At the end of February, 40-year-old Harri Kuusijärvi was hit by a post-concerto hangover. It was a feeling the accordion artist experienced as he sat on the train on his way back home to Rovaniemi. The landscape rushed past the window while Kuusijärvi reflected on the previous days.
Kuusijärvi, who grew up in Lankojärvi in Pello, had performed the previous evening in Kokkola as a soloist with the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. In the concert, the audience was able to immerse themselves in the world premiere of Sleep Cycles. It was a concerto in which the spotlight was on the electronically expanded accordion and the strings.
Although Kuusijärvi has premiered several contemporary music works composed for the accordion during his career, played in various artists’ ensembles, founded bands, toured the world, and received praise for his albums, this time he felt a bit more nervous than usual.
In the hotel room, his thoughts bounced between childlike excitement and the fear of failure.
– For a soloist, mastering one’s mental deck is an important skill. Uncertainty fades when you return to the basics: I have practiced well and done my best. That carries you through.
The nerves were heightened also by the fact that bringing electroacoustic elements into orchestral music is still relatively new. There are few ready-made models; new ones are created by doing. The worry turned out to be unfounded. The orchestra and the audience embraced the expression openly. The feedback was appreciative.
On the journey back north, Kuusijärvi reflected on having his own voice. On how, as a soloist, he was part of a group yet also alone. At the same time in the spotlight and on the margins. Somewhere in between. He also thought about why he keeps pushing himself into new and unfamiliar challenges.
The answer, however, was clear. Having one’s own voice and developing it always requires striving toward the unknown.
– You have to go to the outer edges of your own experience and beyond them, because it is in those unfamiliar realities that you find the unique pieces that complete your own musical mosaic.
Kuusijärvi cites as an example the Argentinian accordion artist and creator of the tango nuevo style, Astor Piazzolla. He played in a rough and gritty manner, not necessarily with the greatest technical precision, but recognisably and in his own way.
Piazzolla created a mosaic that sounded and looked like him.
– When one of his pieces starts playing on the radio, the listener can tell within a few seconds: yes, this is Piazzolla. The style is so clear and distinctive.
This is what Kuusijärvi also strives for. He says he would rather create something tentative and new than copy what already exists.
– When I listen to distinctive music, I don’t dream of being able to play the same thing; instead I think about how I could achieve a similar distinctiveness and voice.
Kuusijärvi’s musical hobby began at the age of four with piano lessons at the Lankojärvi village school. The little kid who kept wandering into his sisters’ lessons became such a distraction that the teacher made him an offer. If Kuusijärvi would give his sisters some peace and quiet, he would get his own lesson in return, even though he was still very young.
The deal was made.
After a few years, the local adult education center gave way to the Lapland Music and Dance Institute, and the instrument changed to the accordion. The accordion had already become familiar to him from the village’s community-organized music and singing evenings. In keeping with tradition, everything at these gatherings was accompanied by an accordion player.
A few years later, Kuusijärvi sensed that the accordion would, in one way or another, remain part of his life. He perceived the accordion primarily as a fascinating object and interface—inviting and intriguing in its external complexity.
– Traditional accordion music, on the other hand, didn’t interest me, because it was rarely heard through the headphones of a child in the 1990s.
Kuusijärvi says he has been incredibly fortunate, as his parents supported him and drove him to lessons from the very beginning. When he began his studies in Rovaniemi, each trip to his lessons meant about 80 kilometers one way. They were usually back home closer to ten in the evening.
– I also appreciated that I was allowed to play and do things in my own style from early on. For example, I was never interested in competitions like Kultainen harmonikka, and I was never pressured into them.
At the age of ten, Kuusijärvi went to the Jutajaiset accordion camp, where participants were coached by Sibelius Academy teachers under the direction of Matti Rantanen. Rantanen was impressed by the young musician’s abilities.
The encounter sealed his career choice. After upper secondary school, Kuusijärvi would head to the Sibelius Academy. The world and its possibilities suddenly seemed to open.
– I realized that by playing, I could aim for something other than the stages of ski resorts. I wanted to learn to play as well as possible.
The promise was kept. After upper secondary school, Kuusijärvi began his studies at the Sibelius Academy’s soloist department with the accordion as his main instrument. Helsinki was big, different and full of wonders.
Suddenly, Kuusijärvi was no longer the only player his age in the village, but one among many. In the café of the Sibelius Academy’s P building, the boy from Lankojärvi became part of a larger community. Days were spent practicing and talking with others about life and music.
Above everything, however, there was a clear goal: to strive to play better and as well as possible.
– I wanted to internalise the principles of my instrument and the field of art. I have always been competitive. You could say a traditional achiever.
This time, striving paid off. When he mastered what he was doing with precision, it created a sense of freedom that gradually extended to his playing and artistic work more broadly.
Kuusijärvi measured his traditional skills by touring competitions. In 2011, he took part in the Arrasate Hiria accordion competition in Spain and placed second. When the winner was announced, Kuusijärvi felt relieved.
There was a quiet thought in his mind that something new might begin from here.
– If I had won, the prize would have been a tour where I would have had to perform a similar repertoire. Now it was time to close that door.
A month later, Kuusijärvi travelled to the Netherlands for a week to make freely improvised music. He considers this one of the most significant turning points in his life. For a young art student, the experience was earthshaking.
In the Netherlands, Kuusijärvi tried and practiced improvisation seriously for the first time. He felt like shouting: is it really possible to do things like this?
On the journey home, Kuusijärvi had already decided: now. He founded the progressive project Koutus with his musician friends and scheduled the first rehearsals for a month later. He had no choice but to start composing.
– And then to challenge, break apart and create again.
Extremes have always fascinated Kuusijärvi. If something is done, it is done fully. He has experienced this, for instance, while composing. Once, Kuusijärvi was performing in Norrköping. He had a day off between shows, so he thought he would take a quick look at a composition he had been working on.
At first, Kuusijärvi decided to work from morning until lunch. Suddenly it was three in the afternoon. He thought he would go for dinner next and kept working. Before he realised it, the clock was eleven at night. Only then did he stop and ask at the reception if there was a nearby grill kiosk still open.
– I easily and gladly immerse myself, because I want to dive deep into the world of music. To exist and marvel in peace. In family life this can sometimes be difficult, but fortunately not impossible.
In 2018, while sitting on the benches of the Christmas sauna, the idea of moving back to Lapland was born. When the Kone Foundation granted Kuusijärvi a two-year artist grant, the dream became reality for him, his spouse, and their two children.
After settling in Rovaniemi, Kuusijärvi began developing the electronically expanded accordion. He had used electronics to some extent in previous years, but now he wanted to take a deeper dive into the subject.
The goal was to create a new kind of instrument, something more than an accordion dressed up with effects. After a couple of years of work, the new instrument took shape.
Now Kuusijärvi’s main instrument is the hybrid concert accordion. In practice, it is a standard melody-bass accordion that contains electronics inside. This expands the instrument so that the accordion can control acoustic and electronic sound simultaneously.
– I was satisfied because I had finally made decisions that opened up new pathways. I feel that only now have I discovered my way of playing.
Last year, the album Aallot was released, the result of a new beginning. Kuusijärvi was pleased. The sound was finally what he had hoped for.
– I wanted to show that the accordion means more than dance halls and folk music. That it can also sound surprising and unlike anything heard before.
The next album will be released in May in collaboration with Tatu Rönkkö. On the upcoming record, Kuusijärvi plays a synthesizer that he controls with the accordion.
– I’m not sure I’m even an accordionist anymore, but even here the interface I originally fell in love with remains at the core.
Shedding the old skin was worth it.
In February, Kuusijärvi was nominated in the jazz category of the Indie Awards gala, and in March in the same category at the Emma Gala. In their reasoning, the juries described Kuusijärvi as a boundary-breaker whose work extends from jazz to rock and the realm of world music.
Three years ago, the Finnish Accordion Association selected Kuusijärvi as Accordion Artist of the Year because he had broadened perceptions of what the accordion is capable of without prejudice.
The nominations and awards certainly feel meaningful, but the most important thing lies elsewhere.
– In composing and performing, in the doing itself.
When Kuusijärvi was in third grade, he took part in a writing competition. His text imagined Lankojärvi in the year 2052. Nuclear destruction had wiped out almost the entire planet; only little Harri, his dog, and a distant tribal people had survived.
For a long time, the text was a family joke, but lately Kuusijärvi has often found himself thinking back to it as the events of the world grow ever more chaotic. The history of humankind is brutal, and the current situation offers little reason to view the future with much optimism.
Kuusijärvi says that behind his humour there is always a dark undertone.
– Although people are often good to those close to them, on a broader scale I would not give us, as a species, a very high grade.
Fortunately, there is art. It offers a chance to escape reality and create something beautiful, maybe even change the world. It brings a measure of hope.
– For me, making art is the noblest and the best thing I know. It is reaching toward goodness, which is otherwise hard to find.
Lately, Kuusijärvi has also been thinking about men and manhood. Those who hold the levers of power. His own role as a father. The news he reads in the papers.
– I draw strength from the idea that my gentle indie vibes on festival stages or at house parties among friends are at least a small grain of sand against everything toxic and cruel.
Kuusijärvi hopes his work will remain intuitive and free from boxes in the future as well. Flowing. The kind where you simply know when something settles into place. He also feels privileged — above all because he once discovered the accordion and received unwavering encouragement along his path.
– And because later I saw the possibility of electronic expansion, which once again sent everything spinning in new directions.
In the end, Kuusijärvi says he hopes that today’s art students will still experience the same horizons he once saw. That they would believe in what they do and dare to take risks, even though the appreciation of art, government cuts, and the general atmosphere have grown harsher.
– Ultimately, it is about finding our way to what is fundamentally human. For that, art is the most effective means.