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Einojuhani Rautavaara was the best-known composer in contemporary Finnish music. He began to study at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in the late 1940s, but his professional career didn't begin until 1954 when his orchestral A Requiem in Our Time won a competition sponsored by Thor Johnson, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. That same year, Rautavaara entered an advanced course in music composition with Aarre Merikanto and attracted the attention of Sibelius himself, who in 1955 recommended that Rautavaara be awarded a Tanglewood scholarship to study at the Juilliard School for one year. In the United States, Rautavaara studied with Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions, and once back in Europe, he completed his course of study in Switzerland with Wladimir Vogel and in Cologne with Rudolf Petzold.

Rautavaara, paraphrasing a statement usually made in reference to American politics, said "If an artist is not a modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a modernist when he is old, he has no brain." Indeed, Rautavaara's style is rooted in modernism, and his earliest works are in a Nordic folk-derived idiom reminiscent of Bartók. Not surprisingly, his approach shifted more strongly toward serialism after his experiences in Cologne. The political subject matter and often thorny 12-tone writing in Rautavaara's first opera, Kaivos ("The Mine") led the Finnish National Opera to reject the work, but in a revised form Kaivos was aired on national Finnish television in 1963. This helped to establish Rautavaara's reputation in his home country.

By 1970, Rautavaara began to lose interest in the rigorous requirements of serialism. With his next major work, the opera Apollo contra Marsyas, Rautavaara opted for a poly-stylistic approach, utilizing jazz and popular music in an ironic juxtaposition against light Viennese classical music. This breakthrough led to the development of Rautavaara's mature style, in which the music is subservient to the demands of his programmatic concepts, whether political, environmental, social, or spiritual. While Rautavaara's prestige gained ground in Europe throughout the '70s and '80s, it was his Symphony No. 7 "Angel of Light" (1994) that established his international reputation. This appealing and meditative work came as a surprise to many who felt that contemporary composers had grown hopelessly out of touch with the emotional needs of the public.

Rautavaara was a prolific composer with a career spanning seven decades. He created ten operas, of which Thomas (1982-1985), Vincent (1986-1987) and Aleksis Kivi (1995-1996) are the best known. He also produced eight symphonies and many concertos including the popular Cantus Arcticus; Concerto for Birds & Orchestra (1972) and the double bass concerto Angel of Dusk (1980). Rautavaara also composed reams of choral, chamber, and vocal music and a small amount of electronic music. Through working directly from his emotions and not hewing to party line serialism, Einojuhani Rautavaara emerged, in the autumn of his life, as one the major figures in contemporary music worldwide.

Finland's Jean Sibelius is perhaps the most important composer associated with nationalism in music and one of the most influential in the development of the symphony and symphonic poem.

Sibelius was born in southern Finland, the second of three children. His physician father left the family bankrupt, owing to his financial extravagance, a trait that, along with heavy drinking, he would pass on to Jean. Jean showed talent on the violin and at age nine composed his first work for it, Rain Drops. In 1885 Sibelius entered the University of Helsinki to study law, but after only a year found himself drawn back to music. He took up composition studies with Martin Wegelius and violin with Mitrofan Wasiliev, then Hermann Csillag. During this time he also became a close friend of Busoni. Though Sibelius auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he would come to realize he was not suited to a career as a violinist.

In 1889 Sibelius traveled to Berlin to study counterpoint with Albert Becker, where he also was exposed to new music, particularly that of Richard Strauss. In Vienna he studied with Karl Goldmark and then Robert Fuchs, the latter said to be his most effective teacher. Now Sibelius began pondering the composition of the Kullervo symphonic poem, based on the Kalevala legends. Sibelius returned to Finland, taught music, and in June 1892, married Aino Järnefelt, daughter of General Alexander Järnefelt, head of one of the most influential families in Finland. The premiere of Kullervo in April 1893 created a veritable sensation, Sibelius thereafter being looked upon as the foremost Finnish composer. The Lemminkäinen suite, begun in 1895 and premiered on April 13, 1896, has come to be regarded as the most important music by Sibelius up to that time.

In 1897 the Finnish Senate voted to pay Sibelius a short-term pension, which some years later became a lifetime conferral. The honor was in lieu of his loss of an important professorship in composition at the music school, the position going to Robert Kajanus. The year 1899 saw the premiere of Sibelius' First Symphony, which was a tremendous success, to be sure, but not quite of the magnitude of that of Finlandia (1899; rev. 1900).

In the next decade Sibelius would become an international figure in the concert world. Kajanus introduced several of the composer's works abroad; Sibelius himself was invited to Heidelberg and Berlin to conduct his music. In March 1901, the Second Symphony was received as a statement of independence for Finland, although Sibelius always discouraged attaching programmatic ideas to his music. His only concerto, for violin, came in 1903. The next year Sibelius built a villa outside of Helsinki, named "Ainola" after his wife, where he would live for his remaining 53 years. After a 1908 operation to remove a throat tumor, Sibelius was implored to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, a sanction he followed until 1915. It is generally believed that the darkening of mood in his music during these years owes something to the health crisis.

Sibelius made frequent trips to England, having visited first in 1905 at the urging of Granville Bantock. In 1914 he traveled to Norfolk, CT, where he conducted his newest work The Oceanides. Sibelius spent the war years in Finland working on his Fifth Symphony. Sibelius traveled to England for the last time in 1921. Three years later he completed his Seventh Symphony, and his last work was the incidental music for The Tempest (1925). For his last 30 years Sibelius lived a mostly quiet life, working only on revisions and being generally regarded as the greatest living composer of symphonies. In 1955 his 90th birthday was widely celebrated throughout the world with many performances of his music. Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1957. ~ Robert Cummings

Kaija Saariaho was a Finnish composer known for combining acoustic instruments with electronics and prerecorded sounds. Her extensive worklist contains music for voice, chorus, and orchestra, in addition to her three operas and several pieces for chamber ensembles.

Saariaho was born in Helsinki in 1952 into a non-musical family. As a child, she was interested in the visual arts, and she began taking violin lessons. When she was nine years old, she started studying the piano in addition to the violin, and she also experimented with composing in the following year. From 1970 to 1972, she attended the Rudolf Steiner School in Helsinki and the East Helsinki Music Institute, where she focused on the piano and violin. This was followed by piano and organ studies at the Helsinki Conservatory of Music, and the musicology program at the University of Helsinki. Additionally, Saariaho enrolled at the Institute of Industrial Arts as a graphic design major, but in 1976, she left the program to study music theory and composition at the Sibelius Academy under Paavo Heininen. After her graduation in 1980, she continued studying composition at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany, where her professors were Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber.

Around the time of her graduation in 1983, Saariaho composed Verblendungen and Vers le blanc, and she moved to Paris to work in the electronic music studios of the IRCAM. In the following year, she married Jean-Baptiste Barrière, who also worked at IRCAM. She continued exploring the possibilities of combining acoustic instruments with electronics with pieces such as Nymphéa, Io, and Lichtbogen. Saariaho became highly admired in the 1990s for her sophisticated yet accessible style, which led to many commissioned works, such as Maa for the Finnish National Ballet, Graal Théâtre for Gidon Kremer, and the Château de l'âme cycle for Dawn Upshaw. She received the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2000 for her vocal piece Lohn, and in 2003 she won a Grawemeyer Award for her opera L'Amour de loin. That same year, she was also given honorary doctorates from the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki.

Saariaho's critically acclaimed second opera, Adriana Mater, received premieres in 2006 and 2008, and Kent Nagano's recording of L'Amour de loin won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Other major works from this period include the organ concerto Maan varjot for organist Olivier Latry, the harp concerto Trans for harpist Xavier de Maistre, and her third opera, Innocence, was completed in 2018. Three years later, Saariaho was named Composer of the Year by The New York Times, and Innocence received its debut at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. However, she was also diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Her final composition was the trumpet concerto Hush for trumpeter Verneri Pohjola in 2023, but she passed away a few months before the premiere. Saariaho's music can be heard on Kaija Saariaho: Graal Théâtre; Circle Map; Neiges; Vers toi qui es si loin, Reconnaissance: Kaija Saariaho Choral Music, and countless other recordings. ~ RJ Lambert

An important Finnish composer excelling in piano composition, many of whose works contain impressionistic elements such as whole-tone scales and parallel-chord constructions. ~ Mary K. Scanlan