My dissertation, entitled Innovaation ja tradition idea (‘The idea of innovation and tradition’), was on the philosophy of music. It had two mottos: on the one hand, Paavo Heininen’s idea that his research on Finnish composers was ‘extended narcissism: an interest in what happens in this country to a person who composes’, and on the other, Noam Chomsky’s idea that ‘[a] central problem of interpreting the world is determining how, in fact, human beings proceed to do so’.

From the start, I was interested in the historical and analytic study of the art music of our own time, and in addition I focused on the discourses on music in my works that concentrated on the history of ideas and reception. These were the core areas of my teaching as well, all the way to the end of my academic career.

In 1985, the University of Turku established a chair of Musicology, and I came to be its acting holder after professor Irmeli Niemi persuaded me to. The following year I was appointed on a permanent basis and in 1987 I even moved to Turku to live there. It was exciting to be able to develop the contents and structure of a new subject, to create contacts with Åbo Akademi University and the Turku Conservatory, and to try to prepare our students’ for the various practical tasks they would undertake in the world of Finnish music. My largest research projects had to do with the history of Finnish music (together with professors Fabian Dahlström and Erkki Salmenhaara), and music and cultural identity.