DaDa

‘Dadaism emerges even more clearly in the new song cycle DaDa, composed for the soprano Olga Heikkilä. The work was completed in January 2026. In recent years I have collaborated extensively with Olga Heikkilä. She has specialised in contemporary vocal music and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree on extended singing techniques. Heikkilä is a regular performer in Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence, and as the work is soon to be presented at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, she wanted to take a new work by Räihälä with her to America.
In this piece I returned to James Joyce, whose texts I had already set before Wake. Once again the excerpt comes from Finnegans Wake, from a passage into which Joyce embedded a string of Finnish words. At the time it must have looked like complete gibberish to readers! Accordingly, the music darts restlessly from one direction to another.
The text of the second movement is taken from ‘Zettels Traum’ by Arno Schmidt, often described as probably the most extreme avant-garde novel ever written.
The texts in the Zettels Traum section consist of words in different languages, but also of punctuation marks: brackets, exclamation marks, semicolons, fractional equations, ampersands, and so forth. These cannot of course be sung, and are instead rendered through various hand and facial gestures. For the listener it becomes pure slapstick.
According to Räihälä, the third and final movement is, in comparison with the previous ones, pure bel canto, and this very contrast underlines the work’s Dadaist character. Its text is, unexpectedly, sharply topical and political: The final movement is entitled Release. I wrote the text myself; it consists of just a few words. The last are ‘release the files now’, and one need not be a genius to understand that I am referring to a certain well-known paedophilia scandal.’ (Osmo Tapio Räihälä)