My research work in this project focuses on the sector of "changes in concert repertoire and musical taste". The emphasis of this portion of the research is on the changes in the repertoire of public concerts and music events between 1870 and 1910. Under examination is especially the selection of concerts available in Helsinki, but also in Vyborg, Turku and Tampere. The research focuses on the cross-border interaction: concert life was highly cosmopolitan, the top continental artists would regularly visit Finland's biggest cities, and studying abroad was an obligatory part in the careers of the most talented national musicians. The Finnish concert institution faithfully followed the development, which had begun in the European metropoles a few decades earlier.

I have already done provisional mapping of the development of older concert repertoires in the 1800's (Kurkela 2012), and it is easy to see the direction of change based on the mapping. The repertoire structure of concerts corresponded to pan-European standards, and the repertoire was constructed upon the principles of miscellany and symmetry. Symphonic concerts became more common in the 1860's in Finland, when Viennese classical music and The Great Composers were canonised by the repertoire. Meanwhile, a portion of the orchestral concerts developed in the direction of more popular repertoire material, which gradually led to a differentiation between serious symphony repertoire and popular repertoire.

The most central research questions ask: To what extent did the establishment and professionalising of concert life affect the differentiation of repertoires, and in what way did the foreign soloists' concerts change in terms of repertoire? Did the classical canonisation also apply to them, and to what extent and in what types of concerts did the principle of miscellany continue in the concert selection?

The second central focus of the research is the interplay of "art" and "entertainment". How did the emergent entertainment industry change its concert selection at the turn of the century? Before the age of jazz, these areas of music were based on a rather uniform aesthetic, and the same musicians worked both fields. The crossover of art and entertainment was a given, and one of the cornerstones of transnational music production. The third issue under examination is popular education, which was the central area of operation of nationalistic politics. The new national music life reflected the same aspirations, and the central elements of late 1800's concert selection were various types of "kansankonsertti" (concert for the people). They seemed to have continued the old principle of miscellany, yet on the other hand, had the actual objective of the concerts been to educate the lower class with the "greatest achievement" of European high culture – the classical canon?

My forthcoming research articles address, for instance, the change in musical tastes of the concert audience and its reflection on newspaper writings; changes in copyright concepts; methods of introducing "Finnish" repertoire; the interplay of low-brow and high-brow at music events in Finnish cities; and the transnationalism of entertainment production prior to World War I. Currently, I am co-writing a monograph for a wider audience with Dr Olli Heikkinen. The working title is "Parochial or Cosmopolitan? Helsinki as a Music City in the Late 1800's", and it details the music selection and concert practices of two one-year seasons in Helsinki.

My research project, "Musiikkitieteen synty Suomessa" [The Birth of Musicology in Finland], examines the intellectual and disciplinary history of scholarship of Finnish musicology. Leaving aside three doctoral dissertations submitted in the Royal Academy of Turku (1640–1828), that is, dissertations that were directly concerned with music, the academic research of music as an institution in our country is barely over a century old. In addition, in the early stages it was largely personified by Ilmari Krohn's (1867–1960) work. His doctoral thesis of 1899 on spiritual folk tunes remained the singular Finnish musicological dissertation for over a decade, preceding the dissertations of Armas Launis (1911), Otto Andersson (1923) and Toivo Haapanen (1924). Musicologists, however, were not the only intellectuals writing about music. Other musically educated individuals outside the university were musically educating the folk as well: for example, Heikki Klemetti (1876–1953) and the founder and director of Helsinki Music Institute, Martin Wegelius (1846–1906), were two of Krohn's contemporaries who actively worked as musicians and composers and were members of various societies of music of the time.

The Finnish Musicological Society was founded as a branch of Internationale Musikgesellschaft in in 1910, but its operations ceased soon thereafter because of the war. Only in 1916 did the society's operations resume again – this time, without the affiliation to the German society, initially founded by Oscar Fleischer. Krohn himself worked as adjunct professor at Imperial Alexander University during 1900–1918, and as additional professor at University of Helsinki from 1918 until his retirement in 1935. Thereafter, the field became institutionalised in other parts of Finland. A professorship of musicology and folk poetry was established at Åbo Akademi in 1926, but other more provincial universities would have to wait until the 1960's for musicology professorships (Turku 1966, Jyväskylä 1968, Tampere 1965).

In my research, I examine the paradigms of scholarship of early Finnish music research, the history of the musicological society, public writings on the topic, biographical material and scholarship-related documentation housed in institutional archives. On one hand, I am interested in the national context of the discipline in Finland, as well as its relation to other European research in this period (c. 1900–1925). On the other hand, I am scrutinising the paradigms of Finnish music research within the historical framework of the early 20th-century European humanities – for instance, taking up the question how evolutionism and the teleological notions of history are reflected in early Finnish musicology.

Apart from the new knowledge and understanding of the music scrutinised, the researchers of the early 20th century had an additional social and cultural demand for their work. The ongoing national project with a broad cultural, intellectual and political idea called "Finland" as its projected outcome placed its own expectations and needs on research. Regarding this aspect of my project, my research is largely research of the cultural history of Finnish music.

I'm currently working as a research assistant in the project Rethinking "Finnish" Music History. In other words, I mainly gather information and materials from different sources for the research team. My tasks include, for example, filling our concert database, filing archival data and, most importantly, reading analytically digitized Finnish newspapers. Moreover, I've taken part in organizing our project's international conference Confronting the National in the Musical Past.

My own research interests focus on the relationship between music and gender: I'm particularly interested in women's position in Finnish musical life during the 19th century and in the beginnig of the 20th century. How and when did women gain social acceptance as professional musicians? As we know, the bourgeois musical culture of the 19th century mainly encouraged women to act as amateurs in the musical field, and the choice of instrument, for example, was usually dictated by moral code. In this respect, women's access to symphony orchestras dominated by men as well as the position of women composers are of a special interest to me.

In addition to my job, I'm working on a PhD thesis on women's orchestras (Damenkapellen) – usually German-based restaurant and café bands, that is – in Finland from the late 19th century onwards. This topic has not been very extensively studied, and it relates not only to the problematic between music and gender but also to a transantional and cosmopolitan perspective on music history: women's orchestras formed an essential part of European popular culture in the early 20th century. These two aspects are also linked in a smaller project that I'm currently working on: in November 2014, I held a presentation in a colloquium organized at the Finnish Institute in Paris on the works and public image of French women  composers in 19th-century Finland.