On Sept. 24 in Orchestra Hall, Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä opened a three-week residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that runs through the Symphony Ball on Oct. 10. Next September, he becomes its 11th music director. Chicago will rightly spend the coming weeks marveling at him. From Tampere, Finland, where I work as a conductor and my two children attend Finnish schools, he looks like the product of our local system, and Chicago has yet to ask how a country of 5.6 million keeps growing people for that podium.
In 136 years, the CSO has never had a music director born in the United States. Theodore Thomas was born in East Frisia; Frederick Stock in the Rhineland; Désiré Defauw in Belgium; Artur Rodziński in Dalmatia; Rafael Kubelík in Bohemia; Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti in Budapest; Jean Martinon in Lyon; Daniel Barenboim in Buenos Aires; Riccardo Muti in Naples; and Mäkelä in Helsinki. Great orchestras always have hired across borders, and Chicago has chosen well. Every one of those conductors learned the job on someone else’s dime.
Chicago once saw this clearly, and this newspaper said so. In 1919, when Stock announced a training orchestra for young Americans, the Tribune ran an editorial titled “For American Musicians,” observing that the war had exposed the country’s dependence on Germany for orchestral players, among other things. Stock’s Civic Orchestra of Chicago has run ever since, and more than 160 of its players have joined the CSO. It is a superb finishing school for musicians already out of conservatory. It has no place for an 8-year-old or for a future conductor.
Mäkelä was born in 1996 to a cellist and a pianist. He trained as a cellist, sang in the Finnish National Opera’s children’s chorus at age 7 and at 12 entered the Sibelius Academy’s youth department, where he joined the conducting class of Jorma Panula. In Finland, a child can meet a real orchestra, a real chorus and a serious teacher before puberty. Oslo, Paris, Amsterdam and Chicago came later for Mäkelä. Finnish taxpayers paid for most of what came before.
It begins with muskari, early-childhood music play, as ordinary in Finland as swimming lessons. Then come music schools; there are about 100 run by towns and local associations from the south in Hanko to the north in Kemijärvi, with fees held down by public subsidy. Almost 70,000 Finnish children studied music in that system in 2024. Above the schools stand the orchestras: 14 professional symphonies, with public money covering about 85% of their budgets. Lahti, Finland, is home to fewer people than Joliet but has an orchestra that records for an international label. A young Finnish conductor meets working orchestras in Kuopio, Oulu, Turku and Tampere because those orchestras are civic infrastructure.
Panula’s class at the Sibelius Academy grew out of all this. Conductor Jussi Jalas founded it; conductor Leo Funtek gave it a permanent rehearsal orchestra; Panula, Funtek’s student, made that orchestra the method. A conductor’s instrument is 80 other people, and Panula’s students stood before one every week. Put plainly, Finland treats music the way it treats reading. In Tampere, as in Helsinki, you can book a rehearsal room at the public library with the same card that borrows books.
Chicago has fragments of the same idea. Merit School of Music, the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative, El Sistema programs and whatever a given public school can afford all change lives, but they are a patchwork. In the 2023-24 school year, nearly a quarter of Chicago Public Schools still fell short of the district’s own goal of one arts teacher for every 350 students. A child on the South or West Side who might have matched Mäkelä at 12 will reach the Civic, if at all, a decade late, and only if someone already has paid for the years Finland socializes.
Watching Mäkelä this fall, Chicago will be tempted to congratulate the CSO on its taste. Taste is the easy part. Finland treated the bassoonist as a public good, long before any philanthropist felt generous about bassoons, and decades later, it exported the conductors.
A start would cost little: One hour a week in which a handful of Chicago teenagers stand before Civic players and learn, the only way anyone learns it, what happens when you lift your hand. Eighty people breathe in with you.
Mäkelä was 12 when he first stood in such a room. My daughter has just turned 12. In 1919, this newspaper asked Chicago to raise its own musicians, and Stock built them an orchestra. It still rehearses on Michigan Avenue. Put a 12-year-old in front of it.
David Woodard is a conductor and writer based in Tampere, Finland.
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