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He is currently the chief conductor of Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. He has held positions with numerous other orchestras, including the Danish National Radio Symphony and the Austrian Radio Symphony, and guest conducted many orchestras throughout the world including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony and the Brazilian OSESP - the Symphony Orchestra of the State of Sâo Paulo.
He is widely known through his recorded discography, which includes the complete symphonies of Sibelius, Nielsen, and Mahler, as well as many works by contemporary composers such as the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara and the American composers John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse.
As a composer, he is known especially for his numerous symphonies and his series of "Orchestral Diary Sheets", many of which are intended to be performed without a conductor. He developed a personal approach to aleatory through a style called "free pulsation" in which musical events interact in flexibly time.
In 1999, he was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize for his work as a "tireless champion of Scandinavian Music."
Segerstam has for a long time developed an Utopian concept of an “organic musical kaleidoscope” where a group of dedicated musicians could assume his musical idiom so profoundly that they could ultimately perform Segerstam music without any written notes. He has taken a step towards this concept in the orchestral works he has written since 1994, designed to be performed without a conductor; the overall form is determined by signals played by different instruments in turn.
The free-pulsative technique lends an aleatoric Modernist element to Segerstam’s music. His melodic writing is also Modernist in that it is usually free-floating and chromatic; his harmonies extend from triads to dense clusters. Nevertheless, the dominant aesthetic in his music is Late Romantic and Expressionist, a sort of pursuit of constant climax and ecstasy, the “nowmoment” the importance of which he never fails to emphasize. From the 1980s onwards, however, his music has also allowed room for delicate feelings and quiet meditation.
Segerstam’s colossal output is exceptionally coherent in style and expression. Mikko Heiniö has said, that “Segerstam does not so much create independent works as strands from the same musical flow of consciousness”. This is evident in the series of works with the same title; such cases in chamber music are the 28 String Quartets or the numerous works titled "Noëm" or "Episode". In orchestral music, Segerstam has written numerous "Orchestral Diary Sheets" and "Thoughts".
Confusingly, Segerstam has adapted many of his works into versions for different instruments. His most extensive series of works consists of his Symphonies, which, however, in no way differ from his other orchestral works in expression or structure. As of August 2002, he had written a staggering 81 Symphonies, fifteen of them during the record-breaking summer of 2000 alone.
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