You were not allowed to have pulse, or tonally oriented harmonies, or melodies. I don't want to write music through negations. Everything is permissible as long as it's done in good taste.[4]
In 1980, Saariaho went to the Darmstadt Summer Courses and attended a concert of the FrenchspectralistsTristan Murail andGérard Grisey.[5] Hearing spectral music for the first time marked a profound shift in Saariaho's artistic direction. These experiences guided her decision to attend courses incomputer music that were being given byIRCAM, the computer music research institute in Paris, by David Wessel,Jean-Baptiste Barrière [de;fr], and Marc Battier.
In 1982, she began work at IRCAM researching computer analyses of the sound-spectrum of individual notes produced by different instruments. She developed techniques for computer-assisted composition, experimented withmusique concrète, and wrote her first pieces combining live performance with electronics. She also composed new works using IRCAM's CHANT synthesiser.[6] Each of her Jardin Secret trilogy was created with the use of computer programs.Jardin secret I (1985),Jardin secret II (1986), andNymphea (Jardin secret III) (1987).[7] Her works with electronics were developed in collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Barrière, a composer, multimedia artist, and computer scientist who directed the IRCAM's department of musical research from 1984 to 1987. Saariaho and Barrière married in 1984. They have two children.[8]
Saariaho at a concert in 2013
In Paris, Saariaho developed an emphasis on slow transformations of densemasses of sound.[9] Her first tape piece,Vers Le Blanc from 1982, and her orchestral and tape work,Verblendungen, are both constructed from a single transition: inVers Le Blanc the transition is from onepitch cluster to another, while inVerblendungen, it is from loud to quiet.Verblendungen also uses a pair of visual ideas as its basis: a brush stroke which starts as a dense mark on the page and thins out into individual strands, and the wordVerblendungen itself, which means "dazzlements, delusions, blindedness".[10]
Her work in the 1980s and 1990s was marked by an emphasis ontimbre and the use ofelectronics alongside traditional instruments.Nymphéa (Jardin secret III) (1987), for example, is forstring quartet and live electronics and contains an additional vocal element: the musicians whisper the words of anArseny Tarkovsky poem,Now Summer is Gone. In writingNymphea, Saariaho used afractal generator to create material. Writing about the compositional process, Saariaho said:
In preparing the musical material of the piece, I have used the computer in several ways. The basis of the entire harmonic structure is provided by complex cello sounds that I have analysed with the computer. The basic material for the rhythmic and melodic transformations are computer-calculated in which the musical motifs gradually convert, recurring again and again.[11]
Saariaho often talked about having a kind ofsynaesthesia, one that involves all of the senses, saying:
... the visual and the musical world are one to me ... Different senses, shades of colour, or textures and tones of light, even fragrances and sounds blend in my mind. They form a complete world in itself.[12]
Another example isSix Japanese Gardens (1994), a percussion piece accompanied by a prerecorded electronic layer of the Japanese nature, traditional instruments, and chanting of Buddhist monks. During her visit to Tokyo in 1993, she expanded her original percussion conception into a semi-indeterminate piece. It consists of six movements that each represent a garden composed of traditional Japanese architecture, by which she was inspired rhythmically. Especially in movement IV and V, she explored many possibilities of complexpolyrhythm in liberated instrumentation. She said:
... I felt a connection between architecture and music: both art forms select and introduce materials, let them grow, give them form, prepare new contrasting elements, create different relations between the materials.[13]: 18
In her book on Saariaho, musicologistPirkko Moisala [fi;sv] writes about the indeterminate nature of this composition:
[Kaija said:] 'There are so many kinds of percussion instruments which I do not know. I thought that it would be most interesting to see how the musicians choose their instruments in certain passages.' the identity and character of the composition remains the same even when the instruments are changed; each musical idea requires certain kinds of sound color but not a particular instrument.
On 1 December 2016, theMetropolitan Opera gave its first performance ofL'Amour de loin, the second opera by a female composer ever to be presented by the company (the first was performed more than a century earlier, in 1903).[14] The subsequent transmission of the opera to cinema on 10 December 2016 as part of theMetropolitan Opera Live in HD series marked the first opera by a female composer, and the first opera conducted by a female conductor (Susanna Mälkki), in the series. In 2002 the Santa Fe Opera presentedL'Amour de loin. In 2008, the Santa Fe Opera also presented her operaAdriana Mater.
Saariaho was the patron of theHelsinki Music Centre organ project and endowed the construction of a new organ in the Helsinki Music Centre with one million euros.[15] She was also the chair of the International Kaija Saariaho Organ Composition Competition,[16] which selected in April 2023 eleven compositions.[17]
Saariaho was diagnosed withglioblastoma in February 2021. She died in Paris on 2 June 2023, at age 70.[18]
Her very last work,HUSH, a concerto for trumpet and orchestra, was given its world premiere on 24 August 2023 at the Helsinki Music Centre withVerneri Pohjola and theFinnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted bySusanna Mälkki.[19][20] While the premiere was posthumous, Saariaho had been able to hear the work herself at a rehearsal in the spring of 2023. The piece is conceived as a response to Saariaho's own first concertoGraal Théâtre and based on a text byAleksi Barrière,[21] Saariaho's son and librettist of some of her last works.
^Saariaho, Kaija. Programme Note:Nymphéa (1987). New York: Commissioned by the Lincoln Center and Doris & Myron Beigler for the Kronos Quartet., 1987. Print.
^abcMoisala, Pirkko, "Gender Negotiation of the Composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: The Woman Composer as Nomadic Subject", inMusic and Gender (Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, editors). University of Illinois Press (ISBN978-0-252-02544-0), pp. 166–188 (2000).
^"Kaija Saariaho".Schott Music. 14 October 1952. Retrieved15 October 2021.
^Moisala, Pirkko (2010).Kaija Saariaho. Women Composers. University of Illinois Press. p. 23.ISBN978-0-252-09193-3.Archived from the original on 20 June 2023. Retrieved15 October 2021.
^Saariaho, Kaija; Upshaw, Dawn; Kremer, Gidon; Salonen, Esa-Pekka; Kamariorkesteri Avanti; Radion sinfoniaorkesteri (Helsinki); BBC Symphony Orchestra (London) (2001),Graal Théâtre; Château de l'âme; Amers, [Lieu de publication non identifié]: Sony Classical,OCLC995496757
^Saariaho, Kaija; Maalouf, Amin; Sellars, Peter; Kokko, Helena; Finley, Gerald; Upshaw, Dawn; Groop, Monica; Salonen, Esa-Pekka; Tsypin, George; Pakledinaz, Martin (2005),L'amour de loin, Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon : Distributed by Universal Music & Video Distribution,OCLC724679575
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