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A guide to Kaija Saariaho's music

Each week during the Proms season our contemporary music guide will feature a composer whose
music is being played at London's Royal Albert Hall. We begin with Kaija Saariaho, whose Laterna
Magica receives its
Tom Service
Monday 9 July 2012 16.01BST

All composers are dreamers. But very few have dared to dream sonic images of such
magnetic power as those that Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has conjured in her music
for ensembles, orchestra, opera houses, electronics and soloists. That's true for pretty
much every piece Saariaho has written, whether it's one of her luminous but inescapably
dramatic operas, such as L'Amour de loin or Adriana Mater, or her orchestral sound- and
cosmos-scapes such as Orion, or her chamber and ensemble works such as Nympha and
Lichtbogen. To journey into Saariaho's music is to be confronted with the darkest and most
dazzling dimensions of your subconscious, and glimpses of the existential journeys she has
made to find these pieces.
And yet, for all of power and immediacy of her music, the journey to this soundworld has
not been easy. Saariaho, who's 60 this year, has spoken of growing up in Finland in a family
"without any kind of cultural background". Her father worked in the metal industry, her
mother looked after the three children, and yet this unpromising ground would be
catalysed by the spark of music. "I was very sensitive," she says. "There was some music
that frightened me, and some that I liked. We had an old-fashioned radio at home, so I
listened to music on that. But I also heard music when I was a girl that didn't come from a
radio." Saariaho then reveals something that shows how her sensitivity to music was
already tied up with the idea of a heightened reality, and with her own invention. This
music that "didn't come from a radio" was music "that was in my mind. I imagined that it
came from my pillow. My mother remembered me asking her to turn the pillow off at night
when I couldn't sleep; to turn off the music that I imagined inside my head."
Studying with composer Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki was the
fulfilment of the young Saariaho's ambition, but it only came about because of her selfbelief and stubbornness. She remembers meeting her future teacher, and that even though
there was no room on Heininen's composition course, "I had decided that I would not leave
the room until he had taken me. I was crazy, but I knew I could not leave the room. He tried
to say many times there was no room for me but finally he had no choice. I became his
pupil." The academy also confronted her with the realities of life as a composer. And
especially as a composer who was not male. In the early 1970s, Saariaho was the only
woman in the class. "There were some teachers who actually would not teach me, because
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they thought it was a waste of time. 'You're a pretty girl, what are you doing here?' That
sort of thing ... My femininity was so apparent, so unavoidable."
But Saariaho was a composer, from the start, who knew what she wanted to do, to feel, and
to make in her music. And she knew what her music would not be as well. There was
pressure from the academy to conform to more conventional archetypes of modernism,
and subsequently, when she studied with Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg she experienced
the aridity of what she thought of as the over-systemisation of some species of
contemporary composition "all of that complexity, and for what aural result?", she says.
Yet she had found one possible escape from those modernist diktats in the work of Grard
Grisey and Tristan Murail, the French spectralists who were investigating the harmonic
potential of the overtone series, creating a more intuitive musical space that chimed with
Saariaho's compositional instincts.
And it was a French institution that finally sealed Saariaho's flight from her homeland in
the early 1980s: the underground labyrinth of electronic and electro-acoustic
experimentation, IRCAM, underneath the Pompidou Centre. There she discovered the
computer technology that would allow her to realise the sonic phenomena she heard in her
personal musical universe. The pieces that resulted, like Verblendungen and especially
Lichtbogen ("a piece I can approve", as this most self-critical composer describes it, "it's
breathing music") opened up new possibilities for the way acoustic instruments and the
computer technology of the mid 1980s might work together. Saariaho's stroke of brilliance
and imagination in these pieces is to make the connections between the live musicians and
the other world of the tape and electronic sounds as seamless as possible. The "breathing"
of Lichtbogen applies just as much to the electronics as it does to the ensemble's music, and
above all to the immediate, sensual impact of the whole work.
The brilliance of her works that fuse electronics with instruments is the way they melt the
divisions between both worlds. The electronics become a halo around the instruments,
amplifying their sonic palette yet indivisible from them. Your ears are seamlessly taken
into another realm, a place that's both ethereal in its sheer, rarefied beauty yet grounded in
the real world of instruments and voices.
Having immersed herself in the possibilities of electronics, Saariaho can now create the
same uncanny effect of distance and transcendence using only an un-adulterated acoustic
orchestra, as in her recent Orion; imagining and realising sounds you didn't think the
orchestra could make.
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video
Saariaho's music since then has not compromised the techniques it uses, whether
electronically or acoustically, in order to serve the private yet grand passions her work
describes. Her operas especially explore the big themes of war, of love, of existence; and
each has created a new sonic universe to do so. But for all the change in her life and her
career, and the largest possible scale of orchestral and operatic music that she now often
works in, there's something in Saariaho that remains of that sensitive and dreaming child,
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the fundamental desire to realise her ever-mysterious musical visions. But that's a process
that involves making the private, public; that necessitates revealing to the world the most
delicate areas of experience and contemplation. Talking about her most recent opera,
Emilie, composed for the solo voice and solo persona of Karita Mattila, who is alone on
stage for all 90 minutes of the piece, she says: "It's always the inner space that interests
me." She adds: "It's very private: everything is happening in this woman's mind during one
night when she's working. Like all of my operas, it should have the effect of being
fundamentally private music, music that I want to communicate with the inner world of
my listeners, just as it expresses my inner imagination." In so doing, Saariaho has given her
audiences and given late 20th and early 21st century music as a whole some of the most
luminous, beguiling and sheerly sensual experiences they can hope to have.

Five key links

Verblendungen
Saariaho's first professional work is a dazzling blend of acoustic and electronics.
Orion
Saariaho conjures a cosmos from the orchestra.
Du Cristal la fume
An orchestral diptych based on the transformation of timbres and colours ("from crystal ...
into smoke"); 40 minutes of orchestral astonishment.
Saariaho in interview
On Laterna Magica, the piece that receives its UK premiere at the Proms on 17 July.
L'Amour de loin
Saariaho's first opera, still one of her most darkly seductive and communicative pieces; this
is the Grammy-winning recording from Kent Nagano and the Deutsches SymphonieOrchester.
Next week: Pierre Boulez
More blogposts

Topics
Classical music
Proms 2012
Opera

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