Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Anneli Saariaho (14 October 1952 – 2 June 2023) was a Finnish composer based in Paris, France.

During the course of her career, Saariaho received commissions from the Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet and from IRCAM for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the BBC, the New York Philharmonic, the Salzburg Music Festival, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and the Finnish National Opera, among others.

In 1980, Saariaho went to the Darmstadt Summer Courses and attended a concert of the French spectralists Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey.

Hearing spectral music for the first time marked a profound shift in Saariaho's artistic direction.

These experiences guided her decision to attend courses in computer music that were being given by IRCAM, the computer music research institute in Paris, by David Wessel, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and Marc Battier.

Her work in the 1980s and 1990s was marked by an emphasis on timbre and the use of electronics alongside traditional instruments.

Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg, and Paris, where she also lived since 1982.

Her research at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) marked a turning point in her music away from strict serialism towards spectralism.

Her characteristically rich, polyphonic textures are often created by combining live music and electronics.

Saariaho was born in Helsinki, Finland.

She played violin, guitar and piano growing up, and received her primary and secondary education at a Steiner school.

In university she studied first splitting her time between studying graphic design at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, piano at the Helsinki Conservatorium and musicology at the University of Helsinki; and then she later studied composition at the Sibelius Academy under the guidance of Paavo Heininen.

After attending the Darmstadt Summer Courses, she moved to Germany to study at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg under Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber.

She found her teachers' emphasis on strict serialism and mathematical structures stifling, saying in an interview:

"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."

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 with musique concrète, and wrote her first pieces combining live performance with electronics.

She also composed new works using IRCAM's CHANT synthesiser.

Each of her Jardin Secret trilogy was created with the use of computer programs.

Her first tape piece, Vers Le Blanc from 1982, and her orchestral and tape work, Verblendungen, are both constructed from a single transition: in Vers Le Blanc the transition is from one pitch cluster to another, while in Verblendungen, 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 word Verblendungen itself, which means "dazzlements, delusions, blindedness".

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.

In Paris, Saariaho developed an emphasis on slow transformations of dense masses of sound.

Jardin secret I (1985), Jardin secret II (1986), and Nymphea (Jardin secret III) (1987).

Nymphéa (Jardin secret III) (1987), for example, is for string quartet and live electronics and contains an additional vocal element: the musicians whisper the words of an Arseny Tarkovsky poem, Now Summer is Gone.

In writing Nymphea, Saariaho used a fractal 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."

Saariaho often talked about having a kind of synaesthesia, 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."

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 complex polyrhythm 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."

In her book on Saariaho, musicologist Pirkko Moisala writes about the indeterminate nature of this composition:

Another example is Six Japanese Gardens (1994), a percussion piece accompanied by a prerecorded electronic layer of the Japanese nature, traditional instruments, and chanting of Buddhist monks.

In a 2019 composers' poll by BBC Music Magazine, Saariaho was ranked the greatest living composer.