Kaija Saariaho

1. Biography

1 1 Biography kaija saariaho (née Laakkonen) is the eldest of three children of entrepreneur Launo Laakkonen and his wifeTuovi Laakkonen.Her father’s family comes from Karelia, which in nationalistic discourses has been referred to as the mythical home of original Finnish culture. In the peace treaties after the Second WorldWar,Finland was forced to cede parts of Karelia,the easternmost part of the country, to the Soviet Union.Approximately half a million people were evacuated to other areas of Finland. The Laakkonen family was one of those forced to flee from Karelia at that time.They moved to Helsinki, where Launo Laakkonen, who today is an inventor holding several patents, established a modest enterprise. As a child, Kaija Laakkonen spent much time alone, partly due to her poor health. She remembers being an overly sensitive child who was fascinated by all kinds of sounds. Her earliest childhood memories are of being ill and looking out at other children playing outside. “I loved the quietness of the house, and I can still feel the warm touch of the spring sun on my skin. I placed a towel on a sunny spot on the floor and I lay down on it, changing my position according to the sun and enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin. That experience of sunlight and its warmth is fundamental to me.”1 As a child, Kaija often listened to Bach’s music; she thought “Bach” (German for stream) was the perfect name for this music. She also heard music from 2 k a i j a s a a r i a h o : Biography within herself. Once she asked her mother where the sounds and music she heard beneath her pillow came from. Only years later did she understand that the music she was referring to was a product of her imagination, and that other people’s imaginations did not necessarily work in the same way. Kaija’s childhood summers were filled with the feeling of freedom. She spent them in her mother’s childhood village, Särkisalmi, in eastern Finland (Photo 1). The children played freely in the fields and in the forests. Kaija Saariaho remembers the birds filling the air with their songs particularly vividly, and since then, the birds have felt important to her; “my favorite activity was to walk in the forest after the rain, when the leaves of the trees were still wet. They reflected the bird song differently—the forest was like a great echoing hall.”2 Kaija Saariaho’s lonely childhood years have remained with her to this day. Kaija’s parents placed her in the Helsinki Rudolf Steiner School, which is equivalent to the Waldorf School in the United States.3 The school’s educational system is based on the pedagogy of German philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861– 1925), which regards the person as a bodily, mental, and spiritual being. It aims at strengthening the individuality of the pupil and broadening her or his personality. Photo 1: On the grandmother’s lap (1954). Photo: Launo Laakkonen, by permission of Kaija Saariaho. 3 The arts are regarded as important pedagogical means in this personal development . One of the main principles of Steiner pedagogy is that the child has to experience the concepts and forms before she or he can understand them; the experience helps the child to internalize the movement of the form. Forms are exercised by dancing, drawing, and so on. Form drawing and eurhythmy, or dance therapy, are also Steinerian pedagogical methods. Form drawing, which is part of the school curriculum during the five first years, includes exercises in symmetrical and mirror forms.The children are also asked to draw metamorphoses of a form: in the course of the exercise a simple form is transformed into another form. Kaija spent all thirteen of her school years in this school system (Photo 2). She can still recall her first school days. “When I think about the form drawings of my early school years, I remember the symmetrical exercises with the right and left hands and the satisfaction which I gained from those exercises. I am left-handed, and I felt physical uncertainty about having to act in a world where most people grasped with a different hand from me. Form drawing calmed me in this respect.”4 Encouraged by the school’s music teacher, Kaija’s parents paid for her to...