Kaija Saariaho

4. Sounds

73 4 Sounds saariaho is “a product” of a musical world that is pluralistic without dominating musical styles or commonly shared aesthetics. Today, it is quite common for composers to explore different musical styles and composition techniques without rigidly staying within one style; even a single work may find connections with several traditions. Musical influences from different styles, past and present, and from a range of cultures open up unlimited possibilities for the composer. Saariaho’s path has also passed through several compositional schools. She received a solid education in several composition techniques regarding both tonal and atonal music, both serialism and spectralism. Saariaho’s production cannot be placed within a single school or musical style,and she has avoided becoming attached to any particular school of composition. She finds such labels restrictive, although she does not object when others try to label her. “I don’t think much of my relationship with musical traditions.It is obvious that I come from the tradition of Western art music. I have no reason to fight against the tradition.”1 If loosely categorized, Saariaho’s works move within those streams of contemporary music that make music “for the ears,” focus on sound quality, employ both electronic and acoustic means of expanding music, and renew musical conventions without opposing them. These streams of contemporary music reflect the ideas outlined by early futurists, impressionists, and expressionists and, more recently, 74 k a i j a s a a r i a h o : Sounds by spectral composers. In the spirit of the spectral school, her music celebrates sound and sound colors as sources of harmony, the core of orchestration, and musical structure. Saariaho has a background in Central European avant-garde. The influence of serialism on her first composition can be witnessed in her way of organizing musical material. Her studies at IRCAM have, in their turn, left their imprints on her musical thinking, particularly with regard to her development of harmony and orchestration. Saariaho would never simply adopt others’ styles. “For me all kinds of quotations [from others’ works] are completely impossible. I live and I hear and I see what’s around me. [But] it must be my music. It’s hard to explain, but there’s something quasi-religious about my attitude to music: it must be purely what I believe in—it comes as it is and I cannot choose it.”2 Despite numerous significant changes and developments in Saariaho’s compositional style, certain features characterize her whole production. Rich timbral nuances, focused musical material evolving into unique musical forms, as well as works that call for careful listening remain her musical finger prints. Saariaho’s music does not obey the rules of conventional analytical tools, since these were developed for music with distinct phrases, endings, and melodic, rhythmic, and thematic moves. Instead, it reorganizes the conventional hierarchies of musical parameters, and finds new musical forms within traditional frameworks. She finds the material for her music from computer analyses of recorded natural, instrumental, or vocal sound. Lively, vibrating sound is at the core of all the levels of her musical structure. Instrumentally or electronically varied sound color is also a form-giving principle within her music. “My music does not necessarily lead to developmental progression in the same sense that it would in romantic music, although my music does have a sense of direction which is created by using unconventional methods. The musical dynamics arise from the directions which can be heard, so that the audience perceives the direction in which music is moving.”3 Saariaho finds inspiration in literature, film, and the visual arts, albeit staying mainly within highbrow culture. Her production mainly relates to French and Finnish cultures, although some traces of great Asian traditions can also be recognized in some pieces. When settling down in Paris, Saariaho listened to Asian music, particularly Indian classical music; she became familiar with uninterrupted, large musical forms, nuanced vocal variations, and new kinds of rhythmic structures . She felt that her musical thinking was enlarged by these listening experiences . Japanese aesthetics can most obviously be heard in Six Japanese Gardens (1993/1995), but it can also be sensed in the refined nuances of her flute music 75 and in the koto-like sonorities of Neiges (1998).The Asian flavor in her music is so minor, however, that Saariaho cannot be meaningfully classified among those contemporary composers who actively draw impulses...