Kaija Saariaho, and: Dusty! Queen of the Postmods, and: Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (review)

In Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), musicologist Susan McClary noted: "It almost seems that musicology managed miraculously to pass directly from pre- to postfeminism without ever having to change—or even examine—its ways" (5). McClary, one of musicology's most important feminist scholars, throughout her career has continued her evaluation of musicology's complicated relationship to feminism. In her 1993 assessment of the state of musicology and feminism, she traced the journey from the feminist historiography that dominated the 1970s and 1980s to the emergence of feminist criticism in the early 1990s. In her 2000 reassessment of the field, McClary noted the great strides forward in terms of female representation in music, but also that many of those same strong women eschewed the label "feminist" completely. Now it is ten years later and many university women's studies programs are becoming gender studies instead, reflecting changing interests, foci, and methodologies. In the twenty years since McClary's foundational tome, there has been dedicated interaction with feminism from many music scholars in many different ways, and the three books under review here all speak to both the history and the diverse current state of musicology and feminism.

Kaija Saariaho is one of the most important Finnish composers of Western art music after Jean Sibelius, and one of the most important composers of contemporary music alive today. Known for her work in "spectral" music—which involves using computers to analyze the component parts of a given sound, and then using those parts as the basis for the whole piece—as well as blending computer and acoustic sounds into profoundly emotionally effective works that eschew the hierarchical structures that normally dominate traditional Western music. She is a figure that has attracted many scholars interested in female composers, and with Kaija Saariaho, Finnish musicologist Pirkko Moisala delivers a biography of both the artist and the works she has composed over the course of her thirty-year-long career.

The book, grounded in the tradition of feminist historiography, documents the case for Saariaho's importance and normalizes her position in the traditional canon of Western art music, while showing ways in which she also challenges that canon. Kaija Saariaho is based on extensive interviews the author conducted with the composer and some of her collaborators, materials from the press, and detailed, yet accessible, descriptions of her work. The book begins with a chapter on Saariaho's biography, and then goes on to trace the phases of her career, compositional influences, musical philosophy, and sonic characteristics, and finishes with a discussion of the more political works that have made up Saariaho's most current oeuvre, such as the opera Adriana Mater and oratorio La Passion de la Simone. Moisala writes in a clear way, with vivid musical descriptions that provide a strong sense of the sound of Saariaho's music regardless of the reader's musical background, and the keen insight the book offers into the composer's process and intentions is a useful addition to music scholarship and women's biographies.

Kaija Saariaho is a valuable example of the continuing need for feminist historiography, yet surprisingly, given Moisala's other work, there is very little feminist criticism. Many tantalizing tidbits, such as Saariaho's insistence on the importance of motherhood to her identity, how she dealt with emerging out of the exceptionally male-dominated electronic-music compositional communities, and her reluctance to identify as feminine, feminist, or even as a woman composer, are left spotlighted though uncommented upon. I suspect this may be due to the close collaboration between Moisala and Saariaho (who read the manuscript twice), and Saariaho's uneasy relationship...