Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) - 12-16 October

[Serial_Apologist]

For me this will be a week to be savoured, Kaija being one of my favourite composers of today.

[DracoM]

[jayne lee wilson]

Just a goddamn wonderful composer..... tend to prefer her earlier work......
But the music is so immediately sensuous and visionary, falling so physically upon the ear...and what lies beyond the ear...

[DracoM]

Sheer magic, inventotive, a fabulous, incisive ear for timbres and melodic fragments.
I always hear her music as a symphony of wild birdsong and lively rhythms!

[Serial_Apologist]

Sheer magic, inventotive, a fabulous, incisive ear for timbres and melodic fragments.
I always hear her music as a symphony of wild birdsong and lively rhythms!

Her music manages to summarise so much of what has always drawn me in 20th century music: daring, imagination, surprise, colour, evolution, expansiveness and expressivity. She has kept faith with the best of those who came before her. However, I should really mug up on what little I know of and about Finnish modern music, post-Sibelius. Reading up on Kaija has got me investigating her teacher Heininen, and his teacher Merikanto.

[DracoM]

[Quarky]

A remarkable person - her humanity is overwhelming.

Some more posts here:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?20386-Saariaho-Kaija-1952

[DracoM]

I live more northerly than many, so her invention and inspirations strike [ahem!] a real chord up here, even if she / her music have been bred living in France for X-years!! Amazing what one carries for years from way, way back and then refines into a present?

[Bella Kemp]

Absolutely wonderful. I look forward to each episode.

[Quarky]

Recall in 2016 (I think) there was broadcast from the MET on Opera on 3, Kaija's opera L'Amour de Loin. Enjoyed this greatly.

It was emphasized that this was the first opera composed by a woman that was performed at the MET, and they employed I recall a female conductor. It struck me at the time that the MET, and perhaps Opera in general must be heavily male-dominated, for such a comment to be necessary.

May be that's why I don't listen to much Opera?

[DracoM]

Been a week of non-stop discovery.
I think I prefer the instrumental mixes / pieces to the vocal?

[Serial_Apologist]

Been a week of non-stop discovery.
I think I prefer the instrumental mixes / pieces to the vocal?

By the end of the week I had the strong impression of a composer who has come to adhere much more strongly to traditional expressive conventions than I had realised before. The main gateway seems in her case to have been opera. However, I am quite comfortable with this course of development, according as it has with many one-time iconoclasts whom time has revealed as respectful of the past and its riches, without throwing out the baby of idiomatic and formal expansion and enrichments with the bathwater of endumbment!

One superficial thing I learned from the week was the correct way to pronounce "Saariaho" - Sarry Ah Ho, not Sariah Ho, as rhyming with "pariah"!

One of the question Calum didn't ask - unless my attention lapsed - was, what relation did Ms. Saariaho feel with Finland's musical past, particularly the long-engulfing influence of Sibelius (the composer!), and with the culture of a country she left for France, where the artistic and expressive ethos feels to be far greater on her music.

Kaija's parting statement about maintaining enduring values... well, I couldn't have stated them better or more completely than she did.

[Richard Barrett]

By the end of the week I had the strong impression of a composer who has come to adhere much more strongly to traditional expressive conventions than I had realised before. (...) However, I am quite comfortable with this course of development, according as it has with many one-time iconoclasts whom time has revealed as respectful of the past and its riches

I think she has always adhered strongly to traditional expressive conventions. I can't think of a piece of hers that doesn't do so. Yes there's a certain (somewhat overhyped) involvement of electronic techniques, but really only to enhance certain aspects of the sound of traditional instruments, never as a source of different sonic perspectives in itself or of inspiration to think of instrumental music in a different way... and I speak as someone who's been involved in performances of several of her electro/acoustic pieces. I don't intend this to be a criticism, since I've known Kaija and her work for many years and have much time for both, but she is basically a very traditionally minded composer and always has been.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think she has always adhered strongly to traditional expressive conventions. I can't think of a piece of hers that doesn't do so. Yes there's a certain (somewhat overhyped) involvement of electronic techniques, but really only to enhance certain aspects of the sound of traditional instruments, never as a source of different sonic perspectives in itself or of inspiration to think of instrumental music in a different way... and I speak as someone who's been involved in performances of several of her electro/acoustic pieces. I don't intend this to be a criticism, since I've known Kaija and her work for many years and have much time for both, but she is basically a very traditionally minded composer and always has been.

I wonder, do you also feel this to be the case with the Spectralist composers, whom Kaija mentioned in passing - or, at least, some of them? Because I have the feeling that their music often evokes past aesthetics, especially Debussyian impressionism - their harmonies for me are strongly reminiscent of his orchestrational practices in particular - even more so than eg Messiaen's, his polychordal juxtapostionings seeming superficially most obviously pre-figurative - being a sort of elaboration of Debussy's fascination with and mastery of timbre and timbres, albeit often cloaked under a language of acoustic properties that make it seem apparently more aligned with Stockhausen, as regards his early research into acoustics.

[Richard Barrett]

I wonder, do you also feel this to be the case with the Spectralist composers, whom Kaija mentioned in passing - or, at least, some of them? Because I have the feeling that their music often evokes past aesthetics, especially Debussyian impressionism - their harmonies for me are strongly reminiscent of his orchestrational practices in particular - even more so than eg Messiaen's, his polychordal juxtapostionings seeming superficially most obviously pre-figurative - being a sort of elaboration of Debussy's fascination with and mastery of timbre and timbres, albeit often cloaked under a language of acoustic properties that make it seem apparently more aligned with Stockhausen, as regards his early research into acoustics.

Yes I do, although of course "spectralism" covers quite a wide stylistic range, from the experimental early music of Radulescu on one hand to the influence of this way of thinking on much more traditional composers such as Julian Anderson. You can see the concept as having emanated from Stockhausen's Stimmung, or on the other hand from Daphnis et Chloé, and different composers of course interpreted this strand in 20th century musical thinking in their own ways. The technological aspect of working with sound spectra is associated with IRCAM, where Kaija's husband Jean-Baptiste Barrière was involved for many years in heading various research programmes, and where she herself realised several pieces.