Jennifer Higdon | »Femmes4Music«

Korvat auki is directed against the conservative Finnish music business of the 1970s, when mainly neo-romantic composers received commissions for large operas. The students around Korvat auki, on the other hand, are interested in works of the avant-garde, which they learn about through their composition teacher Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and they organize concerts and workshops in which they present these works and their own works to the public.

Saariaho continues her studies in Freiburg im Breisgau, with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. Her own view of the avant-garde becomes more critical, she finds many works »musically quite boring«. As if shouting the motto »Open your ears!« to the avant-garde now, she finds fault with the fact that compositions often implement concepts that have »nothing to do with the laws of perception,« and that works are »not really handling any musical issues.«

In 1982 Saariaho goes to Paris, to the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM), the research institute for music and acoustics founded a few years earlier. There she intensively studies the aforementioned laws of perception, which for her are part of the basic tools of composing. At IRCAM there is close exchange with other composers, researchers and developers. Saariaho gains insight into the fields of acoustics and psychoacoustics and gets access to the latest research results. She learns programming languages and studies algorithmic composition and electronic sound synthesis. What she learns here in computer music will also influence the way she composes for instruments without computer.

Her first internationally successful work for orchestra and tape, »Verblendungen«, is written, and Saariaho is already applying her newly acquired knowledge. She sets herself the difficult compositional task of beginning the work with the climax and then steadily reducing the volume and musical energy over a period of 14 minutes. To ensure that the flow of the music is not lost in the process, she plans several simultaneous lines of development. For example, the orchestra begins with pitch-oriented sounds and ends with noiselike sounds (in which no exact pitch can be perceived). The tape moves in the opposite direction: it begins with noise and ends with pitch. In spite of all the theory that goes into the piece, however, the final authority for Saariaho always remains her ear, with which she decides whether a note or sound is well placed or needs to be corrected.

»Femmes4Music« – female composers in focus

As in video art, women are still far from being sufficiently visible in music. Yet sound art in particular, whose boundaries to performance and conceptual art are fluid, has produced many outstanding female artists. With »Femmes4Music«, ZKM presents female composers born between the 1940s and 1960s whose works have achieved great international renown. 

Online in Livestream
Sundays on November 20 / 27 and December 4 / 11 starting at 7 pm

Higdon is one of the most frequently performed contemporary classical music composers in America today. More than 200 performances of her works are recorded each year. Since its premiere in 2000, »blue cathedral« has become the most frequently performed contemporary orchestral work, with more than 650 performances worldwide.

The success is astonishing, since Higdon's musical career began quite late. Her parents are hippies. Her father, Charles »Kenny« Higdon, works as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. Avant-garde film, art and theater are part of her childhood in Atlanta. »I was the odd one out because it was a rock ’n’ roll household and I decided to go into classical music when my mom brought me a flute from a pawn shop.« She teaches herself to play the flute at 15, studies flute at Bowling Green State University with Judith Bentley at 18, and creates her first compositions at the age of 21. Her very first composition is a two-minute piece for flute and piano called »Night Creatures«. She develops a fondness for American masters such as Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland, some of whom seem to be quoted in her own works. To this day, she intensively follows the work of colleagues, including, for example, Du Yun, Kristin Kuster, Joan Tower, Caroline Shaw, Ginastera, and listens to 300 to 500 new works a year.

At the Curtis Institute of Music, she studied with US composers Ned Rorem and David Loeb, among others, and has been a professor of composition there since 1994. After receiving her diploma, she successfully completed her doctorate in composition at the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of composer George Crumb. Both the Hartt School and Bowling Green State University have awarded her honorary doctorates.

To date, she has received numerous awards, including in 2018 both the Eddie Medora King Award from the University of Texas and the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University, which is given to contemporary classical composers with outstanding achievements who have influenced the field of composition in significant ways.

Author: Dominique Theise

Composers of the series »Femmes4Music«
Meredith Monk (*1942 in New York City, USA)
Kaija Saariaho (*1952 in Helsinki, Finland † 2. June 2023, Paris, France)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (*1939 in Miami, Florida, USA)
Jennifer Higdon (*1962 in Brooklyn, New York, USA)