Kaija Saariaho | »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

Saariaho's oeuvre is large and varied. In addition to orchestral works, it includes chamber music works, solo works for various instruments, electroacoustic works, choral works and, last but not least, a number of operas. For Saariaho, her probably most important work is the oratorio »La Passion de Simone«. It deals with the life and thinking of Simone Weil (1909-1943), the French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Saariaho came across Weil's writings by chance at the age of 15, and they have stayed with her ever since. For Saariaho, a central message to our time is when Weil talks about compassion, and how that compassion can give rise to action. Saariaho dedicates the oratorio to her own children as a kind of »mental testament.«

Strong female protagonists often appear in Saariaho's other operas as well. Asked about this in an interview, she replies that all »composers choose their own subjects that really speak to them.« Asked by the moderator about her own situation, Saariaho relates how she, too, had to first assert herself as a woman in a male-dominated world. Both at the beginning of her studies and at IRCAM, Saariaho was the only woman among men. At her university, there were teachers who did not want to teach her because she »was going to get married soon« and it was therefore wasted time. Later, when her music is played more and more in concerts, she has to realize that begrudging male colleagues see the reason for this success not in the quality of her compositions, but in the fact that she would be included in the concert programs mainly because she is a woman.

Finally, I would like to mention the piece »Vent nocturne« for viola and electronics, as an example of a solo work. Saariaho composed »Vent nocturne« in 2006 for violist Garth Knox. Together with the video artist Brian O'Reilly, Garth Knox created an audio-visual version of the piece at the ZKM in 2010, which was released on a DVD together with other compositions.

Author: Götz Dipper

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)