Kaija Saariaho

‘I didn’t come from musical circles at all. My father was a kind of inventor who created his own business in the metal industry. When the business started taking off, my mother was just at home with the children, with me, the oldest, my sister and my brother. My parents didn’t have any real education. They came from very poor families from the eastern part of Finland. So it was a family without any kind of cultural background. Music, from the start, was completely my own thing. Music was my own universe but I had nobody to guide me. It was quite haphazard, what I learnt and what I didn’t learn.’
It may be what she didn’t learn that allowed Kaija Saariaho to create her etherial, shimmering world, to let her music speak for itself intuitively, naturally. Although we rarely get to hear a statement this personal from this introverted, private person, what matters is that her ‘universe’, with it’s sophistication, subtleness, colorfulness and its underlying ‘Finnish-ness’ has touched a strikingly broad audience. This set of four …show more content…
A highly economical approach to the use of material, consecutive blocks of sound of often contrasting nature, a strong relationship between texture and timbre and a very personal approach to structure and timescale are features that are recurring in this collection and in most works by Saariaho. The collection starts with the composer’s period of ‘French Connection’. That was the period that Saariaho spent at IRCAM in Paris, which greatly affected her perception and formed the foundation of what her music style currently is. The last piece is her most recent large-scale work, Notes on Light (2006), for solo cello and orchestra. Light transitioning to darkness, the mystery of dreams and the subconscious, strong imagery and other extra-musical elements are present in the