By Sanna Iitti – IAWM Journal (2001)
Kaija Saariaho’s first opera, L’amour de loin (Love from afar), was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris) and premiered at the Salzburg Festival on August 15, 2000. In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini deemed it the best new opera of the year,1 and it is Saariaho’s most intriguing work thus far. It will receive its United States premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in July 2002.
For prestigious organizations to commission an opera from a mature composer with an outstanding reputation, as indicated by awards such as the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1986), Prix Italia (1988), the Austrian Ars Electronica Preis (1989) and the recent Rolf Schock Prize (2001), is not extraordinary, but to commission an opera from a female composer is, nevertheless, still a rare occurrence. With this accomplishment, Kaija Saariaho broke through one of the invisible glass walls that confront so many women composers.
The article that follows presents a short history of Saariaho’s stylistic development, the basic principles of her creative style, and a theory about femininity in her music. It also serves as an introduction to an article on L’amour de loin that will appear in the next issue of the IAWM Journal.
Finnish musical life in the mid 1970s was conservative, and a strongly patriarchal tradition prevailed. To discover and then develop her talent in composition in a milieu lacking female composers was not easy for Saariaho. She first studied pictorial art, but she soon realized that the only art that truly mattered to her was music: an irresistible urge drove her to compose.2 Her initial problem was finding a suitable role model. She felt estranged when trying to relate to Sibelius, the conventional Finnish composer-model; she could identify only with prominent female writers such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and the Finnish-Swedish poet, Edith Södergran.3
Saariaho belonged to the generation of Finnish composers who were united by their desire to shake established conventions. Crucial to her development was her decision in 1977 to join a group called “Ears Open!” Such figures as the conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and the composers Magnus Lindberg and Olli Kortekangas were active participants. Members of “Ears Open!” explored first and foremost the styles and techniques of the Central-European avant garde, an influence that has remained strong throughout Saariaho’s career. The group produced adventurous programs, and members often promoted their music in a provocative manner.4
Professionally, Saariaho received her musical education at the Sibelius-Academy, where she studied with composer Paavo Heininen (1976-81). Being a post-serialist, Heininen transmitted the serial tradition and the art of writing contrapuntal and atonal music to his students. This is evident in Saariaho’s early compositions, such as Jing for soprano and cello (1979).5 Saariaho explored serial technique further with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. After finishing her training in Freiburg, Germany, she moved to Paris in 1982 and continued her work at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). But she was increasingly troubled by the use of compositional structures that could not be heard. In IRCAM Saariaho found such technological means that suited her compositional needs and expressive aims.
Saariaho has experimented with multiple ways of using computer technology in composition. She has used the computer to analyze sound and to create harmonic structures. An example is her analysis of the sounds that a cello makes as it is played in various transitions from a “light” sound, produced by string harmonics, to a “noisy” sound, obtained by increasing the force of the bow while approaching the fingerboard. The harmony of her piece for chamber orchestra, Lichtbogen (1985-86), was created on the basis of this analysis.
The psychoacoustic notions of pure sound and noise are central for the composer in her thinking about musical sounds. The sound-noise axis, with its different analogies, provided her with tools for designing musical forms, as in Lichtbogen, where Saariaho created a vast and dynamic musical landscape by combining different layers of “pure” and “noisy” sounds and building transitional passages between them.
The characteristic sound-noise axis is created through the instrumentation: purity is achieved by utilizing the bright and translucent sounds that both the strings and the flute produce in their high registers, combined with pitched percussion instruments, the harp and the piano. The dark qualities arise from unconventional sound productions: playing ornament-like figures involving micro-intervals on the fingerboard of a string instrument or breaking the sound altogether through overpressure on the bow. Also, the harmonic structures themselves contain certain sound-color qualities.6
Her strong sensitivity to sound-color has guided Saariaho in bringing new musical visions into being. She prioritizes timbre to create musical structures in a way that links her to the French impressionist tradition.7 Vers le blanc (1982), based on a holistic process that was realized with IRCAM’s Chant-software, presents a three-tone chord that slowly changes into another one during the 15-minute composition. Its timbre resembles a masked and distorted human voice.8
Visual metaphors and visual impulses have had significant influence on her musical ideas. The original conception for Saariaho’s first orchestral composition, Verblendungen (1982-84), arose from a mark left by a brush stroke on paper. To her, this image suggested an unusual musical form: a piece with a climax at its beginning. The work, for tape and orchestra, presents a gradual transition from rough and noisy sounds to bright and translucent ones in both the tape and orchestral parts, but in reverse order with respect to each other.9
Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam suggests that part of Saariaho’s contribution as a contemporary composer is her creation of unusual parametric hierarchies.10 In my view, Saariaho abolishes hierarchical structures altogether by creating organic fusion between parameters that have traditionally been distinguished from one another: timbre and harmony. This approach clearly provided her with a crucial starting point that she continued to explore throughout the 1980s.
Increasing rhythmic dynamism, combined with a powerful handling of large-scale sound masses, characterizes Saariaho’s compositions written in the 1990s. She began the decade with a pair of orchestral works: Du Cristal (From Crystal, 1989-90) and ...à la fumée(…into smoke, 1990). In ...à la fumée Saariaho uses her favorite instruments, the flute and the cello,11 as soloists in dialogue and contrasted with the orchestra. Melody gains a new emphasis in the work, and the formal design is surprising.12 Obsessive repetition functions as a means of creating tension, a device highly characteristic of Saariaho’s music.13 Concertos written in the 90s include Graal théâtre for solo violin and orchestra (1994; version for solo violin and chamber orchestra, 1997) and the recent Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, which will be premiered in October 2001 in Belgium. Although the orchestral works of the 1990s seem more varied than the previous ones, the basic structural principles consistently resemble those used by the Hungarian composer, György Ligeti, in his early compositions.14
Vocal music has always occupied a special position in Saariaho’s oeuvre: her vocal and choral compositions total 23.15 Three important orchestral works incorporating one or more vocal parts preceded Saariaho’s first opera, L’amour de loin. The vocal idiom of Château de l’âme (Castle of the Soul, 1995) for solo soprano, eight female voices and orchestra is similar to that of the opera.16 Oltra mar (Across the Sea) for mixed choir and orchestra, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in New York in 1999, provided material for the fourth act of the opera. Lohn, for soprano and electronics (1996), is a work that Saariaho considers a study for the opera,17 and it contains modal melodic material that is featured prominently in L’amour de loin.18
Saariaho does not hide the fact that the soprano voice, in particular, fascinates her: “[it is] my own voice, a woman’s voice. Besides this, the soprano voice bends in a completely different manner than male voices do.”19 The prominent and skillful utilization of the high female voice is indeed a characteristic of Saariaho’s output as a whole since the 1970s. One may question whether this implies that the undertone of her music is essentially feminine. Without assuming that music necessarily refers to extramusical factors, I argue that musical structures can nevertheless create or transmit gender representations and that masculinity and femininity have long been notions relevant to composers and listeners alike.20 Femininity in Kaija Saariaho’s music is linked both to the female sex and to feminine desire,21 and of prime importance is her prominent use of the soprano voice. As described, Saariaho regards this voice type to be the most apt for conveying her musical ideas. To emphasize it, Saariaho typically enriches the vocal textures of the soprano part by using glissandi, microintervals, trills, whispering and speech-song.22
The soprano voice acquires multiple signification in Saariaho’s oeuvre; in addition to referring to the composer as a member of the female sex, it appears in different contexts, at times simply as a vehicle for transmitting musical ideas, but occasionally for creating an intimate and erotically-charged atmosphere. Jardin secret II for harpsichord and tape (1984-86) is a telling example. Saariaho recorded and modified her own voice for the tape part: her breathing and whispering provide noisy sound material, which is rhythmically organized so that it evokes associations with sensual and erotic pleasure.
Saariaho’s style has remained consistent and easily recognizable—changes have been either slight or gradual. She has always approached musical form by avoiding stereotyped solutions and by stressing the uniqueness of each composition and its formal solution. Her deepest ideas concerning the artistic principles she has adopted or created have guided her stylistic development throughout her career. Traditional Western art music has had an increasing impact on her creativity, despite her belief that tonality is obsolete; for example, hearing a rehearsal of Gidon Kremer playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto gave her the impetus for writing her own violin concerto, Graal théâtre.23
Her post-modern opera, L’amour de loin, is intertextually linked to both her earlier works and to the Western vocal music tradition. Saariaho expands her characteristic pairs of oppositions to encompass and represent human psychological tensions arising from the conflict of desire and fear. In the next issue of the Journal, I will investigate the opera’s genesis, relying, to a large extent, on interviews with the composer.
1. Anthony Tommasini, “A Haunting New Opera,” The New York Times (December 31, 2000).
2. Pirkko Moisala, “Gender Negotiation of the Composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: The Composer as a Nomadic Subject,” in Music and Gender, Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press): 170-71. Moisala studied Saariaho’s press reception in Finland, which was rather negative at the beginning of her career due to her involvement with computer composition and to her gender. Moisala shows how Saariaho’s international success gradually changed her reception in Finland from the late 1980s on.
3. When Saariaho matured as a composer, her relationship to Sibelius changed. In a recent interview she admits the influence of his Symphonies nos. 5 and 7 and the symphonic poem Tapiola. See Frank Mallet, “Kaija Saariaho: de subtiles connexions entre lumière et son,” Le Monde de la Musique 8 (2000): 51.
4. Pierre Michel, “Music to be Heard: On Kaija Saariaho’s Oeuvre,” Salzburg Festspiele (2000).
5. Juhani Nuorvala, “Kaija Saariaho,” in Finnish Composers (Helsinki: Finnish Music Information Center, 1995).
6. Sanna Iitti, “Mutta tämähän on maisema, madame Saariaho: Kaija Saariahon Lichtbogen” (Master’s thesis, Sibelius-Academy, Helsinki, 1993).
7. Sanna Iitti, “Värin ja ajan illuusiot,” Sävellys ja musiikinteoria 1(1991): 16. A similar tendency is characteristic of the French composers Tristan Murail (b. 1947) and Gérard Grisey (1946-98).
8. Kaija Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Musical Structures,” Contemporary Music Review 1.2 (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1987): 106-22.
9. Ibid.
10. Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, “Rhetoric of Transitions in Kaija Saariaho’s Music,” Musical Signification Between Rhetoric and Pragmatics, Gino Stefani, Eero Tarasti and Luca Marconi, eds. (Bologna: CLUEB, 1998): 539.
11. See for example Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, “A Cornucopia of Kaija Saariaho,” Finnish Music Quarterly 3-4 (2000): 73.
12. Michel, op. cit.
13. See the General Glossary of the CD-rom “Prisma – The Musical World of Kaija Saariaho” (WSOY, New Media, 1999): Repetition.
14. The Ligeti associations sometimes seem very specific: as Mikko Heiniö points out, Verblendungen associates with Ligeti’s Lontano. See Suomen musiikin historia 4: Aikamme musiikki (Porvoo, Helsinki, Juva: WSOY, 1995): 461. Also, the use of cembalo in Saariaho’s Jardin secret II for harpsichord and tape (1984-86) associates with Ligeti’s Continuum (1968). These works are part of the canon of the Central-European avant garde, which provides the stylistic background of Saariaho’s compositions.
15. These works were written between 1977 and 2001. Saariaho’s stage work, Unien kieliopista (From the Grammar of the Dreams), also combines two sopranos with an instrumental ensemble consisting of a flute, viola, cello and harp. Finnish Music Information Center Website, http://www.fimic.fi, under the title “The Works of Kaija Saariaho.”
16. Liisamaija Hautsalo, “Kaipuu, rakkaus, kuolema,” Rondo 4 (2000): 20.
17. Ibid.
18. Lohn contains part of a poem called Lanquand li jorn, written by Jaufré Rudel (1125-48), a medieval troubadour who is the hero of the opera. Saariaho says she handled the poem rather freely. Interview with Kaija Saariaho by Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, August 19, 2000.
19. Hautsalo, 20.
20. Note, for example, the use of the term “feminine ending.” According to some analysts, sexuality and desire lie at the core of the relationship between gender representation and musical structures. It has been proposed that conventional musical narratives, such as sonata form, have been motivated by and perceived through normative analogies created by male sexual desire. See Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). In contemporary art music, femininity, masculinity and androgynity are obviously modeled and constructed in a more varied way. See John Richardson, “Androgyynisyys Philip Glassin musiikissa,” Musiikki 3 (1994): 292- 335. In her compositions written in the 1980s, Saariaho created strikingly static forms through rhythmic organization and an atmosphere that evokes intimate and “closed” spaces. I suggest that their structures can be interpreted as musical representations of a quality analogous to the nature of female reproductive mechanisms. Cyclical recurrences, repetition and the lack of large-scale linear development, combined with organic fusion of timbre, harmony and form, create a phenomenon one is tempted to call “the music of the womb.”
21. Representations of femininity can vary in a composer’s oeuvre according to the particular creative phase at the time. In other words, femininity is not a fixed quality nor does it have fixed musical representations. This argument relies on the theories of Luce Irigaray, who emphasizes the fluid and flexible nature of femininity. See especially Margaret Whitford, ed., The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1991) and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (original title, Ce sexe qui n’est pas un) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977]).
22. In the opera L’amour de loin, these qualities are not central; the vocal idiom is rather traditional, obviously due to the demands of the genre.
23. See Mallet, 53.
Sanna Iitti earned a master’s degree in music theory at the Sibelius-Academy in Finland in 1993, and taught music theory and other subjects there. She is a Fulbright Fellow and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in musicology at New York University as a Henry M. MacCracken Fellow. She has published in Finnish about music theory methodology as well as contemporary art music. Her article, “Mind Above Body—Evaluating the Aesthetic Experience in Eduard Hanslick’s Writing,” will soon be published by Indiana University Press in Musical Semiotics Revisited (in the Acta Semiotica Fennica series).