Kaija Saariaho was born in Finland in 1952. Before embarking on a musical career, she spent a year studying at the Helsinki School of Fine Art. She then studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, in 1976, with Paavo Heininen; this teacher gave her a very rigid basis on which to work. After these learning years, she attended the summer courses in Darmstadt in 1980 and 1982, where she worked with Brian Ferneyhough, and studied at Freiburg-im-Breisgau with Klaus Huber from 1981 to 1983. In 1982 she was introduced to computerised music at IRCAM, and this has now become a major element of her composition work.
Her latest compositions, written in Finland, such as Laconisme de l'aile, testify to her particular sensitivity to tone. The works are written on the basis of a sound-noise continuum for a refined sense of harmony. She is a lover of spectral music (for me, Murail et Grisey were a real revelation) in which the problems of tone and harmony lead to a new formal conception no longer founded on dynamic functions but on the very substance of the sound. Most of all, she seeks to integrate instrumental substance with computers, using direct transformation of sound. In the same spirit, she has moved towards the use of orchestral formation, in which the spectrum of colours is even richer.
She currently lives in Paris. She is involved in producing the Festival of Contemporary Music in Helsinki and has won numerous prizes for her work.
Like ten or so other composers, Kaija Saariaho has written for the CENTQUATRE a piece lasting precisely 104 seconds, a commission involving a fascinating combination of figures and constraints. These compositions will be accessible on line to enable you to discover different and distant universes in the field of contemporary music, all too often reserved for initiates only. They will then be performed in the CENTQUATRE after it opens.
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