Composer Portrait: Kaija Saariaho

Even before the 58-year-old Finn decided to dedicate herself entirely to music, after graduating from high school Kaija Saariaho started off by studying painting and fine arts. By matriculating at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the biggest music college in Scandinavia (and the only one in Finland), she changed sides. From then on, the principal focus of her interest was music, or to be more precise composing. As a pupil of the influential Finnish composition teacher Paavo Heininen, she soon bade farewell to conventional composing, and followed his advice to devote herself to the »abstraction of pure instrumental music«. For Saariaho’s approach to composing, this meant first parting with vocal music and its textual ties. Her early works focused on creating pure musical sounds, liberated from text and language. In subsequent spells of study at holiday courses in Darmstadt and in Freiburg, Kaija Saariaho developed her preference for electronic music. At Pierre Boulez’s renowned Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique in Paris, from 1982 onwards she studied computer-aided composition, tape work and live electronics – thus laying the foundations that would prove determinant for her creative output. Despite her close affinity to technical and scientific methodology. Saariaho is nonetheless always mindful of the need to create an equilibrium between the rational and the emotional, between nature and technology – one might almost say reflecting the inherent dualism of our era: »I am always seeking innovative, antithetical conceptual pairings, ones that help to categorise thought and time, and consequently music.« At the Rheingau Music Festival, Kaija Saariaho will be represented, for example, by her composition »Laterna Magica«, which was premiered quite recently, in August 2009, by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. This composition, commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic Foundation and the Lucerne Festival, is lavishly adorned with the aural metamorphoses typical of Saariaho’s work.