We have just learned of the death of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, a figurehead of contemporary music, this Friday, June 2. She was 70 years old.
It is a press release from the composer’s family which announces to us that the composer Kaija Saariaho died this Friday morning, “peacefully in her bed, at her home, in Paris.”
Kaija Saariaho first studied in her country of birth, Finland, before continuing her training at IRCAM in Paris. Influenced by spectral music and computer music more generally, her style mixes classical effectives and computer-assisted music.
Born in 1952 in Finland, Kaija Saariaho is a renowned composer in contemporary music. She studied at the Sibelius Academy with Paavo Heininen, a modernist composer himself, recognized for his high standards. With friends, she founded the association “Oreilles Ouvertes!”. Their goal is to fight against the nationalist tendencies of Finnish music at the time, wanting distribute post-serial music from Germany and France in their country. She attends summer courses in Darmstadt. She soaks up the avant-garde of Western Europe.
She discovers the spectral school, this current which was born in France in the 1970s, and which designates a music in which all the material is derived from the acoustic properties of the components of a sound. It is the mutation of sound, the becoming of sound that is at the center of the composer’s research. Spectral music will be a real revelation for her..
She then left to study in other countries to finally find herself in 1982 at IRCAM, in Paris, where she settled permanently.
She developed a style of composition all her own, using computers and mixing tape work with real-time electronics. She has a significant interest in colors and textures and is inspired by spectral music to compose her pieces. She composes for very different groups, ranging from vocal to orchestral music, passing through chamber music and will turn to opera with her first in 2000. Love from afar, in five acts to a libretto by Amin Maalouf inspired by the life of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel (12th century). She also composed in 2006 Simone’s Passionan oratorio for choir, soprano, spoken voice orchestra and electronics, on a libretto by Amin Maalouf around the life of the 20th century philosopher Simone Weil.
Kaija Saariaho won in 2021 the Golden Lion of the Venice Musical Biennale led by another composer, the Italian Lucia Ronchetti. THE May 18, 2022, the composer also became a foreign associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, in France.
