Kaija Saariaho

Women Composers

by Pirkko Moisala

This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L'amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Her influences include the spectral analysis of timbre, especially string sounds, micropolyphonic techniques, the visual and literary arts, and sounds in the natural world. Pirkko Moisala approaches the unique characteristics of Saariaho's music through composition sketches, scores, critical reviews, and interviews with the composer and her trusted musicians. Drawing extensively from this material, Moisala describes the development of Saariaho's career and international reception, the characteristics of her musical expression, and the progression of her compositional process.

130 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pirkko Moisala's book about Kaija Saariaho, published by University of Illinois Press in 2009, is one of the few monographs on the Finnish composer. Unfortunately, it is a great disappointment.

The problems are legion. For one, it appears that there was little to no real editing of the manuscript. Typos ("the ensemble L'Itinerairen"), spelling mistakes ("Karl-Heinz Stockhausen") and ungrammatical direct translations from Finland ("from the Finland's Academy") abound. There's hardly a single page without such errors. Moisala's English style is atrocious and I wish she had simply written the book in Finnish to begin with and then had it professionally translated into English. Also, the book is lightweight. Discussion of her music is all generalities. At less than 150 pages long, it still manages to be highly repetitive. How many times do we need to hear the same general statement that Saariaho has incorporated timbre and tone-to-noise transitions into her basic musical grammars? There are sketches of the form of two works, but not a single score sample.

I guess that the book does have some value for its trivia (the stuff that isn't mispelt to unintelligibility at any rate), and Saariaho provides something of an apology for why she no longer uses electronics as much as before. Still, anyone interested in Saariaho's life and work can get the same information as here, and much more detailed analysis of her music, by simply doing a search at JSTOR and reading the articles which the Finnish Music Information Centre has placed online. The IRCAM publication about her music (ISBN 2858508003) also has some lovely discussion of certain works.