En6 — A life in music: Kaija Saariaho & Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
Looking back at two legendary female composers we lost in 2023
KAIJA SAARIAHO (1952–2023)
WORDS BY JANE FORNER
On a cold December day in 2016, I met Kaija Saariaho at the Maison Française at New York University. As a naïve graduate student in the second year of my PhD at Columbia University, I was about to give not only my first conference presentation, but also one about Saariaho’s music, while the composer sat in the front row. Having been encouraged to take a seminar on troubadours the previous year, I wrote my Masters of Arts thesis on the medievalism of Saariaho’s L’amour de loin─which in 2016 was receiving its Metropolitan Opera début in Robert Lepage’s production, 16 years after its premiere. Most of all, I was captivated by how the voice of the domna (dame) of old Occitan poetry — almost always silent and silenced — had been brought alive in the character Clémence, and then by the sinuous bodies of sound that Saariaho commanded from the orchestra.
Clichéd as it is to say, Saariaho left us too soon, and her composing career has borne an astounding and diverse body of music that continued to pour forth until the last. I can barely scratch the surface of her work in these few words. Her oeuvre ranges from earlier pieces like Petals (1988) and Du Cristal (1989) that emerged from work at IRCAM in Paris, suffused with her interest in spectralist techniques, computer-assisted composition, and the use of live electronics, to the success of her increased focus on the voice in this century.
Saariaho’s music has always invited metaphors of colour and light: iridescent, shimmering, luminous, connoting her distinctive timbres synesthetically, and often reflected in her own titles. But it is also searing and incisive, insistent and commanding as much as it is bewitching, and shattering as much as enigmatic in its glistening textures.
Saariaho died aged 70 on June 2 in Paris, where she had made her home for decades. In her departure, she leaves a formidable imprint, a legacy that will continue to define contemporary music for many years to come. Seven years ago, L’amour de loin, and that pivotal experience with Saariaho herself, was one of the most powerful catalysts that turned me into the musicologist, teacher, and musician that I am today. I know that variations on this experience are shared by countless of us throughout the musical world. Thank you, Kaija, for everything.
EMAHOY TSEGUÉ-MARYAM GUÈBROU (1923—2023)
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