Making Music: Kaija Saariaho

Tonight’s program focuses on Saariaho’s works for voices and electronics, and includes visualizations that play an integral role in the overall conception of the concert. Designed and implemented by long-time collaborator Jean-Baptiste Barrière, the visualizations grow out of the inherently visual overtones of Saariaho’s music, enhancing and developing those implicit features. The music comes from various stages of Saariaho’s career, spanning the years between 1988 and 2007. And the texts come from a similarly wide array of writers, including the medieval troubadour Jaufré Rudel, 19th-century writers Hölderlin and Balzac, 20th-century American poet Sylvia Plath, and two contemporary French writers—Roubaud and Barrière.

All of the works employ electronic sounds, either electronically generated or sampled, and some entail real-time processing of live sounds. In all of the works on tonight’s program, the vocal parts employ a wide variety of techniques. Vocalists whisper, speak, sing with or without vibrato, or sing with different quantities of air; sometimes the vocalists produce words, other times phonemes, and sometimes they simply breathe. The dazzling array of vocal sounds gives the music an expansive expressive range that allows for subtle shadings of meaning.