Kaija Saariaho (born 1952)
Kaija Saariaho is Finland’s most prominent living composer, and even (according to a 2019 poll conducted by BBC Music Magazine), the world’s greatest living composer.
She was born Kaija Laakkonen in Helsinki. She studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and starting in 1982, at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in Paris, where she studied computer music and electronics. She was drawn to spectralism – the use of the spectral properties of sound as a basis for composition. Here is her 1987 composition Nymphéa (French for “water lily") for string quartet and electronics:
On her website she has written:
In preparing the musical material of the piece, I have used the computer in several ways. The basis of the entire harmonic structure is provided by complex cello sounds that I have analysed with the computer. The basic material for the rhythmic and melodic transformations are computer-calculated in which the musical motifs gradually convert, recurring again and again. I have used sounds of an original string quartet that are manipulated in the concert situation.
YouTube has a variety of Kaija Saariaho’s later orchestral and chamber music. This is a gorgeous and sonically spectacular three-movement orchestral composition from 2002 entitled Orion.
Here’s a 2014 piano trio entitled Light and Matter:
In 2016 her beautiful opera L’Amour de loin became only the second work by a woman composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera. (The first was Ethyl Smyth’s one-act opera “Der Wald” in 1903, but that was performed only as a preliminary appetizer to “Il Trovatore” and “La fille du regiment.”) Here’s just a little bit of the Metropolitan Opera production of L’Amour de loin with Susanna Phillips singing the lead part: