Timbre as a form-building property in the music of Kaija Saariaho

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Timbre as a form-building property in the music of Kaija Saariaho

Candidate number: 22025865

MUS335 Individual Research Topic

MMus Contemporary Music Studies


Abstract

This essay outlines the evolution of Kaija Saariaho’s working methods from the 1980s to the present, with particular reference to her own research on timbre and form. Relatively recent music research began to address the need for new formal possibilities to suit the requirements of avant-garde composition. The main focus of this essay is on timbre as a form-building element in Saariaho’s music, and her association with psychoacoustics, which examines the ways in which timbral form can be apprehended.

The essay commences with a summary of the historical background to Saariaho’s interest in timbre and its relation to “spectral” music. After investigating her work in this field, the essay then examines Saariaho’s violin concerto Graal Théâtre (1994) in more detail, to show how the composer’s working methods and range of expression have expanded, with a subtle shift of emphasis from timbral concerns towards more linear, melody-led compositions. Throughout the essay, the author locates Saariaho’s music in its historical context and circumstances, and looks at her music’s relationship to its surroundings, canonic origins and influences. The essay concludes with some critical thoughts on the nature of timbre as a form building element in music.


Contents

Page 4: Introduction and acknowledgements.

Page 6: The evolution of timbre as a form-building element.

Page 19: Form, perception and the sound/noise axis.

Page 33: Graal Théâtre.

Page 64: Comments.

Page 66: Bibliography and discography.

Page 70: Appendix A: Biography of Kaija Saariaho.

Page 72: Appendix B: Instrumentation in Graal Théâtre.


Introduction and Acknowledgements

My interest in the music of Kaija Saariaho (b.1952) originated from a SOCRATES foreign exchange to Finland in 1998 that I took part in while at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. This involved a stay of four months in Tampere, in Finland’s worst winter for fifty years. The experience was memorable not only for the weather conditions but for the refreshing open-mindedness of the Finns in their approach to modern music. The government funding of music education reflects the respect in which composing as a profession is held by the Finns. Their range of contemporary music festivals is enviable, and I found new works programmed at almost every concert, which were full without exception.

        On returning to Britain, I briefly researched Saariaho for a contemporary performance techniques project at college, but found very little research material of value available. Few people in this country appeared to have encountered her music. It was natural, then, that I should attempt to raise her profile, in however small a way, by making her the subject of my dissertation.

        The scarcity of research material in English meant that I looked abroad to Finland, Germany and France for my information. Much of this came from the Finnish Music Information Centre in Helsinki, who were unfailingly helpful with recordings and articles. Scores were mainly acquired from numerous inter-library loans and some generous help from Saariaho’s publishers, Chester Music. I am also grateful to Saariaho’s manager Wiebke Busch and to Keith Potter for helping to arrange an interview with the composer, who kindly provided me with a range of useful information that I could not have found from any other source.

I cannot conclude without thanking my dear parents Denise and Bryan, who have always helped, supported and believed in me throughout my education.

And eternal thanks to Alex, who has been just brilliant.


The evolution of timbre as a form-building element

For the purpose of this essay it is important to locate Saariaho’s compositions in terms of the wider evolution of timbre as a form-building element in music, and how these particular developments in twentieth century music led to her work in this field.

Though a variety of composers around the beginning of the twentieth century showed increasing awareness of timbre’s potential for structural organisation, such as Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) and Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), it could be argued that relatively recent investigations into the nature of the mechanics of sound, particularly in so-called ‘spectral’ composition, have their theoretical origins somewhat ironically in the music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). His experimentation with a melody of timbres (“Klangfarbenmelodie”; literally “sound colour melody”) in the third movement of his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op.16 (1909) emphasised timbre as the point of focus, rather than pitch or rhythm (Example 1). Schoenberg’s renouncement of tonality meant that he also forfeited the primary method for generating movement and development in a piece, particularly when unsupported by a text for structure. Consequently, the aforementioned third movement, entitled Farben (“Colours”), has a much freer, unfettered feel as the textures and timbral colours interweave.

In Schoenberg’s output it is a unique piece; placed in its historical and musical context it remains a strange, disconcerting movement. In its utilisation of sound at both micro and macro levels, Farben anticipated far in advance the emergent change in focus led by the accession of electronics and the computer in contemporary composition. However, its nature is rather evanescent and intangible. A question arose: without the solid prop of tonality to rely on, would it be possible to find an alternative method for the expression of tension within the very properties of sound? That is not to assume all composition relies upon tension, or assumes its existence as a pre-requisite, but for those composers occupied with the creation of new sound worlds away from the realm of tonality, the issue of finding new musical forms to suit their new material became deeply problematic.

Developments in the field of electronics after the Second World War led to an explosion in the exploration and creation of new sound worlds most preoccupied with timbre. Attempting to realise an electronic composition with the primitive means available to composers of that time involved such complex factors that their attention naturally became focussed upon the properties of the sounds themselves, especially those frequency components which define the sound of a particular instrument. Through an investigation of sound properties, it became evident that a sound could in itself be a whole musical form; strands of this thought developed into the ‘spectral’ idea of sound as a spatial construction whose inner dimensions could be transformed into music. There was also the attraction for composers, in contrast to the objectification of the musical material of serialism and integral serialism, of ‘getting their hands dirty’, of having direct control over the generation of the musical materials themselves. Following his initial pursuit of ‘pure’ electronic music created by the new means that became gradually available, Karlheinz Stockhausen (b.1928) joined composers such as György Ligeti (b.1923) and Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) in combining what he learned about timbre and texture in electronic music into the composition of acoustic works, or adding acoustic instruments to electronic composition.

There are surface comparisons to be made between a composition of Ligeti’s such as Atmosphères (1961), and Saariaho’s earlier work, such as Verblendungen for thirty-five piece orchestra (1982-84): their slow rates of change, large-scale harmonic shifts and massive blocks of texture that function as a single unit. Despite their superficial similarities, Ligeti does not make the same kinds of connections between harmony and texture that Saariaho does. The connection to be made between early electroacoustic compositional activity and Saariaho’s music needs a further bridge.

This connection comes via Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) in the form of ‘spectral’ music, a type of music that was already well established in France when Saariaho moved there in the early 1980s. Saariaho says “the music of Grisey and Murail was a fantastic revelation … their music sounded fantastically fresh and completely different. The idea in spectralism is that we are dealing with audible structures. Grisey was analysing instrumental sounds…his music sounded completely different to the serial harmonic structures which were based more on abstraction, or some intellectual game, than the actual sounding result” (Saariaho, The Wire, 2001: 24).

In spectral composition the idea of a listening dedicated to texture replaces the fragmentation and figuration of serial music. According to musicologist Julian Johnson, “spectralism deals more directly with the physical nature of musical sound, and thus of our understanding of time and space, than any other current means of composition.” (Johnson 2001, www.vivosvoco.com/bibliography.html). The composers who are most often assembled under the broad and non-specific term ‘spectral’ are five Frenchmen: Grisey, Tristan Murail (b.1947), Michaël Levinas (b.1949), Hugues Dufourt (b.1943) (who invented the term ‘musique spectrale’) and Roger Tessier (b.1939). Their basic unifying principle is the search for expression through the constituent materials of a sound, by using the spectrum of a sound to generate a composition. The aesthetic objective of these composers was to find a greater connection between “concept and percept—between the concept of the score and the perception the audience might have of it” (Grisey 1996). Developments in the capability of computers made it possible to analyse or deconstruct a sound source into its most minute component parts, to map out the way its partials change through time and to cast the resulting sound properties into any shape at will. Saariaho’s relationship to the ‘spectral ’composers does not end with computer aided analysis of sounds and the focus upon the structural potential of timbre, but continues through her general aesthetic attitude to the “recovering [of] the hierarchy” (Grisey 1996), and the comfort with using methods adapted from tonality that she shares with these composers.

It is necessary to provide some background information on Kaija Saariaho, in order to define a starting point from which the discussion of her music can begin. Her move to Paris in the early 1980s was dictated by practical circumstance, as her growing interest in electronics and the use of the computer in music limited her choice of where to work and study. Few if any institutions were as advanced and well equipped as IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which Saariaho felt offered the best conditions for her work and study in her chosen media. Her earliest published pieces, composed in Finland, show a preoccupation for small vocal or instrumental ensembles, and a propensity for melodic rather than timbral writing; for example, Bruden, a song-cycle for soprano, two flutes and percussion from 1977, Jing for soprano and cello, 1979 and Nej och inte (“No and Not”) for female choir or vocal quartet, from 1979. Her first advances into electronics and computer music came in 1979 with the tape piece Cartolina per Siena, composed during the Young Nordic Music Festival. Here, Saariaho used her own voice and the sound of bells as the basis of the material to be electronically manipulated. Her Study for Life in 1980 was an adventurous multi-media experiment for female voice, dancer, tape and lights, an allusion perhaps to her earlier student background in visual and graphic arts.

Following their meeting at the Darmstadt summer school in 1980, Saariaho took the decision to study with Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg, Germany. There is little discernible similarity between their compositional works or personal aesthetic, and also little information about Saariaho’s time in Germany, though she expresses particular admiration for Ferneyhough’s teaching, commenting that that he “has such a passion for his [teaching] work, drawing out the individual voice of his young composers”, (Saariaho, Finnish Music Quarterly 3/1998:14). The first work of Saariaho’s to truly signal the direction that she was to take was …sah den Vögeln (1981), composed under Ferneyhough’s supervision during her studies in Freiburg. The piece is for flute, oboe, cello, prepared piano, live electronics and soprano, with fragments of texts by anonymous underground American poets translated into German as the basis for the vocal material. The subject of the work, which became a pervading theme in Saariaho’s compositions, is of communication or of the alienation found when unable to communicate. The texts undergo an ‘alienating’ effect by being translated from their original language, while the sounds themselves are alienated by being amplified and manipulated, and, over the course of performing the piece, the properties of an individual sound are microscopically examined. The piece moves between the axes of sound and noise by means of its real-time electronic manipulation; for instance, the movement of the cello bow against the string is powerfully amplified to the point of becoming grainy noise, therefore creating opposing tension to the more conventional sound of the cello. In Saariaho’s work, the computer is used to facilitate composition, not to replace or provide the creative impetus, thus avoiding the ‘trap’ of forcing traditional instruments or computer-generated sound to do the job of one another.

Opposition as a form-bearing element in music is basic to contemporary and non-contemporary composers alike, but it was the nature of the oppositions in Saariaho’s music which was to be of most interest. Through her earliest explorations of associations between sound and noise at IRCAM, Saariaho discovered for herself what became a vitally important element of her compositions: the building of musical form through timbre.

A key influence on Saariaho’s work with timbre and form was the research climate at IRCAM, and in particular, the work on psychoacoustics carried out by Stephen McAdams. Timbre as a generic term is a simplification an amalgamation on a variety of different elements, and, as McAdams shows, involves psychological issues related to auditory perception:

Timbre is a misleadingly simple word that encompasses not only a very complex set of auditory attributes, but also a plethora of important psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, and duration. It is thus, by definition, multidimensional. (McAdams 1999: 85)

McAdams’ perspective, simplified for the purpose of the present discussion, is that a listener instinctively tries to structure the acoustic world with which they are confronted, and therefore the way a listener perceives form is dependent on the way sound sources are used in building the structure of a piece. Human hearing is undeniably sophisticated; in the concert hall, for example, we can differentiate between sections of instruments, identify individual instruments down to the subtle nuances of a single performer, and distinguish individuals from the group even when the instruments are playing as a whole unit. This relates to the importance to both composer and listener of being able to identify the causal origin of a sound, defined by its timbre, “the attribute of a sound which enables a listener to distinguish between two sounds that are identical in pitch and amplitude” (Born 1995:336). The gestural qualities, and subsequently the formal usefulness of a sound, are diminished when it is stripped from its causal origins or its generative source. Human perceptual systems locate sounds in relation to their environment, but when they are treated artificially—for example, in real-time electronic manipulation—the way we listen changes. Denis Smalley elaborates on this:

The source of a sound is normally associated with a cause—some kind of activity or gesture which sets the vibratory system in sounding motion…One approach to electro-acoustic composition is to use sources which are intended to be recognised…A source with a strong extrinsic identity [in real-world existence outside the work] provides a solid base for transformation because it is memorable. If we can remember the base identity we are better able to follow subtleties of transformation and we are more likely to be able to recognise transformations if they appear at a later location in the work. (Smalley 1993:281)

Our listening is closely related to the context in which we are listening. With this in mind, Saariaho aims to create structures in which to represent her music, to provide a relevant context in which to present a coherent image of perceptual unity in her work with computer generated sound.

On a different level, Saariaho chooses sound sources for their timbral characteristics and spectrum; analysis of which, depending on how spectromorphologically rich the source is, can potentially provide a fertile reserve of material for further sonic expansion. In many of her pieces which combine live performance and electronic extensions, Saariaho tends to retain the original identity of the base sound; for example in Petals for solo cello and optional electronics (1988), a work which takes its material from Nymphea (Jardin Secret III) for string quartet and electronics (1987). In Petals, Saariaho establishes the base sounds (the acoustic sources), however briefly, before embarking on her transformations. This enables the listener to associate the initial sound source with its consequent identity when transformed.

In a way, Petals is too obvious an example; the electronic processing takes place in real-time, and as the cello is the only source of material, the relation of the electronically altered sounds to the base sounds will be clear by means of the audible transformation processes the sounds go through. Petals does provide a useful example of Saariaho’s method of establishing the base identity of a sound at the beginning of a piece (Example 2).

It is incidental, but notable, that very few tape pieces were produced at IRCAM in the 1980s. According to Smalley, “IRCAM’s prevailing ideology…is concentrated on gestural extension via live performance. In other words it uses instrumental identity as base identities.” (Smalley 1993:298). Georgina Born also observes that “the kind of piece most fashionable and prestigious among IRCAM composers was one mixing the resources of a live orchestra or ensemble…with computer-generated tape or live computer transformation.” (Born 1995:224). Saariaho’s academic research and her production of works that follow this ‘ideology’ point to a willingness to comply with IRCAM expectations. Indeed, she appears to have thrived well in this environment, showing a competitive artistic individualism that made her work stand out, and taking what was right for her from the IRCAM experience: “In computers, I saw a means of entering inside sound concretely in order to control timbre, and finding a vocabulary for describing the different factors that comprise musical color. It was also a means of continuing my research on musical processes in an especially suitable environment.” (Saariaho, Computer Music Journal 1986: 43).

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Further to this issue of influence, Saariaho asserted in my interview that the research and work she co-authored with Stephen McAdams was a mere clarification of what she was already practising in her compositions; the potential for timbre to be a form building element was not a new discovery that she could then integrate into her work, but a qualification of a personal methodology that was already active in her compositions (Saariaho 2002a). At IRCAM the academic environment was one where composition stemmed from research; analytical and theoretical work was used in ways that could generate compositional ideas. It is ...

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