Miniatures and tensions: phenomenological reverberations in and around Kaija Saariaho's Lichtbogen (1985-86)

Abstract

The article studies miniatures in Kaija Saariaho's Lichtbogen for nine musicians and live electronics (1985-86). The research material consists of records, the score and composer's interviews and articles. Methodologically, the article is based on Gaston Bachelard 's phenomenology (The Poetics of Space) and Denis Smalley's "Spectromorphology." Miniatures are subtle spatio-temporal constellations, which require a non-global listening strategy, or an "aural magnification glass" in order to be perceived. In Saariaho's case, these miniatures are often imbued with musical tension, which reverberates across the material borders of music and texts. By working on the borderline between music and language, they challenge the notion that a hard separation exists between the purely musical and the extra-musical.

Timelines in Spectral Composition: A cognitive approach to musical creativity

“…Our goal is to understand the way in which time representations have shaped their compositional practices. Their conceptualisation of time has already been approached by several scholars via phenomenology: Grisey's thoughts have been often compared with Bergson's (Orcalli 1991;Manfrin and Piras 2003;Dufourt 2004;Pasler 2004;Exarchos 2018); we have also found an essay on Saariaho through Bachelard's philosophy (Sijouva-Gunaratman 2003). Despite the validity of these scholarly exegeses, we regard them as speculative to some extent; for instance, Grisey never made an explicit mention of Bergson in his writings.…”