Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues. Ed. by Tim Howell, Jon Hargreave, and Michael Rofe

This is the second book to appear in English on Saariaho’s music, following the publication in 2009 of Pirkko Moisala’s Kaija Saariaho. Whereas the latter is a general overview of the Finn’s music, concentrating on biography and aesthetics rather than the notes on the page, the focus of this volume of essays is decidedly music-analytic. In this it is someway comparable to the IRCAM Compositeurs d’aujourd’hui volume dedicated to Saariaho published in French in 2000, though the essays in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues are more up to date with regard to Saariaho’s compositional output, and the analyses more numerous and variable in quality. Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues features nine contributions—eight essays and one interview with the composer (by Tom Service). These nine contributions are subdivided into groups of three according to the three categories of the book’s subtitle. Although the blurb on the book’s sleeve states that this distribution into the categories of ‘Visions’, Narratives’, and ‘Dialogues’ ‘reflects the wide range of Saariaho’s creative preoccupations while subscribing to a carefully structured succession of commentaries’, these three categories are not particularly insightful from an analytic point of view and should rather just be considered loose tags for arranging the book’s content.