2023/06/03

Kaija Saariaho, the composer who explored color and light, has died at age 70

"I think that sound and color are not completely detached from each other," the composer told NPR last year. "That's maybe how it is in our brain. And I think that certain sounds, or certain kinds of music, can have even a specific smell. So I feel that all the senses are somehow present when I compose."

By the early 90s she had followed French spectralists such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who used the experience of electronics, and especially the computer’s then new facility in analysing sound, to write music mainly for instruments and voices