Kaija Saariaho: II. Never a Machine-Freak

Kaija and her colleagues knew that to find their compositional voices, they would need to look outside of Finland. Kaija moved to Germany and eventually to Paris, where she spent hours toiling over electronic sounds deep under the Centre Pompidou at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, also known as IRCAM. Kaija, who was in her own words, “never a machine-freak," was the only woman in a sea of programmer-type men. She thrived in this environment, finding her voice during this era, a combination of subtle electro-acoustic manipulations and her own, intuition-based take on spectralism.