ABSTRACT
The music of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho offers an ideal way into a more concrete discussion of musical interactions. High-level duality of spiritual and physical thus gives way, at the level of technique, to a network of interlocking musical processes that blurs the boundaries between compositional theory and audible transformation. Solar is built around a single distinctive chord, based on an overtone series on D, and the music proceeds as a series of short-range motions away from this chord and back to it again harmonic cycles, in other words. The musical dramatisation of acoustic processes such as attack and decay is characteristic of the spectral approach that has so influenced Saariaho. Saariaho's invocation of 'harmonic gravity' provides the basis for this relationship between repetition and development. Saariaho notes that 'towards the end of the piece musical elements registers, harmony, rhythm, tempo, orchestration are presented in rapidly changing extremes'.
