• Flute & electronics (see below for details)
  • 9 min
    • 21st November 2024, Cité de la musique, Paris, France
    View all

Programme Note

For full information on the electronics and performance guide, please see 'more info'.

Flute has always been to me an important instrument. Laconisme de l'aile, my second piece for a solo flute was started in Freiburg and finished in Paris in 1982.
As starting points I had ideas about blending the rhythms of speech and timbres of breathing into more traditional flute expression.

The text fragments are borrowed from Saint-John Perse's Les Oiseaux, Birds, and the title refers to birds, meaning something like 'the tersenes of a wing'.

I had in my mind, despite of bird song, above all the different ways birds fly, winning the gravity, crossing the sky. The solo flute draws these lines into acoustic space.

Kaija Saariaho

Media

Features

  • Kaija Saariaho’s Poetic Montages
    • Kaija Saariaho’s Poetic Montages
    • From the very beginning of her career as a composer, Kaija Saariaho has turned to poetry as a material and inspiration for her music. The forms and logics of poetry have played a defining role in her output since then.

Discography

More Info