Musical Distance in Kaija Saariaho's "L'amour de Loin"
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Date
2022-02-18
Authors
Choma, Gabrielle
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Kaija Saariaho’s and Amin Maalouf’s 2000 opera “L’amour de Loin” has received world-wide praise and acknowledgement for their masterful storytelling, and breathtaking, fresh musical setting. In 2020, the Met offered this work to viewers at home as part of their stay-at-home program, where it received further acknowledgement and praise among contemporary operas. Despite the success of this opera, few music theorists have attempted to dissect and understand the music of this opera. This comes as no surprise, as Saariaho’s pluralistic and idiosyncratic compositional style can seem intimidating, with complex electronics and a heavy emphasis on the timbral and cerebral reception of sound. But a glance at some of Saariaho’s preliminary sketches for this work demonstrates a rather straightforward method to composition: she assigned unique harmonies, timbres, and other musical characteristics to her three main characters. My work will focus on using these drafts to track harmonic changes as they relate to character development, specifically Clémence, Countess of Tripoli. We will find through this analysis that Saariaho painstakingly planned the projection of Clémence’s character through her harmonic progression, expressing these character changes as they relate to three kinds of distance—physical, temporal, and anticipatory.
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Keywords
21st Century Music, Contemporary music, Kaija Saariaho, Opera, Post-spectralism