CHORAL UTOPIAS by Kaija Saariaho and Helena Tulve

Liner notes for the CD I Am a River, featuring choir works by Kaija Saariaho and Helena Tulve performed by the Helsinki Chamber Choir conducted by Nils Schweckendiek, published by BIS Records in April 2026. A shorter, Finnish version of this text served as the programme notes of a concert featuring the same performers and works, on September 9, 2024 in Helsinki.

Introduction

Kaija Saariaho’s (1952–2023) and Helena Tulve’s (*1972) highly personal compositional identities have both emerged from the exploration of instrumental color. However, both composers have also authored distinctive catalogues of choral works, and their approaches share some literal common ground: the rich culture of choral practice in Estonia, that in the 19th century also inspired the Finnish song festival boom, has involved various social groups, in churches, universities, and workers’ corporations among others, leading to a level of training, practice, and down the line institutionalization and creation of repertoire that is unique to the Eastern Baltic region.

The peculiarity of choral music has been to grow at the confluence of two distinct traditions: folk singing, mostly born outdoors and in dry acoustics, often polyphonic and rhythmically complex, and liturgical chants, traditionally more focused on the prosody of text and its intelligibility in church acoustics.

These two highly contrasted strands have been combined in different ways throughout the centuries, through the inclusion of folk material in church music and in concert music developing from it, to which modernists turned in the 20th to reinvent the medium with increased awareness of its twofold legacy. This is crucial for instance to the choral writing of the Hungarian modernist master György Ligeti (1923–2006), who has deeply influenced the likes of Saariaho and Tulve, and allows us to understand how both composers found a relation to the choral medium that cannot be reduced to its traditional incidence in their home cultures.

Tulve: Nächtliche Gesänge for mixed choir

Nächtliche Gesänge (Nocturnal Songs) was premiered by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir at the ISCM’s World Music Days 2019. Montaging texts by two persecuted and exiled German-speaking Jewish poets, Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Hilde Domin (1909–2006), the work gives flesh to an endeavor they shared with their common friend Nelly Sachs: reclaiming German, the language of their supremacist oppressors, through poetry. The sonic material of the piece stems from the phonetic properties of the German language, best exemplified by the leitmotiv Nacht (night), that opens both poems and gives its title to the work, also mirrored in Domin’s poem by its closed, airy counterpart nicht (not). The fricative sounds of German, stereotypically associated with aggressivity, are here stretched and redeemed into contemplation. Both poems’ ambiguous second person form, inhabiting a limbo between the traditions of prayer and love poem, also opens a space for the listener.

Helena Tulve’s choral writing is informed by long-lasting interest in Gregorian chant, understood as an art of timbral-harmonic transition in the vocal realm. Here, an uninterrupted sound field is built by voices that regularly meet on shared chords and diverge into harmonic diffraction, with the additional coloration of ornamentations, overtones, and sustained high notes. The generous reverberation characteristic of church music blurs individual events into a shared aura, while also calling for a dilated sense of time. But instead of transcendence, we commune around the shadows of future, on whose evocation the work climaxes in unisono at its exact middle point. Reverberation is then the very image of a world haunted by its ghosts.

At night, when the pendulum of love swings
between ever and never,
your word reaches to the moons of the heart
and your storm-blue
eye hands the sky to the earth.

From the distant, from the dream-blackened
grove the expired breath drifts to us
and what was lost haunts us, large as the shadows of future.

What now descends and rises
is addressed to what is buried deep inside:
blind like the glance we exchange,
it kisses time on the mouth.

Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1952 (tr. AB)

The night is upon us
when you love

not what is beautiful –
what is hideous.

Not what rises –
what now must fall.

Not where you could help –
where you are helpless.

It is a tender night,
the night when you love

what love
cannot save.

Hilde Domin, Rückkehr der Schiffe, 1962 (tr. AB)

Saariaho: Suomenkielinen sekakuorokappale for mixed choir

Kaija Saariaho’s first major choral work, whimsically titled Suomenkielinen sekakuorokappale (Finnish-language mixed choir piece), is located on the opposite end of the historical spectrum of choral writing: playful polyphony enacted by constantly reshuffled groups, engaging in a game of call and response. Written in the summer of 1979 after a workshop in Italy led by composer Franco Donatoni, the work taps into the modernist interest in folk choral practice, with precedents by Berio and Stockhausen providing Saariaho with a broad palette of extended techniques: breath sounds, shouting, tongue clicks, voiced trills, handclapping, stomping, among other theatrical effects. As it turns out, the piece was considered too difficult to perform by the commissioning student choir, and was premiered in 1983 only by the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir.

To a commission for a ‘Finnish-language mixed choir piece,’ Saariaho responded with wry literalness by setting a list of some 400 common Finnish given names, recited in approximate alphabetical order from the impractical Aadolf to the reassuring Yrjö – displaying a form of humor Saariaho would only revisit in her later choral output. Apart from certain extended vocal techniques later utilized in a more coloristic fashion, the most characteristic feature of Suomenkielinen sekakuorokappale is the thinking in sound masses (the alphabetical combinatory of syllables forming names) that Saariaho applied to much of her writing in the 1980s. Composing out of necessity for small venues and dry acoustics in her early career, Saariaho got accustomed both to a level of polyphonic detail and, later, to the use electronics as a means to create mellow artificial reverberation, blending both into a musical language that in modernist fashion aimed to combine the best of both worlds.

Saariaho: Nej och inte for SSAA choir or vocal quartet

Nej och inte (No and Not) was completed in September 1980, from material created as harmony and counterpoint exercises for Saariaho’s teacher at the Sibelius Academy, Paavo Heininen. Looking back, by design, to structural elements of Renaissance vocal counterpoint, the miniature was viewed by Saariaho herself as a laboratory and work-in-progress, and she later arranged its homophonic middle section into a song for soprano and piano, under the title Du gick, flög (1982).

The young Saariaho’s musical thinking found an ideal catalyzer in posthumous poems by Gunnar Björling (1887–1960), whose nervous interplays of short words forming shifting verbal mosaics offered a verbal equivalent of her pointillistic sound masses. Nej och inte establishes the grammar of many early Saariaho works, including the choral part of her radio piece Stilleben (1988), but also of her instrumental writing, in proceeding by disintegration of sonic and semantic units into smaller particles rearranged into the composer’s own musical form, rather than following pattern suggested by prosody/melody.

Most importantly, Saariaho later came to systematically use vocal polyphony as an expressive means to diffract the sense of unity of a lyrical subject, and this element became a defining trait of her later use of tools first trained in Nej och inte, most notably in From the Grammar of Dreams for two singers (1988), Nuits, Adieux for vocal quartet and electronics (1991), and Tag des Jahrs for mixed choir and electronics (2001), all works that treat polyphony as the natural means of expression of a “me” that is actually a multitude.

I do not want to talk
I want to stay silent, stay silent
about everything
everything is understood
from that and can
and understand
everything is understood
I want to stay silent, stay silent
about everything
happiness and pain
I do not want to talk
about your life
about that and can 
and understand.

[7/7 1956]

And you passed, flew
past
and if I saw I
saw: you passed
and past
your steps
all the steps
and that you passed, flew
past
I saw: passed
and past

And passed, flew
past
and if I saw I
saw: you passed –
and that you passed, flew
past
I saw: passed –

[30/5 1956]

No, we didn’t get to
and next to each other
we didn’t get to hand in hand
we didn’t get to on the road
with each other
no, we didn’t get to
and next to each other

We did get to a thousand hands
we did get to in each other
and like with all others
no, we didn’t get to
and next to each other. 

[30/11 1953]

Gunnar Björling (tr. AB)

Saariaho: Lumen valosta for vocal ensemble

Lumen valosta (On/From the Light of Snow) was composed for the 10-year anniversary concert of the vocal ensemble Lumen valo in November 2003, alongside works by Eero Hämeenniemi and Riikka Talvitie. All three tribute pieces were based on poems by Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995), a major voice of Finnish modernism. Manner’s poetry, typically exalting the silent mystery unveiled by meditative contemplation of the phenomenal world, doesn’t call for musical fireworks, and we are instead treated to a tour-de-force of aural transparency.

Lumen valosta offers condensed insight into the development of Saariaho’s choral writing since her student years: as in her Tag des Jahrs (2001), the musical architecture now stems from rhythmical and relative pitch patterns provided by the text itself, and song grows from speech. Even musical semantics derive from Manner’s indications of light/shadow and movement, confining to a form of laid-back madrigalism that illustrates Saariaho’s combination of different strands of choral tradition, characteristic of her later choral music.

The room is light with flowers and wide.
Outside the trees ascend,
in the half-light they redden.
Like snow the flowers withhold light,
the dusk reclines, only
the lightness of light’s matter remains.

Eeva-Liisa Manner, Tämä matka, 1956 (tr. AB)

Saariaho: Kesäpäivä for SA chorus and percussion

Premiered in 2006 by its commissioner the Tapiola Choir, Kesäpäivä (A Summer Day) is a sister piece to Horloge, tais-toi ! (2005), also composed for a children’s choir. As the librettist for both works, I looked for a kind of ‘serious playfulness’ idiomatic of childhood, and implemented a similar device of dividing the choir in two opposing groups – in this case, bees (sopranos) and humans (altos) singing of their parallel workdays in the fields, with the additional solo voice of an outsider bird. The miniature epic, inspired by my school exercises of translating Virgil’s Georgics, unfolds the oppositions and overlaps between the two groups over five ‘hours’ of the day.

As in Horloge, tais-toi !, Saariaho leans into the child choir aspect as an opportunity for onomatopoetic effects, whispers and breath sounds that serve as a soft introduction to extended vocal techniques. The thematic material invited the composer to enact for her own musical language the fusion of contrasted choral idioms that can be traced back to folk practices, such as the work song, and church music. This personal synthesis, that solidified her already perceptible evolution towards madrigalism, was the basis of our later joint ‘contemporary madrigals’ Écho ! (2007) and Reconnaissance (2020), and of the intricate choral part of Saariaho’s penultimate opera Only the Sound Remains (2015).

Read the full text and its English translation on the publisher’s website.

Tulve: I Am a River for mixed choir

I Am a River was commissioned and premiered in 2009 by the Nederlands Kamerkoor. Set to a compilation of verses by the 13th-century Persian scholar, poet, and mystic Rūmī, the piece is a staple of Helena Tulve’s exploration of the connection between choral music written for resonant church acoustics and mysticism as a sensorial experience, an endeavor that later culminated in her large ‘mystery’ Visiones at Venice’s St. Mark’s Basilica in 2022.

Tulve’s signature uninterrupted, steadily advancing vocal ‘stream,’ inspired by the historical practice of church music, is now embodying the titular metaphor of the universe as a cosmic river full of internal motions, which Rūmī’s poetry is inviting us, literally luring us into understanding as a whole of which we, as individuals, are only parts or accidents. In the form of choral writing, individual voices are reunited into the larger over-conscience to which the mystic aspires. This reunion, however, is no univocal fusion: Tulve’s writing is expert at making the chorus breathe like a complex, textured organism, alive with trills, whispers and glissandi that enrich its color palette, sustained by an almost instrumental use of overtones in lower voices. More than syncretic, Tulve’s music is truthful to its own original blend of choral traditions converging towards resonant acoustics as the ideal space to bathe in harmonic and chromatic ambiguity.

I Am a River is the first of many works by Tulve dealing with Rūmī’s poetry, which she revisited, among others, in North Wind, Sound Wind for voice, flute, kannel, and cello (2010) and the later choral work You and I (2017).

Read more about Saariaho’s and Barrière’s choral works on the publisher’s website.

Read more about their concept of chorality in their 2023 lecture (in French).