In the early 1980s, Kaija Saariaho experienced a shift in her musical outlook, switching from the strict serialism she had studied previously in the pursuit of something more eclectic and experimental. At IRCAM, the computer music research centre in Paris founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977, she began experimenting with different ways of creating sound, particularly with using electronics in the interrogation of sound’s properties, and used spectral composers such as Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey as models. Early works from Saariaho’s new period included the Jardin Secret trilogy (1985-7), for tape alone and instruments with electronics, and Lichtbogen (1986), the first time Saariaho worked with computers in the context of purely instrumental music. 

Saariaho’s Petals, written in 1988, was another work that resulted from that creative shift. Petals came directly from discarded or unused ideas she had in the creation of Nymphèa, the third of the Jardin trilogy, for string quartet and electronics. (“It was like she collected these petals and made them into a cello piece,” the cellist Anssi Karttunen, who premiered the piece, has said.)  

For solo cello with or without electronics, in Petals there’s an emphasis on finding new sounds and textures through a variety of live techniques: varying the pressure, speed and placement of the bow on the instrument, changing the density of the sound through the use of harmonics, and playing with a mix of different types of vibrato. The electronics—consisting of a cellist playing through a microphone into a mixer, with the sound being put back the system via a  reverb dial and a harmonizer—can be played live, or be pre-programmed. “If the sound is already 3-D,” Karttunen has said, the electronic element of Petals represents “the opening up of a fourth dimension.” 

Hugh Morris 2024