Over the last few days we have been talking a great deal with Kaija about building your own hierarchy of musical parameters and prioritizing. What is the most important idea to express in this piece? Which parameters can enhance it? Which will muffle it or destroy it? Where must you hold your ground when it comes to the performance and where can you give way in the name of that one most important thing?

After hearing The Child come together over the course of several days and getting more familiar with the material and the different sections, I started to feel like the piece was dragging somewhat. Certain elements, which were borrowed from other sections, began to seem foreign and unnecessary in their new environment. Still lacking enough confidence to trust my intuition, I really appreciated Kaija confirming it to me in her quiet way. Almost as soon as she said it, I knew instantly which bits to cut and which to alter slightly. It felt like surgically removing cancerous growths to make the body more like its true self.

In the past I had more of a tendency to compose from the first bar to the last, which often resulted in music that changed constantly. In an effort to avoid this in The Child, I felt compelled to bring certain elements back almost obsessively. All it did was burden the totality of the piece, which was already unified by my unconscious intention. But to hear that, I really needed to get to know the sound of the piece. Some elements looked perfectly fine on paper. The notes and transitions worked. It was their sound and intention that didn’t.

The last few days at this workshop have been putting me in a strange frame of mind. Hearing so much string music in such an intimate setting has made me want to hide away somewhere and descend into a very small, dark place within myself. Watching Anssi coaching the players and hearing his performer’s take on the music has added to that enormously. The breathing and sighing… the scratching of the horsehair on the string… the fragile harmonics…These are the musical parameters I want to explore. Even thinking about the 12-part piece I have to write next week seems much too loud in this place of mind.

When introducing her Nocturne for solo violin at Friday’s string master class, Kaija said something that shook me to the core. This piece was written in memory of Lutoslawski. Kaija said that when writing it, she was thinking about his life, and life in general…and the fragile harmonic, which must after all come to an end.

Last night, after a few hours wandering around mid-town New York and getting attacked by a Starbucks tea, which left a nasty red burn on my left hand, I got to hear a full concert of Kaija Saariaho’s music for voice and electronics. The program spanned 20 years of her output, and featured a fantastic French vocal ensemble Solistes XXI, along with video projection by Jean-Baptiste Barrière. All I can say is – magnifique!

I hung around after the concert, looking like an overexcited stalker, trying to squeeze my way through the adoring crowd to the great composer herself. My breathless “Hello-I’m-Anna-Pidgorna-I’m-participating-in-your-workshop” was greeted with a cool, Nordic, “Good. Thank you for coming. I will see you tomorrow.” And that is how I met Kaija Saariaho.

This morning I got to meet all the other Carnegie Hall workshop participants: five other composers and seven string players. We spent the whole day with Kaija and her long time collaborator, the cellist Anssi Karttunen. The string players bravely worked their way through the new pieces while the composers sweated and twitched anxiously over their scores suppressing minor heart attacks. Bravo to the outstanding players! I feel very lucky to have a whole week to absorb their heavenly sound. Kaija’s and Anssi’s questions and suggestions were just the right mix of artistic considerations and practical reality.

After all the read-throughs, the composers had a great coaching session with Kaija to discuss any problems in need of immediate treatment. Having calmed their battered nerves with beer, everyone is now cooped up in their rooms tearing their hair and trying to figure out how to write out their accelerandi or revolutionize formal structure.

I got off pretty easy overall. I mostly have to think about tempo and durations. I can’t seem to find a good way of handling those. After a few attempts at precision resulted in ridiculous tempo changes every two measures, I seem to have given up on tempo markings altogether. “Fermata boxes,” my own invention, also absolve me of the responsibility to settle on any sort of duration. It’s all done in the name of liberating the performer. But now I’m wondering: where do you draw the line between liberty and laziness?