Kaija Saariaho
From the Grammar of Dreams (1989) #10’
pour deux sopranos
The texts used in this piece come from two books by Sylvia Plath: there are excerpts of her only novel, The Bell Jar, and fragments of the poem "Paralytic" from the poetry collection Ariel. The texts are strong, dealing with life and death, escaping into madness, self-destruction and the fight against it. Nevertheless, the piece includes an evolution: the painful nightmare ends in daylight and life.
The emotional context of these texts, powerful in the extreme,
However, these rules do not always proceed in a rational or combinatorial thinking, but rather in the manner of our dreams, where thoughts are transformed into visual images with their colours, juxtapositions,movements and directions. I have sought to operate in the same way by opening the text with two voices, and creating with them five different soundscapes.