Kaija Saariaho (born October 14 1952 in Helsinki) is a finnish composer. For 13 years Saariaho attended the Helsinki Rudolf Steiner School, a school with a strong arts and music curriculum, and studied violin and piano at the Sibelius Academy. She later studied composition in Freiburg (under Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber) and at IRCAM in Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Saariaho was influenced by post-serialism, but she grew to find it too restrictive: "You were not allowed to have pulse, or tonally oriented harmonies, or melodies.

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