One of the most exciting things about music to me is finding out what will come next. There are always people out there claiming that they’re pushing the envelope but, generally, those people are full of it. So, when I do finally come across a sound that truly feels unique and new, it’s always thrilling to me and usually quite surprising. With that, I want to share what I think is coming next.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying the music of Kaija Saariaho quite a bit. She’s a Finnish composer, in her fifties, living in France. Her background is in something called spectral music, which you most likely have never heard of. There was a movement that started in France in the 70s where composers tried to use texture as the driving force behind their music. They didn’t care at all about harmony or melody, they wanted the focal point to be the texture of the music and how it changes. Generally, this led to a lot of extremely weird and, to me, awfully boring music. There were some gems though, like Gerard Grisey’s Partiels, but, for the most part, I think they were building the foundation for later composers to design great cathedrals on.

Saariaho is one of those new architects. She’s the first “spectral” composer that I have ever heard where I don’t say to myself, “If it weren’t for my interest in the theory, this would sound like utter crap.” Her music simply sounds good regardless of the fact that it’s a million miles away from any semblance of what most people would consider “music”. Honestly, most people want their music to be predictable and reassuring hence we’re stuck with pop music that’s still thoroughly embedded in the compositional ideas of the 18th century. Music that’s meant to be art left these ideas, returned to them, put them through a blender, and left them again, long ago. There’s this delay between the time when someone, probably poor and pathetic, creates something miraculous and when the rest of the world realizes that it’s good. By that point, no one even knows where it came from or who started it.

I’m kind of getting off on a tangent here but my is point is that this sound could very well be equivalent to Wagner breaking tonality. Maybe in two hundred years pop music will be all about exploiting the ideas expressed by Saariaho in some dumbed down, overdone drivel. If I could live that long, I would probably complain about how outdated and predictable everything you hear in the future mass media is too. I hope so, because it would be kind of neat to be right about what’s next right now.

If you listened to this and liked it you might want to check out her opera, “L’amour de Loin“, which is available on Netflix and probably other places as well.