no place for paper music (in the garden): for Kaija Saariaho

“Her tight-lipped grin, sphinx-like and secretive, doesn’t extend upwards to the sockets. Instead her gaze is full, penetrative and unreadable, and everything else in the photo seems to dissipate around it. I can feel myself curling away, retracting, fleeing from these eyes which cut through me, even as I pour myself toward them, desperately, and in terror.”

an essay and mourning diary in the wake of Kaija Saariaho’s death