Kaija Saariaho (born October 14, 1952) is a Finnish composer.

She was born in Helsinki and studied music at the Sibelius Academy there. She later studied in Freiburg (under Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber) and at IRCAM in Paris. Several of her pieces use electronic resources alongisde traditional instruments; Nymphéa (Jardin secret III) (1987), for example, is for string quartet and live electronics.

She has won the Prix Italia and, in 1989, the Prix Ars Electronica1952 birth, received commissions from Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet, and from IRCAM for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and been the subject of a pan-European collaborative project to produce a CD-ROM Prisma about her work.

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