Saariaho is known for her spellbinding music, which challenges the modern stereotypes of classical music as a cerebral, convoluted, and distant art. Indeed, listeners experience her music as an overwhelming primal event, a mystical encounter providing glimpses of a deeper reality that escapes the regulated, linear consciousness of everyday life. Underneath tonality, which she does not reject, Saariaho explores the magical universe of musical colors, timbres, and inner forms; underneath the linear temporal and narrative structure of much of traditional and modern classical music, she searches for the profound, infinite, sacred time which introduces the human soul to the fullness of being.