Further Reading
10th January 2023
The British composer talks about her new album, drawing together three of her collaboratively-created contemporary works: Skin, void and Unbreathed.
Rebecca Saunders is one of the leading international composers of her generation. Skin, a new album from the Berlin-based British composer, comes after she has been masterfully sculpting sound for more than three decades, and incredibly, is Saunders's first ever release with NMC. Having pursued a keen interest in the concertante form, Saunders's fascination with the sonic essence of an instrument necessitates that she work very closely with the performers of her music. This new album features three significant works for different ensembles composed between 2013 and 2017, which are all products of close artistic collaboration.
The focus of much of Saunders's music is on the delicate balance between sound and silence, and none of her works explore this more vividly than void (2013-14) for percussion duo and orchestra. Composed for Christian Dierstein and Dirk Rothbrust after a number of "exploratory sound sessions" together, the two percussionists are positioned in front of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) conducted by Enno Poppe, playing aluminium flower pots and rin (Japanese singing bowls) into the 'void' created by the orchestra. Saunders repeatedly returned to the final short prose of Samuel Beckett's thirteen Texts for Nothing (1947-52) when completing void, inspired by how the text's "intensely fragile fleeting moments, describing a mouthless murmuring ceasless voice, are juxtaposed with violent outburts of anger."
Beckettian expression was also part of the pool of influences behind Unbreathed, a string quartet written for Quatuor Diotima in 2017. Premiered at the Wigmore Hall in 2018, not long after the composer's fiftieth birthday, Unbreathed is only the second string quartet written by Saunders after 2012's Fletch. The work plays with ideas of remoteness and negation, exploring the materiality of sound in a way only Saunders's music can. But the collection of precise sonic events that comprise Saunders's composition is anything but sterile; she is fascinated with the grit and noise involved in producing sound, those extramusical elements that remind us of music's humanity.
The title of the third work on the album – and also the title of the album itself – invokes this tactility, describing "the delicate membrane seperating the body and its environment" (Saunders). Composed in 2015-16 for Juliet Fraser and Klangforum Wien, Skin is the first of Saunders's works with a sung text, her previous vocal works having explored the voice purely timbrally. The text is Saunders's own, materialising gradually throughout the compositional process, partly inspired by collaborative sessions with solo soprano Juliet Fraser, and partly by literary references such as the close of Molly Bloom’s monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and once again, prose by Beckett. The solo part is hugely virtuosic – in the liner notes Paul Griffiths describes how "the work stretches its soprano protagonist across the feverishly alive body of instrumentalists. She is this music’s skin. Voice is this music’s skin."
Rebecca Saunders is in great demand as a composition tutor and teaches regularly at, amongst others, the Darmstadt Summer Courses and the Impuls Academy in Graz. Her compositions have been recognised with numerous prestigious international awards, including the 2019 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (often described as the Nobel Prize of Music).
