Rebecca Saunders Portrait

“What I’m interested in is the transition between non-sound and something concrete, the transition from silence into silence, from noise into sound.” Rebecca Saunders occupies a pre-eminent position among the composers of her generation. This is based on her powerful and deeply moving sensibility for the finest musical gestures, for tonal colours never been heard before and on her wealth of ideas to make musical processes manifest in spatial terms. The contributions made by noise to the formation of sound in particular form her musical material. She is inspired by authors such as Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Italo Calvino and David Foster Wallace. Rebecca Saunders is British but has lived in Berlin for many years. She studied first with Nigel Osborne in Edinburgh and then with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe. Her work has won numerous prizes. The Ensemble Modern, as the leading international chamber ensemble for new music, will dedicate a portrait concert to her with three distinctive recent works.

The composer likes to preface her scores with dictionary definitions of their titles. a visible trace: paths, tracks and clues, hints, following and imitating. Fury II is an extension for chamber ensemble of a major solo piece for double bass.

: not only an outburst of anger, put also a force of nature like a storm or epidemic; the raging of madmen and “furies”. Skin won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2017 and the British Composer Award. The work was created in intense collaboration with the brilliant soprano Juliet Fraser. Skin:a taut, elastic, sealed layer around a body or on top of a fluid or solid substance; a fine membrane separating inside and out; to touch, but also to peel, to remove a coating; to get under one’s skin, to irritate, stimulate, remain; skin as a metaphor for transience.