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A guide to Rebecca Saunders' music

Rebecca Saunders' compositions focus the ear on minute gradations of timbre and intonation, and
turn her performers into Zen masters of attention and focus
Tom Service
Monday 5 November 2012 15.47GMT

How do you turn the evanescent shimmer of sound into something tangible and solid,
something that can glow with intense, fiery colour or dazzle with a weirdly luminous
darkness? You need the technique of an alchemist and the imagination of a poet to pull
off this feat, to turn sound into a kind of sculpture. But that's exactly what British-born
and Berlin-based composer Rebecca Saunders has been doing in her music the last
couple of decades.
We often talk of the "material" that composers use, which is usually a metaphorical
sleight of hand that tries to turn a bunch of notes into so much clay. But in Saunders'
case, you really are dealing with sound and the way sounds are made by voices, by
instruments, or by music-boxes and record players as mouldable, physical stuff. Few
composers make you more aware of the intricacy, delicacy, and elementality of the
musical process, of what happens when a musician's body and fingers catalyse their
instruments, than Saunders does. As she says in her programme note for miniata, an
astonishing and sometimes terrifying piece for accordion, piano, orchestra, and choir:
"Surface, weight and feel are part of the reality of musical performance: the weight of the
bow on the string; the differentiation of touch of the finger on the piano key; the
expansion of the muscles between the shoulder blades drawing sound out of the
accordion; the in-breath preceding the 'heard' tone " The result is music of extremes,
of violence and stillness and of violent stillness. Listen to the opening of Saunders'
choler for two pianos, and you'll understand what I mean by that poetic paradox, as
volleys of granite-like chordal pile-ups erupt out of, and sink back into, pools of resonant
silence: music as explosive meditation.
Born in 1967, Saunders has made her creative life in Germany. She studied with
Wolfgang Rihm, she has taught at the Darmstadt Summer Schools, and has been
commissioned by ensembles, orchestras, and festivals in her adopted homeland. It's a
cliche with any contemporary composer, but we really don't hear enough of her music in
Britain, even if she has been a regular fixture of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music
Festival's programmes over the last decade or so (she has a world premiere with
Ensemble Resonanz of a new cello concerto on 17 November, and she was in residence
at the festival in 2010), and the Proms and BBC Symphony Orchestra have played her
music in the last couple of years.
What we're missing out on is music that charts a unique aesthetic. There are twin
influences in Saunders' work of postwar German fastidiousness and expressionism on
one hand, and experimental, Cageian concentration on the other. She has built entire
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pieces on something as seemingly small as the shift from one pitch to another, focusing
the ear on minute gradations of timbre and intonation, and turning her performers into
Zen masters of attention and focus. Her orchestral piece, G and E on A, investigates the
different shades and shimmers that are possible to find in the musical base matter of
tuning and texture. More recently, her music has taken a sculptor's approach to space as
well as sound: in Chroma, the players are positioned around the hall, and in other pieces
such as Stirrings Still the musicians conjure musical moments that are suspended in time
like a series of Alexander Calder mobiles.
What makes Saunders' music so fascinating is the way in which this forensic
examination of how sounds are made becomes a vivid and sometimes disturbing world
of feeling. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are important inspirations for her
(CRIMSON: Molly's Song 1 is just one of the handful of works she has written that
meditate on images from Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses), but so too is
colour. The titles of some of Saunders' works amount to a miscellany of colours,
especially arcane and redolent reds: cinnabar, crimson, vermilion, rubricare (latin for
marking with red), miniata (coloured with cinnabar). That obsession with the furthest
reaches of redness suggests the rarefied sensuality of Saunders' music. Far from
abstraction, she is looking to create moments of such intensity that music ceases simply
to be sound, but becomes an all-consuming, synaesthetic experience. It's demanding to
perform and to listen to you need to concentrate just as hard as the musicians to get
there. But it's worth it: stay with dichroic seventeen to discover the mysterious world of
memory, melody, and the scratching of a record player in its last couple of minutes;
experience the continuous clusters of her crimson for solo piano, sounds that coruscate
and blaze in your imagination. And above all, enter the heightened world of miniata,
that extraordinary work for instrumentalists, singers, solo piano and accordion,
composed in 2004. It's music in which each breath and whistle of the accordion, every
abyssal utterance from the wordless choir, each hammered-out note in the piano, and
every moment of stillness and silence, is transmuted into primeval poetry. It's Saunders'
musical alchemy at its best.

Five key links

miniata
dichroic seventeen
choler
crimson
Blaauw
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Topics
Classical music
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