Rebecca Saunders
A former pupil of Nigel Osborne and Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders has forged a distinctive voice that explores sound with intensity and delicacy. This year, she won the Ernst von Siemens Music prize for her outstanding contribution to music. Her work Scar receives its premiere on 15 Dec at Birmingham’s CBSO Centre.
Scar is an explosive piece.
It traces the memory of a wound. Musically speaking, I set up big choleric attacks creating multilayer resonances. The two grand pianos at the far le and right of the stage act like catalysts, setting o these attacks and throwing sounds back and forth across the ensemble.
Each new composition sets up a question and seeks an answer.
I never really know where a new piece will take me – going into the unknown, exploring and seeking, is a very exciting process. I o en have a fragment of sound or gesture that fascinates me and in a new work I explore its sonic, expressive and emotional potential. It’s exciting to test and push a sound to its limits.
I’m doing something I thought I would never do, and that’s working with voice and electronics. In 2016 I wrote my first piece for soprano, called Skin. It took me many years to get to that point and since then I’ve been very involved in working with text and voice in several di erent
contexts. At present I’m writing a new soprano solo for Juliet Fraser, exploring the emotional potential of the voice and written word, and for the first time I’m working with electronics. I’m actually cloning Juliet’s voice, and we have recorded a lot of exciting and intimate sounds.
I like the physicality and precision of using a pencil.
Each stroke of the pencil is absolute, and it is a focused process. All I need is a set square, a good B pencil, a plastic rubber and a piece of paper. I can go anywhere, any time and write everything with those four utensils.
The Ernst von Siemens prize means a lot to me. I feel very honoured. In a way, essentially it will change nothing about how I work or what I do – I love composing partly because it’s such a slow and complex process that requires intense concentration. But it gives me financial stability and therefore enormous freedom to really invest the necessary time in each new piece I write.