Rebecca Saunders

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Rebecca Saunders (born 19 December 1967) is a London-born composer [1] who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). [2] In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling.". [3] Her opera Lash - Acts of Love was premiered at Deutsche Oper Berlin in mid-2025 to critical acclaim.

Contents

Biography

Saunders studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh, earning a PhD in composition in 1997. As a DAAD scholar, she studied with Wolfgang Rihm from 1991 to 1994 at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe; Nigel Osborne [1] supervised her doctoral thesis.

Her awards include the Busoni Prize of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, Sponsorship award (1994), the Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize (1996), the Hindemith Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival (2003), the composition prize of the ARD, and the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize (2015). In 2019 she won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (main prize), the second woman, and first female composer to be awarded. [4] [5]

In 2010 and 2012, she taught at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses [1] and was composer-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Dortmund from 2005 to 2006, [6] Staatskapelle Dresden from 2009 to 2010, [7] and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2010. [8]

Fabio Luisi and the Staatskapelle Dresden gave the UK premiere of Saunders' revision of traces at the 2009 Proms. [9]

Her music has been performed by notable ensembles worldwide, including Ensemble Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Resonanz, Ensemble Recherche, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. [10]

In 2024, Saunders received the Ivor Novello Award in the category Best Small Chamber Composition for The Mouth, for soprano and tape. [11] [12] [13]

Music

Saunders's music is characterized by limited pitch material and a wide breadth of timbral complexity. [14] She is fascinated with resonance and extraneous noise created by instrumentalists, such as the scratch of a bow change, the thud of the pedals of a piano or harp, and the taps and slides of the left hand on a string instrument's fingerboard. [14] Due to the subtleties and specificity of the sounds she creates, Saunders includes lengthy textual explanations in many of her scores to describe each effect that she wishes the performer to produce. [14]

Much of Saunders's music is based upon a single pitch, or sometimes a small collection of pitches which govern large sections of music. [14] Therefore, development and elaboration are determined more by sonority and texture rather than traditional voice leading. However, she does sometimes include “quasi-diatonic” pitch collections, which suggest a more traditional context than that of her music based on single notes.

Rebecca Saunders has also explored physical space in her music. In an interview for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, she described her music thus: [8]

For me, what’s really important is enabling the listener to feel the magical physicality of sound, the timbre, the colour, the mass, the weight, of sound. That’s what I feel I’m working with, almost like a sculptor works with different materials.

By describing the “mass and weight” of her music, and comparing her art to that of a sculpture, she is attempting to bring sound into a physical plane. Additionally, in works like chroma, she invites the listener to wander around and explore the influence of physical space on the audience's experience. [8]

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Rebecca Saunders biography (in English)". Edition Peters. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022. Retrieved 13 July 2011.
  2. ↑ "A music referendum". Ricordi. Retrieved 2 December 2019.
  3. ↑ Clements, Andrew; Maddocks, Fiona; Lewis, John; Molleson, Kate; Service, Tom; Jeal, Erica; Ashley, Tim (12 September 2019). "The best classical music works of the 21st century". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 12 June 2020.
  4. ↑ Amling, Ulrich (17 January 2019). "Berliner Komponistin erhält Ernst-von-Siemens-Musikpreis". Der Tagesspiegel (in German). Berlin. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  5. ↑ Brown, Mark (17 January 2019). "British composer Rebecca Saunders wins Ernst von Siemens Music prize". The Guardian . London. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  6. ↑ "Erstes Konzert Rebecca Saunders—Composer in Residence (in German)". Konzerthaus Dortmund. Archived from the original on 4 October 2006. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  7. ↑ "Capell-Compositeur 2009/10 (in German)". Staatskapelle Dresden (in German). Archived from the original on 7 March 2009. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  8. 1 2 3 "Pulling Threads of Sound: Rebecca Saunders interviewed". Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Archived from the original on 22 September 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2010.
  9. ↑ "Prom 56: Staatskapelle Dresden". BBC Proms 2009. Archived from the original on 20 April 2009. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  10. ↑ "Composer | Edition Peters UK". www.editionpeters.com. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022. Retrieved 18 November 2018.
  11. ↑ Taylor, Mark (15 October 2024). "Nominations for The Ivors Classical Awards 2024 announced". The Ivors Academy. Retrieved 15 October 2024.
  12. ↑ Brown, Anna (12 November 2024). "The Ivors Classical Awards 2024 winners announced". The Ivors Academy. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  13. ↑ "Winners announced at The Ivors Classical Awards 2024". www.classical-music.com. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  14. 1 2 3 4 Adlington, Robert (Fall 1999). "The Music of Rebecca Saunders: Into the Sensuous World". The Musical Times. 140 (1868): 48–56. doi:10.2307/1004495. JSTOR   1004495.
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