As a collector, Rebecca Saunders is fastidious rather than impulsive. In photographs, her studio is sparsely but tellingly furnished: desk, pencils, Korg organ, snare drum, Stratocaster guitar, pinned manuscript paper, a view of trees. Over twenty-five years as one of Europe’s leading composers, a similarly small but overlapping collection of obsessions has settled on her work: the writings of Samuel Beckett and Italo Calvino; bodies and spaces; Molly Bloom’s chapter from the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. To these she returns time and again, disturbing them, recontextualising them; concentrating on one alone or placing two or more in correspondence. Sometimes their presence is evident in the form of titles. At other times they have simply sat, whispering, alongside her while she works. Skin, her masterful work of 2015–16 (and an hcmf// co-commission) for ensemble and the voice of Juliet Fraser incorporates words from Bloom’s breathless monologue, but it was equally catalysed by words from Beckett’s Ghost Trio – that ‘dust is the skin of a room’.
When she blows the dust off her collection, Saunders reveals a deeper set of recurring preoccupations to her work: traces, permeation, spaces, sex, disfiguration, death. Skin, for example, is the first of a triptych of ensemble pieces Saunders has written on the theme of bodily surfaces and cavities. The second, Scar (2018–19), plays upon two meanings of the word of its title: as the mark left on the skin by a healed wound, and as a steep rocky promontory, stretching into the sky. The third and final panel, Skull, will be given its UK premiere by the Oslo Sinfonietta during the opening weekend of this year’s hcmf//. Written for 14 instruments, Skull draws on an image by Haruki Murakami of a skull enveloped by and containing a profound silence, ‘held like smoke within’. One imagines Beckett’s dust-filled room, before the motes have settled.
The secondary preoccupations of Saunders’ music become tangible not through concrete references and quotation but through its sonic and gestural language, which is profoundly involved with matters of touch and distance. For her, instruments act like bodies, made of surfaces (the points where her players touch them) and cavities (which contain and project the sounds that occur). She is fond of Calvino’s line from Six Memos for the Next Millennium – ‘The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss’ – and her music consequently contains both abyssal spaces and frail bridges. Those chasms may be articulated physically (many of her works employ ensembles distributed throughout a space) or sonically. She makes powerful use of silence as negative space, not only between sounds one after another, but also between sounds that are heard simultaneously but separate from one another: as though the music contains silent cavities even as other sounds are present. Or: as though silence stretches like Calvino’s frail bridge between two sonic walls.
With Scar, a new addition came into Saunders’ private collection of inspirations: A Primer for Cadavers by the artist Ed Atkins, and in particular the script to his 2012 film installation Us Dead Talk Love. This text resurfaces in Saunders’ second UK premiere at Huddersfield this year. Another hcmf// co-commission, Us Dead Talk Love (2021), for alto, saxophone, Korg, electric guitar and percussion, draws on Atkins’ eponymous text, as well as his ‘Air for Concrete’, a heady meditation on the sensation of words in the mouth. The mouth, as Saunders notes in the programme text to a different work, ‘is the threshold between two worlds, the interior and exterior’. It is, therefore, a special type of skin: permeable, penetrable; both bridge and abyss. The dust settles once more, over something new.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 46th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2023, takes place Friday 17 – Sunday 26 November 2023. Tickets for all concerts including Oslo Sinfonietta (featuring Skull) and Ensemble Nikel + Noa Frenkel (featuring Us Dead Talk Love) are on sale now.