He composes as one learns to speak. The Prague Spring will bring the winner of the prestigious award

For the fifty-five-year-old author, the power and magic of music lies in the fact that it cannot be hidden in a box or hung on the wall – from a commercial point of view, it is a truly miserable commodity that slips through the fingers, is unattainable and fleeting.

“It’s that invulnerability that fascinates me,” says the London native, whose four compositions will be performed at the Dox Center for Contemporary Art on two evenings on May 31 and June 1. They should confirm her belief that music contains no concrete or immediately recognizable images. According to the composer, her task is primarily to indicate and stimulate.

Already in the early 90s of the last century, she studied in Karlsruhe, Germany with Wolfgang Rihm, soon settled in Berlin and still collaborates with the renowned Cologne Musikfabrik Ensemble. He also recorded her first profile album in 1999. At one of the concerts of the Musikfest Berlin festival this fall, she accidentally met Prague Spring dramaturg Josef Třeštík: they were able to informally confirm the previously agreed hosting in the Czech Republic.

Rebecca Saunders will be the composer-in-residence for the third year of the Prague Offspring format, which Prague Spring started right after the coronavirus pandemic. As soon as concerts without respirators and other restrictions became possible, the successful hosting of Klangfora Wien – an excellent ensemble oriented towards contemporary music – began. In cooperation with him, top composers come to the metropolis. In previous years it was the Austrians Olga Neuwirth and Georg Friedrich Haas.

Next year, Rebecca Saunders will be a resident of Prague Offspring as the first Englishwoman, even though she has long since settled in Germany. She herself says that she would like to be more involved in British music life. Her works were performed at the Huddersfield Festival and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed the composition To an Utterance. The composer was also pleased with the profile concert at the Southbank Centre, and she does not complain about the infrequent presentation of her work at home. Still, she misses the British environment.

He thinks that the British have a diametrically different idea of ​​art than Europeans from the old continent. That according to the general opinion, music says something concrete and the listener should understand it. To which Rebecca Saunders counters that it’s really about cultivating and stimulating curiosity. Music needs to be allowed to touch a person. “I think that mine can be very direct and, apparently, appropriately emotional,” says the composer.

Her approach to work has changed over the years. When she was much younger, she imagined the space where the composition would be played. “To have before my eyes a hall without an audience, an empty stage, and the performer just before the sound started, I found it quite inspiring,” he recalls.

However, various experiences with spatial polyphony changed her “inner ear”. She wrote many solo works including Fury for double bass, the reworked version of which for orchestra will be played by Klangforum Wien on Friday evening, May 31, when it will also perform the world premiere of the composition Grain, Chaff and Fire by the Czech author Slavomír Hořínka.

After a series of compositions for solo instruments, Rebecca Saunders realized that she began to listen and think very differently. “New synapses appeared in my head,” the composer describes how she felt her brain expand and hum.

Behind the extreme dynamic positions of her music, which range from distant and almost inaudible murmurs to almost painful blows and scratches, it is as if the person of the author is disappearing.

Rebecca Saunders is currently composer-in-residence at the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg. Photo: Astrid Ackermann | Video: Elbphilharmonie Hamburg

Her career is reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, where there is rarely a single action over long stretches of time, while the music rolls on incessantly in gentle tremors, gusts and heaving waves. Rebecca Saunders does not talk about her privacy, her personality radiates exclusively through the wall of sound she gradually creates around herself.

Her love for the island’s literary modernity cannot be overlooked – she admits to being inspired by the texts of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Either the monologue from the end of the novel Odysseus or the short story Neither.

Soprano Juliet Fraser, who already sang on Rebecca Saunders’ debut album, can be considered the composer’s alter ego. In Prague, the British singer will perform the solo part of the composition Nether, which develops from a seemingly random and inartificial release of sounds into an urgent message. Within half an hour, it is as if a person got rid of mental inhibitions and speech defects and learned to speak convincingly, as well as to sing.

In the current social situation, the composer considers music to be an extremely valuable thing that temporarily fixes everyone in space and time. It encourages you to focus on a specific moment, to contemplate and open cracks in the smooth surface of things. Thanks to them, you can get closer to their essence, create a new sound space or environment, release hidden monsters, give voice to everything that is happening here and now.