Interview, Rebecca Saunders on 'Skin'

With textural inspirations from Joyce and Beckett, and deeply informed by collaborative sessions with the musicians she works with, a new album bringing together three works by British composer Rebecca Saunders takes us into the complex world of her musical voice, likened by BBC Music Magazine more to a sculpting of timbres than a conventionally harmonic sound. Yet, as Rebecca herself explains, at the same time there's more of the traditional in her approach than there might appear to be.

I spoke to her to find out more about the creative processes and thinking that gave rise to Skin, void and Unbreathed, and how Saunders explores what being a soloist in a piece of music might mean.

Skin arose in part from your close collaboration with soprano Juliet Fraser. Can you tell us about how that process worked?

I am very interested in exploring the physicality of sound. The embodiment of sound fascinates me and when working with a singer one gets to its very essence. Juliet and I are both deeply drawn to the expressive particularities of the voice, and we explored not just lyrical threads, but also recitation and modes of singing which explore the noise or grain of the voice.

We met a few times at my studio in Berlin. I asked her to sing Bach and Aperghis for me. And then to improvise on a tiny musical fragment I had chosen. I sought to explore the physical limits of this sound and to observe its physical production. Together we explored the full potential of the sound and how to notate it exactly.

I also asked her to recite texts in different ways and was notated exactly how she produced the sounds and formed her body to produce the words. It was exciting to see to what extent the breath and flow of air could be controlled to create taut and explosive musical textures.

The very humanity of singing is fascinating. All in all we shared an intimate creative space and I feel strongly this work is very much written for Juliet’s body, on her skin.

With a stream-of-consciousness libretto for Skin (and indeed an explicit link to Joyce’s Ulysses), and similarly hard-to-pin down sleeve notes for Void and Unbreathed, none of these pieces gives up its secrets easily. What would you say each one was about, broadly speaking – or is that a question you leave to the listener?

A new piece of music is an invitation to listen and engage. As opposed to older classical music, it invites us to embrace the new and unexpected, such as a new sonic or emotional landscape. It sets an impulse, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual. There is no message or meaning in that sense, it is not the means to an end. It is the thing itself. Music is extraordinary and unique in that it can imply and suggest in an almost magical way. It gives space to that which is so difficult to articulate with language or with a visual image. Peter Brooks said in his The Empty Space, “The musician is dealing with a fabric that is as near as man can get to an expression of the invisible”. I found this beautiful.

In the absence of “traditional” ways of structuring your music – conventional tonality, regular rhythms and so on – what techniques do you use to give it its shape and structure?

That’s interesting as I think my music draws strongly on traditional structuring principles. These principles are nowdays necessarily transformed and developed from those of a few hundred years ago - we live in a radically different diverse and complex contemporary society and music reflects this.

I would say all three works draw on tightly organised rhythmic cells in a central part of each piece, although in each one it is in a very different way.

The last part of Unbreathed is essentially a polyphonic working of melodic threads.

void fuses two very different timbral palettes of sounds and their harmonic fields, each of which grows out of the percussion instruments; here harmonic fields are tightly organised and intrinsic to the structure of the piece, and I gradually mutate from one into the other.

void runs up against a question at least as old as John Cage (or maybe even Haydn) – how do you approach conveying nothingness through music, which by definition is something?

The work does not seek to convey nothingness. 'Void' is a wonderful word - I like the dialectic: a thing that is not, an object saturated in emptiness. It is perhaps like contemplating the role of silence in music - silence frames sound, provides the framework within which sound is perceived, it precedes and follows the sonic event, it is the moment of waiting, of tension, of expectation; it is the saturated empty page, before the first sound is notated on the page. The play between silence and sound is fragile, volatile and exciting.

Are these three works conceived as separate pieces, or do they form a triptych?

They are separate pieces, but I chose this combination carefully. The emotional and sonic landscape explored in these works are very different, but related. Each work also explores different aspects of the role of the soloist.