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]

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]

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]

• Official website
• Rebecca Saunders interviewed at the time of the premiere of albescere, Ensemble Modern (in English)
• SoundCloud profile
• Rebecca Saunders discography at Discogs