Rebecca Saunders: 'Stirrings Still'

Rebecca Saunders: ‘Stirrings Still’
blaauw for solo double-bell trumpet (2004)
Blue and Gray for two double basses (2005)
Duo for violin & piano (1999)
vermilion for clarinet, electric guitar & cello (2003)
Stirrings Still for flute, oboe, clarinet, piano & crotales (2006)
musikFabrik
WERGO (WER6694 2)


Music composed for acoustic instruments that centres on the exploration of timbre is relatively rare. The western system for writing down music privileges melody and rhythm, and in much classical music the composer gives little indication of any interest in the possibilities of different timbres beyond the occasional use of mutes or pizzicato. Even for a composer as radical as Webern variation of timbre was limited to choice of instrument, and all the instruments were sounded in the conventional way. But in the second half of the twentieth century some composers and instrumentalists began to develop ‘extended techniques’ whereby instruments were played in unconventional ways, opening up a whole range of sounds different from those for which the instrument was originally designed. Cage’s prepared piano is a famous example, or bowing ‘col legno’, i.e. with the wood rather than the hairs of the bow. It soon became apparent than any musical instrument was capable of playing a given note in several different ways, producing many different qualities of sound. Some of these sounds were difficult to control, or were pitch-variable, but nonetheless awareness of the variety of sounds that were available from acoustic instruments expanded hugely and they seemed to rival the infinity of possible sounds that were being developed over the same period by composers drawn to electronic music.

Giacinto Scelsi, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and Julio Estrada are examples of composers who have developed music for acoustic instruments in which timbre is at least as important as pitch/melody or rhythm. The practical difficulties of notating such music in the western system are daunting. The score of Lachenamnn’s first string quartet (Gran Torso), in which not a single note is played conventionally, is a bewildering maze of notes and special instructions as to exactly how each note should be played. The laboriousness of this process, together with the difficulty in really controlling the outcome, has driven other composers interested in developing new timbres towards the use of electronics (Nono, Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), or towards an increasing engagement with improvisation where the musicians can respond to and work with the inherently unstable nature of many of these unorthodox / extended sounds (David Tudor, Richard Barrett, Hugh Davies).

But there is undoubtedly still a space for composed acoustic music that radically explores new timbres, and the music of Berlin-based composer Rebecca Saunders is one of the strongest examples of this. She has spoken of wanting to continue the “emancipation of timbre” from the confines of the western classical tradition that was begun by the avant garde of the twentieth century. She has been quietly building a reputation for herself as one of the leading voices in contemporary music, but until recently there has only been one CD of her music available: Quartet, which the German label Kairos released in 2001. However this month sees the appearance of two new portrait discs – Stirrings Still on Wergo and Crimson on Kairos – and a third disc (Chroma on Aeon) is due out next month. I have so far only heard Stirrings Still, but it is a stunningly good CD.

Saunders’ compositions start from the exploration of particular sounds: “Each piece is based on specific sounds, whose physical presence provide the core from which a composition can develop… Where possible I work closely with musicians to keep close to the physical reality of the instruments’ core sounds.” The process is slow and in some ways resembles that of a visual artist more than a composer: “Each work requires a thorough investigation of the palettes of sound available in each specific instrumentation and how they can be fused together and worked against each other, i.e. I find myself starting very much at ‘the beginning’ each time, scraping together tiny moments of colour and gesture before the actual composing process can take place.” Once she has identified a number of sounds that she wants to use, Saunders writes them up and literally sticks them to the walls of the studio where she works to think about how they might be combined or assembled into a composition: “I place this completed material on the walls of my studio. The graphic sketches immediately become a single picture that I can view as a whole. These then are my textures and sound surfaces, which I gradually juxtapose. Here begins the ‘composing’.”

Stirrings Still focuses on Saunders’ recent chamber music, an area in which she feels particularly at home given her careful attention to the acoustic possibilities of individual instruments: “Writing chamber music comes far more naturally to me, probably because I need to work closely with these individual sounds, and to engage with the physicality of the instrument.” Her first disc (Quartet on Kairos, which I enjoyed enormously) was striking both for the boldness of the timbres it used and for its abrasive Lachenmann-like energy. Stirrings Still at first glance has a more classical sound and a more contemplative feel. An underlying lyricism, that certainly existed on the earlier CD but was very severely suppressed, here hangs closer to the surface, particularly in the string parts on Duo and Blue and Gray (perhaps it is significant that Saunders herself initially trained as a classical violinist). However on closer listening it is no less radical than Quartet, and in some ways it is even stronger.

The first piece blaauw is a solo for double-bell trumpet, composed with and for Marco Blaauw, the trumpeter with musikFabrik. Doubtless the title is also intended to suggest the homonym ‘blau’ – ‘blue’ in German - as many of Saunders’ titles refer to various hues of blue and red (I can’t claim to understand these references to colour beyond knowing that it isn’t a simple synaesthesia). Though I’m sure that it’s not at all easy to play, blaauw completely eschews any showy virtuosity. The focus is on the individual sounds, often complex and ‘extended’ both in the sense of being timbrally unorthodox and also held until they fade away into silence. This gives the piece a melancholic edge, which is reinforced by further prolonging some of the notes through the use of an open piano whose sustain pedal is pressed to allow the strings to vibrate sympathetically (as well as providing a further transformation of the sound texture). The double-bell trumpet has an extra valve so that the sound can switch between the two bells (or indeed hover in both if the valve is only partially opened). If the bells are prepared or muted differently, then the basic note can be moved between two different kinds of articulation. So in parts of the piece a subtle polyphony emerges as the sound is shifted (and transformed) from bell to bell. Saunders has obviously collaborated at length and to good effect with Marco Blaauw, but I’d be fascinated to know if she is also aware of the work of improvising trumpet players such as fellow-Berliner Axel Dörner or Franz Hautzinger. Much of their playing is more breathy than blaauw, but there are lovely touches of extreme Dörner-ish breathing here too. In sum a gorgeous forlorn piece that quietly covers an extraordinary range of different timbres.

Blue and Gray for two double basses takes its title from a Rothko painting, and plunges us at once into a deep, dark soundworld where the bass’s lowest string predominates. There are moments of relief when one or other instrument offers high almost lyrical tones from the upper strings, but this fragile lyricism is always under threat of being extinguished by the darker tones. It is a powerful, raw and elemental sound, perhaps with less variation than most of the other pieces on the disc, but nonetheless compelling. Apparently the foreword to the score quotes Kandinsky as saying “gray is resonance, and inconsolable motionlessness” and Derek Jarman’s “blue is darkness made visible”. In turn Blue and Gray could be described as ‘darkness made audible’, a rough and thrilling journey through the shadowlands.

Duo for violin and piano is at first sight something apart. It is an older composition, dating from 1999, and in some ways leads back to the pieces on the Quartet disc (which were composed between 1996 and 1998). Where Blue and Gray flowed onwards (albeit dangerously), Duo proceeds in fits and starts, with numerous abrupt changes of direction. The opening violin sounds have a conventional lyricism, but this is immediately disrupted by a loud knock on the body of the piano. For a while the violin keeps trying to bring the music back to a classical notion of beauty, but the piano – though seemingly supportive for snatches – has another agenda. Michael Struck-Schloen’s sleevenotes compare Saunders’ compositions to dramatic presentations, and this is certainly the case with Duo. But it is a macabre drama of the absurd, with the two characters / instruments tussling with one another, sometimes co-operating but then falling out and ignoring each other, or winding each other up. It is a world over which the characters have little control, subject to sudden bursts of violence and unpredictable twists and swings of mood. About four minutes into the piece the piano starts playing a pretty but mechanised motif, sounding like a fragment of melody from a music box. This is a familiar terrain for Saunders who has used music boxes in previous works, and whose earlier pieces often featured fragments of material as though from another world. Saunders has spoken of these as “dreamlike and very absent….Suddenly an entirely different, foreign reality comes to the fore. Our perception of such different realities is generally very limited – music, however, can bring them to light.” The effect is powerful, if also rather chilling. So the piece zigzags on in absorbing and unpredictable ways until after a particularly animated exchange the lid of the piano is slammed shut. What follows for the final two minutes is a beautiful Feldmanesque sequence with the violin weaving around some pretty, repetitive patterns of the piano. This is a piece that demands the listener’s full attention, but it is a stunning listen.

vermilion for clarinet, electric guitar and cello is the longest piece on the disc, and in some ways the most substantial. Its 15 minutes are a constantly shifting play of forces between sound and silence. But the silence that Saunders addresses is a very particular one. It is certainly not the deep soothing silence of the ultra-minimalists (Radu Malfatti, Antoine Beuger, Taku Sugimoto etc.) nor is it Cage’s conceptual point-zero; it is a busy, formative silence, shot through with tensions and shadows. Saunders has written “What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies and sounds. From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour. I have explored this phenomenon of silence often, but never so precisely as in vermilion. How does silence sound, what are its inner qualities, what are its weight and body, how does it relate to past and future sounds, how does it frame musical gestures, what function does it have between stasis and passion? These questions were foremost in my mind.” Thus although the piece shifts constantly between sound and silence, it would be useless as a new age aid to meditation. The music is stressed, and the sounds when they come are often jarring, unnerving and explosive. So the silence they fall back to is edgy, dangerous and anxious. The electric guitar especially produces a series of unworldly and quite harrowing sounds, and the clarinet and cello, even when they do occasionally strive for some kind of conventional beauty, are always riddled with and undermined by a nervous tension. Listening to vermilion is both riveting and exhausting. Like all of the pieces on the disc it has little evident logical or narrative structure; indeed it has little linear development at all. It is a music that is constantly in the present moment, and is always struggling – and only just managing - to keep its balance. Yet at the end it somehow makes perfect sense. Magical.

The title of the final eponymous work Stirrings Still is taken from Beckett’s last prose text, and the feel of the piece is imbued with a sense of impending closure that is beautifully expressed in the final words of Beckett’s text: “Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. Oh all to end.” According to the sleevenotes “It is a final, radical document of increasing stammering and silence. Never before has Saunders composed such fragile sounds, which, like Beckett’s reduced language, only just penetrate the silence and darkness… musical ‘developments’ in the conventional sense will be missed utterly unless one gives in entirely to the subtle nuances of the movements of sound in space.” It is a breathtakingly beautiful piece, operating in the same kind of area as Cage’s late ‘Number Pieces’, Jakob Ullmann’s recent music, or some of the quieter of today’s best improvisers (John Tilbury, Angharad Davies, Graham Halliwell). At only 11 minutes it also has brevity working for it; the music is shorn of all ornament and pared down to such a degree that the old cliché about every note being made to count really does apply. It is reminiscent of Cage’s Number Pieces also in having no overall score. Each player is given a stopwatch and is instructed to start playing after a certain length of time has elapsed and then play in an approximate tempo but without rigidity. So the clarinet opens the piece on its own, the flute and oboe follow soon after, the crotales (antique cymbals which are bowed) begin after three minutes, and finally the piano after four. The shimmering, hovering quality of the music is largely due to the timbral explorations that Saunders conducted with the musikFabrik windplayers during the process of composition. “Specific, difficult-to-play dyads and double harmonics create an unreal, immaterial aura that is reinforced by interference in the distances between the microintervals… It is a music that seems to be inside and outside at once – both mobile sound sculpture and a journey beneath the surface of the sound waves, into the interior of a sound that suddenly seems more distant yet more intense.” (Michael Struck-Schloen) Yet descriptive words will always fail us. As Rebecca Saunders herself says: “Any attempt to pin down the essence of a piece of music inevitably fails. It is the ‘unnameable’ in music I find so satisfying.”

This disc contains five pieces, each of which is exquisite in itself, but is markedly different in feel from any of the others. At one level it is hard to believe that they were all composed by the same hand, but at the same time as a disc it has a wonderful coherence. It is a brilliant exploration of the timbral possibilities of acoustic instruments, and by some way the best CD of contemporary classical music that I have heard this year.