Rebecca Saunders Scar (Triptych II), 2018-19* for oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, accordion, 2 pianos, electric guitar, 2 percussion, violin, viola, cello, and double bass * US Premiere Commissioned by Festival Acht Brücken | Musik für Köln with financial support from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
Rebecca Saunders Skull (Triptych III), 2022-23* for bass clarinet, tenor sax, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, 2 percussion, Korg BX3, electric guitar, violin, viola, cello, and double bass * US Premiere
Talea Ensemble
James Baker, conductor
Michelle Farah, oboe
Rane Moore, clarinet
Erin Rogers, tenor sax
Adrian Morejon, bassoon
Karl Kramer-Johansen, horn
Sam Jones, trumpet
Mike Lormand, trombone
Ivan Filipchyk, accordion
Reed Puleo, percussion
Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Steve Beck, piano
Peggy Kampmeier, piano
Oren Fader, electric guitar
Karen Kim, violin
Martine Thomas, viola
Chris Gross, cello
Greg Chudzik, bass
Victoria Cheah, Production Manager
David Adamcyk, Director of Production
scar/ n.: the fibrous connective tissue remaining on the skin or within body tissue, where a wound, burn, or sore has healed; a steep high cliff or rocky eminence.
scar/ v. trans.: mark with a scar or scars; to do lasting injury to; v. intrans.: to form a scar; become scarred.
scar: stigma, cicatrix, lesion, naevus, trauma, pock and pit—marred, a mark of difference.
Memory, history, ingrained on the skin: tracing a possible wound. The implication of violence, disfigured and defaced. The imperfect surface, frayed edges, cracks in the veneer.
Silence is the canvas on which the weight of sound leaves its mark. In Scar, sound rips open the surface of silence or peels back the skin, zooms in, and falls into the netherworld. Seeking the obscured, that which lies within.
A quotation from Ed Atkins “Us Dead Talk Love:”
This corporal revenge. A genuine, concerted and systematic undoing of grace. Every promise discovered too late to be a fucking lie told badly. The promise of intimacy and the promise of beauty ripped away to reveal a gawping, hyperreal brute. Perfection only withheld by that small matter of the encroaching white of dawn under the door and the imminent waking. When all of this might be nonchalantly buried studded into the underwear draw of language and a sprint of animist velocity. . . .
Rebecca Saunders Skull (Triptych III) (2022–23)
Skull was composed in 2023 for large ensemble. It forms the final part of a triptych together with the works Skin (2016) and Scar (2019). The three compositions can be performed separately or together.
In Skull the instrumentation differs greatly from the other works. The central timbral focus lies with the lower range of the wind and brass instruments, and the piano and e-guitar are replaced with an analogue electric Korg BX3 draw-bar organ, chosen for its flexibility and striking sound. Skull is the longest work at thirty-eight minutes and with it I sought a cohesive formal unity for the triptych. Simultaneously, and in stark contrast to Skin and Scar, Skull pursues a complex web of lyrical polyphony stretching from the very first sound to the final fermata.
Skull partially draws on Skin and Scar, setting up passing points of reference and reflecting on timbral fragments, individual gestures, and sounds inherent to the earlier works. These fragments are both diffused and condensed, transformed and mutated, and seek to delve from the outermost surface of the acoustic body to the edge of the innermost, of consciousness, as it were, to the skeletal essence within.
This quotation from Haruki Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World elucidates the central image:
The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void.
