Saunders - Stirrings Still

What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds," says Rebecca Saunders. "From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour." Samuel Beckett's works have become very important for the composer. Therein lies, perhaps, a certain parallel to Rebecca Saunders's more recent music: in the increasing sparseness of a language that gradually shuts out the inessential and ornamental. "Stirrings Still" 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. "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," Beckett writes at the end of his "Stirrings Still". "Oh all to end.