Rébecca Saunders

British-born composer Rebecca Saunders is active mostly in Germany, where leading contemporary music ensembles such as Musikfabrik have welcomed her work. Her music focuses closely on the timbral and spatial qualities of individual instruments, but she has composed some works for larger ensembles. Saunders was born on December 19, 1967, in London. She attended the University of Edinburgh, studying violin and composition and earning a PhD in the latter in 1997. By that time, her interest in the German scene was already well-developed; she received a DAAD academic exchange scholarship from the German government for studies at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm from 1991 to 1994. Saunders won several prizes in Germany and served as composer-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Dortmund in 2005 and 2006 and at the Staatskapelle Dresden in 2009 and 2010. She also taught at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses in 2010 and 2012, and she has lived in Berlin, Germany, for some time. Saunders has also remained active in her native country; she served as composer-in-residence at the Huddersfield Music Festival in 2010, and her work traces was performed at the Proms in London in 2009. In Germany, Saunders' works have been performed by such groups as Ensemble Musikfabrik, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Ensemble Resonanz. They have also been played by many groups abroad, among them Ensemble Recherche and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Saunders won two of Germany's major prizes, the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize in 2015, and in 2019, she won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize; she was the second woman and the first female composer to win. Some of Saunders' most notable compositions were the percussion concerto void (2014), the vocal work skin (2016), which the writers of the London Guardian ranked as the 16th-greatest work of concert music since the year 2000, and the installation composition Yes (2017). By the early 2020s, more than 20 of Saunders' compositions had been recorded.
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