ENSEMBLE MODERN 2024

Composers don't just write sounds, they are also always researchers - in search of the origin of sounds, of what holds them together: "The material is the sound, but there is also everything in between," says Siemens Prize winner Rebecca Saunders in an interview. Her work Skull, premiered last year by Ensemble Modern, takes the listener to the source - to the inside of the skull, the place where thoughts arise, whirl around and seem to get mixed up. After Scar and Skin, it forms the third part of a triptych of shadowy, contrasting sounds that seem to spring from deep within the orchestra, wriggling raw and unpolished out of the strings and funnels and, in the best sense, providing an insight beneath the surface of the compositional research work. In his work linea dell'orizzonte, Beat Furrer, on the other hand, casts his gaze into the distance, where details are lost due to physiological boundaries, where sky and land seem to blur and only blurred silhouettes remain: Two tonal extremes - descending glissandi and sustained high notes - hover around an invisible, inaudible centre as if carried by centrifugal forces.The shorter of two versions of Justė Janulytė's Unanime is heard: In the arrangement for eight trumpets, the instruments act "like a single body", as the composer says, "like an organ with different pipes that share the same breath, the same soul." The title of the composer's second work this evening should not be confused with Unanime: Unanimus for eight strings dates from the same year and places a programmatic focus on the number 8, a "symbol of infinity and the constant, circular flow of time and energy", as the composer writes. In both works, Janulytė plays with the fusion of sounds and their sources - can a violin be heard here or is a voice imitating the sound of a string instrument? Composition becomes a kind of colour theory.