Rebecca Saunders - a visible trace - for 11 soloists and conductor (2006)

"Composed in 2006, a visible trace – a 19-minute work enigmatically described as being “for 11 soloists and conductor” – predates both traces and murmurs, and is the first explicit use of a term like this in the titles of her compositions. In this respect, a visible trace is something of a turning point in Saunders’ output as a whole. Prior to this, the emphasis in her titles was on colour, with almost every piece composed between 1994 (the under-side of green) and 2005 (rubricare) bearing a name that implicitly or explicitly evokes either a colour or the act of colouration. With a visible trace, Saunders’ music becomes monochrome, occupying a remarkably vibrant palette of shadow and light, often at the extremes of both. One can hear various similarities in this piece to both traces and murmurs. At the start, the players are clustered around the pitch B, though whereas in traces this clustering was single-minded, like a laser beam, in a visible trace there’s a more roaming focus of attention; it still feels like a point of stability in the work’s opening minutes, but it’s mobile. However, its role within the piece is fascinating because, in no time at all, the players start to lose sight of this stability. Violent accents ensue (the word ‘violent’ feels inadequate for how forceful these accents are), enormous thrusting blows answered or simply followed by trills or, on one occasion, an apparent blast of expelled air. It’s interesting to hear this in light of one of the quotations with which Saunders precedes the score, from Italo Calvino: “The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.” There’s a strong sense in which the piece moves from the ‘frail’ idea of definition-of-a-thing at the start to the more nebulous, fearful, thing-being-defined afterward, a process that triggers enormous turbulence and terror. Those accents become so ferocious they’re like nails being driven into our flesh, and the music loses its grip on both rhythmic and pitched cohesion, becoming pulseless – the players drifting and coalescing as if by an attractive force into enormous moments of crisis, upon which they’re blown apart again – and pitchless, the notes either so high or dull as to be beyond recognition as anything other than some kind of oblique impact. Despite the bleakness of this trajectory, there are achingly poignant moments of beauty, particularly as the work reaches its conclusion: a weird multiphonic chord that becomes reduced to slender strands of pitch in an ominous space, followed a couple of minutes later with something akin to random organ pipes sounding, their notes sliding around forming strange agglomerations coloured with soft guitar harmonics. It’s like an extended, plangent epilogue, an essay in quiet whimpering where the music – and indeed the performers – seem entirely disoriented. The closing moments, during which there’s a similar clustering around certain pitches similar to the start, seems less a recapitulation than a hallucination." (Simon Cummings - http://5against4.com) Follow the score here: https://www.rebeccasaunders.net/a-vis...