Rebecca Saunders is this year’s recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale Musica 2024. The award ceremony is taking place on September 27 during the 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music.
The jury is awarding her “for the refined sophistication of her research and her compositional intentions, for the attention she dedicates to the sonic microcosm, for her capacity to create a private listening area within the listener, an intimate inner acoustic space that evolves and amplifies the sonic imaginary. The composer conceives a specific temporality for each work which becomes an investigation into and experimentation with the experience of listening. Her elaboration of the sonic material is profoundly speculative and at the same time powerfully empirical and material, tied to the performance and the playing strategies”. The 2024 Lion awards for music
The festival also features the Italian premiere of Skull (Triptych III) for large ensemble on September 28 by Silver Lion awardee Ensemble Modern, conducted by Bas Wiegers.
Skull 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 (Triptych I) and Skin (Triptych II), 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.
For further information, please see Biennale Musica 2024
