Rebecca Saunders
2026
Berlin-based British composer Rebecca Saunders is one of the most significant composers of our time. Her practice extends beyond acoustic phenomena to the physical movements of performers and the gestures that produce sound.
Rebecca Saunders’ (b. 1967 in London) work explores the sculptural, spatial and physical properties of organised sound, creating intensely focused and distinctive musical worlds.
Her output encompasses orchestral and ensemble works, concertos, chamber music, opera, music for dance and theatre, as well as spatial and concert-installation works, and is performed internationally by leading ensembles, orchestras and soloists.
Born into a family of professional musicians, Saunders grew up surrounded by pianos and singers and began composing as a child. She studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh, where she completed a PhD in composition in 1997 under the supervision of Nigel Osborne. She also studied in Karlsruhe working closely with Wolfgang Rihm.
Saunders’ practice extends beyond acoustic phenomena to the physical movements of performers and the gestures that produce sound. She explores this through close collaboration with musicians and a deep engagement with each instrument to research and to understand its essence. Saunders also seeks close dialogue with artists from various other fields, including contemporary dance, visual art and architecture.
Saunders has received numerous international awards and honours, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2024. In 2019, she became the 45th laureate of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. She has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh and Huddersfield and is a member of the Academies of Arts in Berlin, Dresden and Munich.
Portrait film
Selected works
Lash – Acts of Love (2025)
Saunders’ widely celebrated first opera, premiered at Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2025, was created in collaboration with visual artist and writer Ed Atkins, who wrote the original text and created the libretto with Saunders.
Myriad (2017) / Myriad I–III (2015–2023)
Created with architecture and landscape office Topotek 1, the original installation comprised 2,646 music boxes arranged in a single 20-metre plexiglass wall and was later developed into the concert-installation Myriad I–III.
Yes (2017)
Saunders’ passionate interest in literature has resulted in works inspired by writers including Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Yes draws on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Music for Moving Picture 946-3 (2021)
A collaboration with visual artist Gerhard Richter, the film maker Corinne Belz and the trumpeter Marco Blaauw
chroma I–XXIV (2003–2026), Stasis / Stasis Kollektiv (2011/2016) and Insideout (2003)
These works demonstrate Saunders’ longstanding exploration of sound, space and performance. Insideout, created with choreographer Sasha Waltz and the Schaubühne Berlin, was her first work for the stage.
Still (2011), Alba (2015) and Wound (2022)
Saunders’ interest in the concerto form can be heard across works for violin, trumpet, ensemble and orchestra.
From the award citation
“Saunders’ music could be described as a sculptural movement: sound sculptures rich in detail rise from silence like physical forms.
Her music is fragile, yet at the same time intense and relentless.
Such a sound – already marked by an inherent contradiction – is at the heart of Saunders’ musical expression, from which she constructs her entire sonic world.
Her passionate interest in the timbral properties of sound makes Saunders a continuation of the modernist tradition. Throughout her impressive career, she has consciously developed her sound world in an increasingly distinctive and uncompromising direction. The result is a series of unique musical worlds that explore the direction and depth of sound with extraordinary precision, repeatedly exposing the listener to transformations of sonic surfaces as the music moves between immense power and silence.”
