Rebecca Saunders: Bite (2016)

Описание: Rebecca Saunders: Bite (2016) for solo bass flute

Performer: Phoebe Bognár
31. August 2025 Salquin Saal, HSLU Luzern
Video Recording: Erwin Fonseca

The final short prose of Samuel Beckett´s Thirteen Texts For Nothing is simply entitled XIII. It is a text of great power and lucidity where intensely fragile, fleeting moments describing a mouthless murmuring, ceaseless voice are juxtaposed with violent outbursts of anger. This Beckett prose closely accompanied the composing process of this bass flute solo, and several key words, phonetics or sounds are heard again and again, like an echo or a resonance.

"...a voice murmuring a trace. A trace it wants to leave a trace, yes, like air leaves among the leaves... ...And whose shame, at every mute micromillisyllable, and unshakeable infinity of remorse delving ever deeper in it´s bite, at having to hear, having to say, fainter than the faintest murmur, so many lies, so many times the same lie lyingly denied, whose screaming silence of no´s knife in yes´s wound, it wonders...
...one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs." Samuel Beckett, XIII, Texts For Nothing, Calder Publications

Bite was written for Helen Bledsoe with my many thanks for the wonderful exploratory sound sessions together over the last 6 years. –Rebecca Saunders