The places where I feel most at peace are my music rooms in my flat in Berlin. The three rooms are essential to my working and listening and thinking processes and occasionally for just lazing. I spend a lot of time there, especially when I’m immersed in the creative process. There’s the broad and very bright corner room with the bay window. It’s only on the first floor, but with all the light you’d think it was a penthouse. I can see sky and birds and watch the light changing. In the spring the white light pours into the room, golden in the autumn. Wooden floor, upholstered chairs, green sofa – warm, and the perfect place to work with musicians. It’s where I used to meet the four singers I wrote LASH for and where we sounded out their voices.

Anna Prohaska and I worked on little flourishes, with Sarah Maria Sun it was the breathy, ultra-delicate notes, with Noa Frenkel we focused on vocal depth, the dark centre, and with Katja Kolm we looked at her voice’s deeper range. We sat in my corner room and I just listened and came up with a visualisation of vocal diversity for each singer on a large sheet of grid paper: features like vocal range, modes of articulation, special techniques, and resonances. And that’s how I composed, with the sounds of their voices in my head.

The second room, my office, is right next door: spartan, minimalist, white walls, white-painted wooden floor, and desk by the window. The acoustics are super-sensitive; every stroke of the pencil is audible and not even the silence is truly silent. Every little noise there has a specific gravity. I like the ambience of jostling nothingnesses and I start to reflect and listen and compose. It’s where tonal sequences, structural arcs and temporal relations are born. I write by hand: big sheets of paper, pencil, ruler, rubber… That’s all I need.

Saunders in her white, minimalist studio. In the background: the two-manual Korg BX-3 © Nancy Jesse

 

Standing against a wall in that room is my Korg BX-3, an ancient analogue two-manual synthesizer from the 1970s, which I bought in 1999. I love its flexibility. I can tune the two keyboards to clash with each other, even ultra-subtly by a quarter tone or less, and the result is floating sounds, tonal differentiation, auditory wrinkles. It allows me to hold chords while I use the drawbars to tinker with the audio. It’s all analogue. The Korg is a sentient being, sometimes even making small variations in the sound according to how long it’s been switched on. We have a trio of instruments taking a leading role in LASH: two Korgs and an electric guitar. To go alongside the orchestra, I wanted to create a physical, live, performative soundscape with hints of electronic music-making.

I love being surrounded by instruments in the room, even though I’m not expert at playing most of them. Apart from the Korg, there’s an electric guitar with amp, an accordion, a violin, a trombone, a giant recorder, a big mouth organ, a small set of drums in the corner, a few other oddities, some metre-long aluminium pipes. I try out sounds, adopt the stances, go through the physical motions.

And then there’s the third room, my second living room, which has my old black Blüthner piano. We had one like it when I was growing up in England. My parents were pianists. My mother played the Blüthner, my father a Bechstein – non-stop! I went to sleep to the sound of a piano and woke up to it. It never bothered me; in fact, I remember sometimes, as a child, crawling under the piano and letting the vibrations kind of ripple through me.

I don’t play so much nowadays, but when I do I always get great pleasure from it. Bach, Couperin, Frescobaldi. Slow movements. I trained as a violinist; I only play piano for my own enjoyment. The sound the piano makes is soft and warm, contrasting with the quiet of the white room and the resonating of the Korg. So each room has its own acoustic character, and together they make up the place where I can work and can think through and hear the music that I’m making.