James Saunders is a British composer and performer of experimental music. He is Professor of Music and Head of the Centre for Musical Research at Bath Spa University.
In 2001, he was a selected composer at the Ostrava New Music Days. He held composition residencies at the Experimental Studio fur Akustische Künst in Freiburg in 2003 and 2007. His music has been played at international festivals, including Bludenz Tage fur zeitgemäßer Musik, Brighton Festival, BMIC Cutting Edge, Borealis, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen Festival, Gothenburg Arts Sounds, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Inventionen Berlin, The Kitchen, Music We'd Like to Hear, Ostrava New Music Days, Rainy Days, Rational Rec, Roaring Hooves, Spitalfields_Music, SPOR, Ultima, and Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik Saunders' music has been performed internationally by ensembles and musicians including Apartment House, Arditti Quartet, asamisimasa, Sebastian Berweck, ensemble chronophonie, duo Contour, Rhodri Davies, Exaudi, Nicolas Hodges, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Neue Vocalsolisten, Plus-minus ensemble, Psappha New Music Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Suono Mobile, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and 175 East. He is active as a performer of experimental music, notably in the duo Parkinson Saunders with Tim Parkinson and as director of the ensemble Material at Bath Spa University. Saunders currently serves as a Professor of Music and as the Head of the Centre for Musical Research at Bath Spa University. He is the co-author, with John Lely, of Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation. His research interests include open forms, notation, group behaviours, instrumentalisation, series and modularity. His interviews with composers and improvisers focus on their working methods.
Music
Saunders' work explores modular and serial structures and uses open forms. Series such as # and divisions that could be autonomous but that comprise the whole adopt a variable structure, comprising a selection of modules that can be combined in multiple ways to make new configurations for each performance. His music uses extended instrumental techniques and found objects as a means of exploring the sonic properties of materials. It is “predominantly quiet, with sustained tones, often on the edge of inaudibility, interspersed with shorter sounds, all produced by an instrumentarium that mixes conventional musical instruments with a range of low-tech sound sources”. He used interpersonal cueing systems to control the way his music is structured, and made distributed pieces that allow collaborative input from others.
