Saunders, Rebecca: Traces

for Chamber Orchestra

The title points to an organic flow of composing, I was really on the track of something and it was a very organic process of composition. About twelve years ago I found a wonderful quote from Italo Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Exactitude. This sentence had me absolutely fascinated but I did not even know who had said it. I simply wrote it down from memory and hung on the wall. This phrase accompanied me during the compositional process: "The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing." (Rebecca Saunders)