Saunders - Fletch String Quartet Score Book

Nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2013

Fletch is a furious ongoing exploration of a specific physical gesture and fragment of sound. In itŽs purest form, this elemental sonic gesture is a flowing up-bow sul pont double-harmonic trill, often with a fast glissando, crescendo-ing rapidly out of nothing to fortissimo.This fragment of sound is arresting, immediate and present, but also inherently unstable and unpredictable. The bow reveals again and again the fast quasi-mechanical manic trilling sound, which lies hidden beneath the surface of silence.

Surface, weight and feel are part of the reality of musical performance: the weight of the bow on the string; the differentiation of touch of the left-hand finger on the string.... Feeling the weight of sound is also an integral part of the composing process. The essential materiality of sound is for me of primary importance - being aware of the grit and noise of an instrument, tracing the essence of fragments of colour within a confined and reduced palette of timbres, and exploring the physical gesture which creates a fragment of sound.