As a listener:in of a contemporary concert piece, hints from the corresponding composer as to how she expects the listeners of her music to feel are very helpful:

"I want the listener to encounter the music with the greatest possible curiosity. And the music should then keep this curiosity alive and bring the listener as close as possible to the music, so that one really stays in the sound. Maybe that's why I so often compose these alternating baths between extremely strong expression and these pianissimo moments in which the ears can suddenly focus and follow the music with renewed attention. Working on the interlocking of these different energy fields, the juxtaposition of these states, is very exciting for me. Music is a physical phenomenon. And listening is just as much a physical experience as making music." (Rebecca Saunders, in: Music Concepts 188/189 p. 49-50)

Rebecca Saunders wrote special programme notes for her violin concerto "Still", which can now also be found on her homepage:

"Still, as if in the unchanging, in the ongoing, with an exhausting persistence, always, essentially, the same.

Fragments, each time slightly varied, gradually create a single image. Prints that repeat themselves and are projected into time and space. Like a huge mobile that is viewed from many perspectives and remains untouched in itself. And the light changes, the focus and the position from which it is perceived changes, as does the proximity and distance to the object - a manifest complex protraction of the one single thing.

Still, as in Stasis, explores two strongly opposing states that are in a fragile state of equilibrium.

Still refers to the framing of sound with silence, of imagined "stillness" - silence being an endless potential waiting to be revealed and made audible. The act of composing is to reveal, to make visible. The gentle tugging on the fragile thread of sound, the pulling out of the depths of imagined silence; or alternatively, the breaking out of sound from the stasis of relative silence.

Still is also the title of a short story by Beckett that ends as follows:
"As if even in the dark eyes closed not enough and perhaps even more than ever necessary against that no such thing the further shelter of the hand....
Leave it so all quite still or try listening to the sounds all quite still head in hand listening for a sound."
Samuel Beckett, Still, Calder Publications 1974.

Beckett's Still sketches a single situation: turning his head towards the setting sun, the unknown protagonist watches as night falls, as the darkness increases; then slowly and carefully he puts his head in his hands and waits, as the darkness unfolds, for a sound. As if in an eternity, a timeless melancholy, terse and brutally honest, yet imbued with a humanity, a gentleness. A stasis; the human body waits, trembles."

(Rebecca Saunders)

Finally, what the dedicatee and soloist of the premiere said in a radio interview about this concerto, which makes use of all the sound possibilities of a violin, also helps to immerse (listen) to this concerto:

"The title of this concerto has a somewhat special history. Now the concerto is called "Still", until a few weeks before the premiere it was called "Rage" (rage, anger), which is pretty much the opposite of "Still". The first part of the concert is what Rebecca Saunders calls "The Rage", where the violin keeps coming out of nowhere, rising in crescendos to fortissimo. So it goes on very wild and crazy through the whole first part, followed by a big tutti where all the instruments are involved, where I can retune the violin, because at the beginning of the concert I had to tune a string a quarter tone lower. The second part is completely the opposite of what you heard before, it's complete silence, stillness, and it ends and fades away into nothingness.
What possibly interested Rebecca about my violin playing is that I was ready and willing to move away from the typical violin sound. In the second part we approach it again, closer to it, to half notes, to the usual high stereo quality sound, but in the first part much is "sull' ponticello", creating a variety of overtones. Often the violin no longer sounds as we are used to hearing it.
Isn't that also interesting in instrumentation, that the instruments can be combined in such a way that they no longer sound the same. Then it can be exciting.
I also love my instrument, the violin, because it has so many possibilities that you can exploit. If you want to try to really create a sound specific to a particular flavour, then the possibilities are endless." (Carolin Widmann, from a radio interview with Carolin Widmann before the live broadcast of the concert at the Barbican Centre in London).

To be heard here

Listening guide: