Rebecca Saunders was born in London in 1967. Following her earlytraining as a violinist she studied music, majoring in performance(violin) and composition, at Edinburgh University. A FraserScholarship from the University and a two-year DAAD (German AcademicExchange Service) scholarship enabled her, from 1991 to 1994, to studycomposition with Wolfgang Rihm at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe,Germany.

From 1994 to 1997 she held the Premier Scholarship at the EdinburghUniversity for a PhD in Composition with Nigel Osborne.

Saunders has received various prizes including the Busoni Förderpreisfrom the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Ernst von Siemens Förderpreisfür Komposition, the ARD und BMW AG musica viva prize in compositionand the Paul Hindemith-prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.In 2000 she was lecturer at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

Recently Saunders has begun to expand her spectrum of musical genre:insideout, Music for a choreographed installation with SashaWaltz (2003), is her first work for the stage, and was premiered atSteirischer Herbst in Graz. In chroma (2003) the performers areplaced in several groups, one of which uses 63 music boxes. Thelistener walks through the spaces, creating their own mix of thestarkly contrasting sound worlds. The architecture of the performancespace defines the formal juxtaposition of the various chamber musicgroups.

A West German Radio production with Musikfabrik NRW conducted byStefan Ashbury was released by Kairos in 2001.