The first weekend of the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival saw an eclectic and vibrant mix of musical events. Artistic director Graham McKenzie promised a festival that was going to be ‘undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making’, and the opening days also manifested a strong sense of artistic difference and distance as well. The presence of Georg Friedrich Haas, this year's Composer in Residence, and Rebecca Saunders seemed to fire up such underlying dynamic energies. Throughout the weekend both composers took part in public interviews and both had UK and world premieres, yet they only presented in parallel: the programming kept them apart. In turn, the weekend amplified various levels of similarity and divergence between the two composers, exposing some fascinating creative tensions.

In interview, Haas and Saunders provided glimpses into the different models they had adopted to connect and engage with this year's Huddersfield audience. Robert Worby, in conversation with Haas, proposed

Haas's response was one of immediate deliberation, the silence broken when the composer said,

Saunders, on the other hand, when asked by Sara Mohr-Pietsch whether it is important to her for the audience to be aware of principal structures within her music, responded decisively: ‘I should not be expecting someone in the audience to do that work. I think the piece, the sounds themselves, will make that evident as necessary’. The composers' words rang true throughout the Huddersfield performances of their works. The composer–audience relationship in Haas's music seemed somewhat loose and, at times, (perhaps purposefully?) confused or misplaced, whereas Saunders's music always seemed grounded.

The Huddersfield performances of Haas's music in the first weekend included the UK premiere of I can't breathe (2015) for solo trumpet performed by Marco Blaauw, the world premiere of String Quartet No. 10 (2016) performed by the Arditti Quartet, aus freier lust … verbunden … (1994–96) for solo trombone performed by Angelos Kritikos, and the UK premiere of Octet (2015) for eight trombones performed by Trombone Unit Hannover. Described by Blaauw as a piece that ‘screams for attention with the most vulnerable of soft sounds, has meaning where words have lost theirs and wants to make audible the suffocation that we witness again and again in the time of frequent outbreaks of racial violence’, I can't breathe was particularly poignant alongside String Quartet No. 10, in which the audience was once again cast by Haas into the proximity of ‘beautiful’ darkness, to experience the ‘feeling of being reduced to yourself … just listening’. The UK premiere of Hyena (2016) for ensemble and narrator, performed by Klangforum Wien and Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, on the other hand, seemed to provoke a more unsettled reception. It was difficult at times to hear the music over the narration, the subject material being Williams-Haas's battle with alcoholism. But it was perhaps even more difficult to understand why such a ‘monstrous’ experience was being expressed through a constant, literal, narration accompanied by music. Was a contemporary music festival the most suitable public platform for Hyena? Words, music and audience seemed disconnected, the piece teetering on the edge of being overtly commercial.

In contrast, the performances of Saunders's music during the weekend included the world Premiere of Bite (2016) for solo bass flute performed by Helen Bledsoe, and the UK Premiere of Skin (2015–16) for solo soprano and 13 instruments performed by Juliet Fraser and Klangforum Wien, compositions which prised the notion of ‘narrative’ wide open. In Bite, the structural outline was almost subliminally visible: exactly what Saunders had described when stating that sound will reveal structure when necessary. Intricately crafted, the trajectories posed by Bledsoe would become more and more desperate to ‘speak’, yet never lose their articulation. Similarly, Skin, incorporating text by Saunders as well as a passage from James Joyce's Ulysses, demonstrated the composer's fascination with ‘speaking on a finishing out-breath, or finished in-breath’ and exploring ‘what that actually does to the drama of the text, what kind of narrative comes across’. Fraser's performance was captivating; as Saunders said, ‘you really feel with her this kind of almost existential moment that she is desperate to breathe but must finish the text. … There is something in there that everybody responds to but can't quite distinguish’. And yet, in prising open the notion of ‘narrative’ – so that the soloist's mouth itself seemed to represent the strenuous unfolding of each word – performative disconnection was never an issue. Saunders was able to ‘imply without saying …’, and, in turn, present the audience with a situation that was precise and persuasive, yet also open to interpretation.