Salvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, Italy; 1947) wrote his first composition at the age of twelve, and by age fifteen had premiered his first concert. Despite some brief studies with Antonio Titone and Turi Belfiore, and his time in Rome attending Franco Evangelisti’s electronic music course at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Sciarrino is very much a selftaught artist.
From 1974 to 1996, he combined his teaching work at the conservatories of Milan, Florence and Perugia with numerous master classes and international courses. In 1982, he decided to concentrate on his art and settled in Città di Castello, in the Umbria region, where he spends most of his time composing. He has nevertheless continued to teach sporadically, including specialization courses in Città di Castello attended by rising composers like Francesco Filidei, Lucia Roncheti, Fabrizio de Rossi Rei and Maurizio Pisati.
His prolific output has resulted in more than 180 compositions that can be heard on some 70 discs. His exceptionally broad and varied catalogue ranges from works for solo instrument though to symphonies and theater music. He has a particular fondness for reconstructing the music of the past – Gesualdo, Domenico Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn or Ravel – and for employing musical quotations in a way that places him within yet side on to musical tradition. He has composed for the London Symphony Orchestra, the Frankfurt Opera Theater, the Fenice in Venice and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and his works have been played at leading contemporary music festivals: Salzburg, New York, Vienna, Berliner Festspiele Musik, Festival d’Automne (Paris) and Ultima (Oslo), to name but a few.
Director of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna between 1978 and 1980, he is a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome), the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.
Speech
Contemporary Music, 4th edition
Composer Salvatore Sciarrino is enjoying an exceptional creative career, with a body of work that is unanimously acknowledged to represent one of the great contributions to the music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. At age 65, Maestro Sciarrino has been fifty years in the profession, counting from the first public performance of his music in 1962, during the New Music Week of his native city. However, the man himself dates the beginning of his catalogue to 1966, considering his previous output to be merely the work of an apprentice music-maker. Because, as a composer, Sciarrino is defiantly self-taught.
Even when advancing his intellectual education and basic music training in Palermo, the teenage Salvatore Sciarrino felt himself a composer and set out to acquire the craft through hard practice. He had no shortage of ideas, and in committing them to the staff marshaled the techniques and resources which, over the years, would become a hallmark of what is now admired as one of the most personal and refined compositional talents. He felt no need to attend the European forums – Italian and foreign – so popular then and now with those eager to join the circuit of contemporary musical creation in order to receive guidance, learn the codes, compare techniques and procedures and, in passing, “flesh out their CV” or perhaps even earn themselves a name under the wing of some revered mentor.
In 1969, on completing his studies in Palermo, Sciarrino sought out the wider opportunities of Rome, where he attended Franco Evangelisti’s courses on electroacoustic music. It was not long before the young musician was in demand as a teacher. From 1974 to 1983, he taught at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Milan, coinciding with his two seasons (1978-80) at the helm of the Teatro Comunale de Bolonia. He next took up teaching posts in Perugia (1983-1987) and Florence, where he stayed for nine academic years until 1996. At this point he turned his back on full-time education, though he has continued to impart specialist courses and master classes at musical encounters far and wide. In 1983, he fixed his residence in Città di Castello (Umbria).
Salvatore Sciarrino is a member of the fine arts academies of Rome, Munich and Berlin. The international jury chaired by Professor Jürg Stenzl was unanimous in granting him the 2011 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Contemporary Music category, singling out among his numerous merits the development of “a new and unique syntax.” “At the heart of his creations,” the jury goes on, “is his way of combining extreme reduction with a richness of detail,” a quality that has enabled him to “renew the possibilities of vocal and instrumental music.”
Maestro Sciarrino’s aesthetic world can be described as radically personal, new and different. While partaking of the most vivid present, it also draws sustenance from a knowledge and vision of other cultures – western and non-western – from the most remote past or of recent tradition. This indeed is a constant in his scores, which are as rich in references to Heraclitus, Confucius or the myths of Ancient Egypt as they are in skillful reelaborations of pages from Gesualdo, Bach, the Scarlattis, Mozart, Boccherini, Mendelssohn, Ravel and, even, the Beatles.
Literature too has an essential place in Sciarrino’s thought. Not only does he use it as a stimulus, the composer states, but he believes literary and musical languages have a great deal in common. Hence the frequent presence of the word – spoken, recited, sung – in Sciarrino’s music; at times with texts of his own writing, including opera librettos, but invariably treated in the score with unaccustomed delicacy and depth. His vocal music bends to the poetry it serves, although, in a fuller sense, much of his instrumental music is also poetry, sound poetry, thanks in no small measure to his exquisite sense of timbre.
Sciarrino explores the raw material of sound with attention to each and every one of its elements and works it in permanent dialogue and interaction with movement and with silence. Silence. A fundamental concept in order to apprehend the musical fact as Sciarrino conceives it. His works often wander close to the frontier between the audible and inaudible. His music abounds not only in pianissimos, but also in whispers, murmurs, faint hints of sounds, silences and empty gestures that confront us with the sound void, creating an atmosphere at once intimate and tense, evanescent and powerful; magical in sum.
Such a new and personal sound language requires a new and personal musical syntax that gives coherence to the artistic whole, and certainly the final product is a music that demands a new and different way of hearing. The subject will soon discover that a conventional listening by reference to pitch, timbre, intervals, melody lines, harmonies, rhythms, etc. is not enough (or not appropriate) for Sciarrino’s musical discourse.
We must also awake to the reality around the sound – a reality the listener is in fact immersed in – and of course to the sound itself, which the composer has explored in all its intimate complexity in order to deploy its full sensorial and expressive power. Salvatore Sciarrino advances along the frontiers of knowledge and has the talent to tell us what he finds there.
