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Anti-Rhetoric in the music of Salvatore Sciarrino

James Bunch

Submitted to: Dr. Gayle Sherwood-Magee

an an an an an e an an an an an an an an an o a aa aaaan

nnnn! an an an u an an an uu an uuuu an an ii an ii iiii!

iiiiiiii!!

-- Gerhard Rhm, from expressionen (1952/53)

[T]he aridity of the musical word today is directly dependent on our schematic thinking, which reveals itself to be insufficient to break the pre-existing silence in a way that creation must be able to do. - Salvatore Sciarrino 1

If Olivier Messiaen authored Le Technique de Mon Langage Musical (1956) so that listeners, theorists, and composers would be better able to come to a theoretical understanding of his music through awareness of its elemental workings, then perhaps the same could be said of Salvatore Sciarrinos Le Figure Della Musica da Beethoven a Oggi (1998). In its pages, Sciarrino fulfills the same purpose vicariously by projecting his own musical poetics onto the history of music as he interprets it. In doing so, he departs from the standard mode of anthropocentric historical representation concerned as it is with concrete stylistic, temporal, and even nationalistic categorization and seeks to find those elements and processes that are everywhere to be found, not only in the temporal art of music, but across the plastic arts of painting, architecture, illustration, film and the decorative arts. In effect it is a history of musical form through the arts, and a poetics of his own music through that of the past. Of the few articles about Sciarrinos music undertaken in English language publications, most are descriptive in nature, focusing on narrative aspects of the music, or imagery with which it is associated. The very few articles available are necessarily introductory for the most part, as Sciarrino remains a figure on the fringes of public awareness in the United States and Great Britain. The descriptive nature of such writings seems to be supported by Sciarrinos own tendency to talk about the role of form in his
1

From a letter to the author, 10/21/2005

music in terms of anecdotal imagery 2. In a program note written for Nicholas Hodges recording of his five piano sonatas, the composer himself remarks on his preference for poetic commentary that elucidates artistic meaning rather than technical banter that values form over content 3. However much these writings resonate with sciarrinien poetic commentary, they portray a very incomplete picture concentrating as they do on a few surface observations about extended instrumental techniques or lyrical implications of silence, aspects which are not ends in themselves, but serve larger purposes within his aesthetic. At the same time, a purely analytical exploration of Sciarrinos work seems in a way unauthorized4, or at least impotent to provide the theorist with a meaningful picture of the music. This irrelevance ultimately stems from what Sciarrino refers to as an antirhetorical poetic that pervades his music. This poetic, the Kaltenecker remarks, was formulated as a result of his rejection of the Darmstadtian aesthetic in the 1960s an aesthetic that can be identified in large part by its emphasis on structural organization through strict serial procedures5. This perhaps naive faith in the inherent value of rhetorical logic ends up being rather ironic if one accepts the historical view that the Darmstadt composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, et. al.) were frantically running

Pesson refers to this anecdotal organization as a meta-text (Pesson, 147) a term that I think rather brilliantly fits his musical poetics in ways that will eventually be made clear below. 3 (Sciarrino) 4 I am referring to his comments in Entretien referring to the quantitative analysis that the composer finds lacking (Entretien, 135) 5 (Kaltenecker, 107) (Thomas, 193)

away from the crumbing values of postwar Western civilization. For Sciarrino, the numberlust of integral serialism is seen as is the functional-tonal system as a sort of artistic plumb-line that seeks to impose a common language upon composers who would be otherwise enabled to create their own musical aesthetic6. He prefers instead a music that bears the anthropological gesture, a music that carries the mark of human intention and disposes with the contrived artifice of arduously dialectical mannerisms7. As Kaltenecker has stated elsewhere, this appeal to a kind of naturalism is for Sciarrino, as it was for his Romantic predecessors, not a reservoir of numerical proportions but an environment from which to draw effects and acoustic ambiances8.

THREE COMPOSITIONAL THREADS The anti-rhetorical sentiment operates predominantly within three threads of compositional thought: firstly as a continual quest to upend listening expectations conditioned by experience with the music of the past, secondly as a rejection of the syntactical mode of formal organization set up within the work itself, and finally as a rejection of traditional temporal thinking. While a thorough contextualization of Sciarrinos music against the backdrop of his thoughts about past musical tradition is unfortunately not possible here, it should be said that there exists a fascinating ideological tension in his simultaneous respect for, self-

6 7

Sciarrino, Letter to the Author, 10/21/2005 (Entretien, 136) 8 (Kaltenecker, 108)

identification within, and selective rejection of, the most primary aesthetic and theoretical foundations of musical organization found within that past context9. As an example of how Sciarrino works within the first thread of thought that of past formal conventions Sciarrino depicts a law of perception (to maintain attentionit is necessary always to intensify) as the sort of listening expectation that necessitates frustration. And so he contradicts this unspoken edict by creating what he refers to as rupture form through an anti-rhetorical curve10. This curve is exemplified in his solo flute work Come vengono prodotti gli incantessimi?, a work in which a series of tongue-rams, which constitute the initial structure, are gradually interrupted and replaced in an increasingly dense manner by a series of jet whistles. The structure eventually becomes overloaded with material at which point, it reaches a rupture where instead of rebounding into a dazzling prestissimo finale (as is a common formal trait of the virtuosic vehicles of the so-called common-practice era), Sciarrinos work withdraws into crippled warbles of Prufrockian timidity and insecurity. As in Como vengono prodotti gli incantessimi, the trio Il mottivo degli ogetti di vetro sets up a condition which: places the listener in a situation where the conscience of time does not exist; all the events [gestures] are arranged in space rather than in time, as elements which compose a landscape. Then there is a moment when the landscape is broken, one comprehends that it was artificial; it is lacerated down the center by this technique of montage11.
9

While every composer engages in a more or less tense dialogue with past musical tradition, for Sciarrino, this tension is especially evident. I refer the curious reader to Le Figure della musica da Beethoven a Oggi or Grazia Giaccos text La notion de figure chez Salvatore Sciarrino for a fuller treatment of the subject. 10 (Entretien, 137) 11 (ibid, 127) Authors translation.

This Copernican recognition of the artificiality of the musical surface opens the listener up to a new experience of the work as creating an alternate awareness of reality that lies on a separate plane from the one that the rupture exposes us to have been a part of. Although it is surely clear to the listener that Sciarrino is presenting his imitative gestures in a formal performative environment he remains dedicated to that theater of imitations to the very moment of rupture. Its the abrupt change in the nature of the musical narrative style that creates a kind of irony as if finally the listener has been initiated into an awareness of the works artifice. The composer was influenced in his utilization of rupture technique by the practice of jump-cut editing found in the art of filmmaking. The sequence and flow of images is abruptly interrupted and displaced, causing a violent moment of change that surprises and contradicts the expectation of fluid forward movement. Sciarrino employs a very similar rupture form in the final three pages of the Second Sonata for piano. After having reached a maximum density of statements of the bell gesture (a chord of stacked perfect-fifth/fourths), the texture is lacerated and trails off into a delicate running figure of major-sixths12. What follows is the montage-technique that Sciarrino often utilizes in conjunction with this point in the rupture form13. Snippets of the different figures that had occurred earlier in various guises are repeated here where they float about as post-apocalyptic tendrils in the aftermath of the rupture. Rupture form in his music does not refer to the idea of form as a container, like rondo form, but

12 13

See the formal diagram of this piece at the conclusion of this paper. (Entretien, 136)

instead it refers to form as the result of the movement of the material14. So form could be said to have been caused by the processes that organize the surface, rather than existing as a mold that causes the material of the music to fall into its proper place. This is the way that Sciarrino thinks about form in a general sense. When the composer speaks of rupture form, he is referring to an event that happens to the music as it moves into our perception; the result of the rupture is to put it simply a form that is ruptured. Its clear purpose is to disrupt a kind of rhetoric that sets up the artificiality to which Sciarrino refers in Il mottivo degli ogetti di vetro. From the rhetorical stripping and redefinition of form in its largest sense, it is necessary to speak of a rhetorical stripping of the structure at the local level of interrelationships between musical materials and the gestures they create, that is, the deconstruction of musical syntax. Returning to our original goal of discovering and understanding the poetics of Sciarrinos music (as readers of Messaiens book would his) one must ask what kind of analysis should be carried out to achieve this goal. Sciarrino himself responds thusly:

The analysis practiced today is too often quantitative in nature. It segments, enumerates, and catalogues, often flowing from dogmatic presuppositions. Thus, despite all appearances, it is not very scientific, nor is it very objective, nor on the other hand, is it courageous enough to free itself from servitude and become an autonomous thought15.

14 15

(Giacco, 55) (Entretien, 135) Authors translation.

Instead of this qualitative analysis that often takes the form of a sort of musical trial by jury where the analyst is engaged in proving to their readership the validity of their conclusions by referring to argumentative chains of evidence supposedly found in the text he appeals to a method of qualitative analysis, which originates from placing oneself in the point of view of the listener16. As opposed to the enumeration and segmentation of the material into sets of hierarchically arranged nomenclatures (of pitch structures for instance), he advocates a synthetic process of discovering the meaning of what is happening in the piece by observing the behavior of the material as evidenced by the processes that effect it17. Sciarrino says this in regards to formal analysis:

In the description of a form, one must always consider the whole picture, to see how, conceptually, the elements dispose themselves on the arc which they draw. They are the perceptual pathways that one must account for, those of the listener who hears the piece18.

As might be expected, Sciarrinos book is written from a composerly point of view. Rather than establishing historical periods through the dissection of time into stylistic epochs, or focusing instead on the musical great men that postulate the ideas which define our times he organizes his historical account by means of a series of

16 17

(ibid, 136) This behavior of the material that is organized into generalized vectors by any combination of formal processes (those at the bottom of this page) is what is referred to by Pesson as the works meta-text. It is the overarching story that the piece is telling about the materials it contains the story that the listener will more-or-less readily be able to identify. 18 (Kalenecker, Pesson, 136)

sweeping generalizations built around five phenomena found in common between ages and across styles:

Accumulation Multiplication Little Bang Genetic transformation Shapes with windows 19

The term figure, somewhat difficult to translate, corresponds not to the English word figure in its usual sense, but to shape or essentially form. Sciarrinos book envisages a transcendental artistic community united by a number of shared formal footprints 20. In order to dispense with the apparent contradiction of a non-rhetorical form that governs these archetypal approaches in Sciarrinos work, it is necessary to separate the idea of form from the assumption that it must be projected in hierarchic patterns. Neither does the anti-rhetorical approach to form necessitate a rejection of organization, pre-compositional work, or most importantly a kind of narrative. Form, and more fundamentally the narrative structure, become something much more like shape, a visual concept that presents these processes as forces synthesizing the material into sonic objects rather than as Sciarrino had remarked containers which

19

All but Little Bang appear in translation (Sciarrino refers to Little Bang in English translation in his book). 20 This is what is referred to when Sciarrino uses the term synesthetic to describe his aesthetic approach and, presumably, his method of writing music through initially creating colorful diagrams that depict not only the structure but also the surface of the final product. For a more full account, see (Giacco, 33-40).

render the autonomous non-referential actuality of each gesture moot in the service of a language of subjection In practice, the composer keeps these processes from becoming much more than vague kinetic models allowing each one to be definable in a number of means and by degrees. The primary difference between the kinds of processes that Sciarrino discusses and the kinds of processes found in serial or functional-tonal works is that the discontinuity, accumulation, or genetic (gestural) transformation spoken of in his manner of analysis, are not value-based arguments that are unfolded in a network of musical lattices, but rather cumulative gestures that are molded by the intuition21. Where tonal music, and especially post-tonal music is often analyzed by, and subsequently often designed by creating associations or networks of harmonic entities (i.e., such pieces are designed around nomenclatures, in a pseudo-linguistic fashion), Sciarrinos processes are connected to physical acts and temporal-spatial locations, with a certain level of disregard for the arrangement of nomenclatures as central to the meaning of the work. That is why set-theory analysis is of little use when examining a Sciarrino score. It hardly matters if he writes an (0145) apart from how it sounds and how that set fits into the physicality of the instrument, the mechanics of the extended technique, or the process governing it. Sciarrinos figures are objects in the strictest sense. The focus is shifted from the functioning potential of such gestures as artifacts of language to the processes that move
21

(Wishart, 15-18) By lattice, Wishart is actually referring to the normalizing effect that musical notation (textuality) has had on our musical perception and compositional awareness. It seems that he and Sciarrino are really coming from the same place or if not certainly ending up with the same conclusion.

them in space and time rather than by means of some sort of grammatical signification22.

Accumulation
Accumulation is, in Sciarrinos way of thinking, not merely growth in intensity, dynamic volume, or pace of events, but growth in its most general terms23. Theoretically, a work or part of a work could grow in silence, or grow in the amount of space between the occurrences of gestures (as in the climactic section of the Second sonata). Basically, accumulation represents a commuting from one state to another state as a matter of texture or pace rather than simply acceleration or increase in loudness. Both accumulation and multiplication represent kinds of growth, the difference being that in accumulation, that growth is irregular, chaotic, and composed of heterogeneous elements 24. Sciarrino points to Jackson Pollacks work as a stunning example of a striking unity between the process of composition (the strewing of paint on the canvas in chaotic patterns), and the gradual consequence of his working procedure an accumulating mass of layers of paint 25. The work creates a formal poetic of its own which is independent of rhetorical structures. Strikingly, this work is grouped together with the initial build-up and chaos of the opening of Stravinskys Rite of Spring as the separate gestures and motives are

22

And of course also to the value of the timbre and sound profiles of the gestures as they are in themselves being central to our understanding of their identities. Gavin Thomas remarks on Sciarrinos desire not to compose with notes, but rather to compose each note (Thomas, 194). 23 (Giacco, 85) 24 (Giacco, 86), (Sciarrino, 27) 25 (Sciarrino, 25)

projected, gather momentum and mass, and finally accumulate into a bewildering caterwaul of primitive ululations26. The formal consequence of accumulation in Sciarrinos work is often the arrival of a point of climax, or saturation, as he puts it. This tipping point having been reached, Sciarrino very often resolves the climactic tension by utilizing rupture form, as in the works discussed above. Accumulation in this manner serves Sciarrinos anti-rhetorical aesthetic paradoxically, by setting up an expectation which is often thwarted in the aftermath of the point of rupture. At other times as in the work of Jackson Pollock (and really also Stravinsky) accumulation is the process of working that creates the corpus of the work itself thus illuminating the work as a multidimensional surface where each layer is a sort of temporal-geological record of its genesis (or at least its path to the present state). It is possible to see such geological striations in these works that are though arrived at through wilder means still strongly present as a perceptual framework. This creation of a new sense of musical space that replaces the lattice of grammatical signification is perhaps the most significant result of Sciarrinos synesthetic modeling.

26

(ibid, 36)

Multiplication
Neither accumulation, nor multiplication is a means of mathematical arrangement in the anti-rhetorical approach. They are instead general principles that are shaped by the physical, audible, spatio-temporal design of the work as controlled by intuitive, yet structured compositional choices27. Reproduction is perhaps a better term to express the homogeneous and periodic growth that occurs notably in the Third Sonata. Each reproduction of the primary gesture is clearly discernable as a single general idea, but it is possible to divide the individual elements of that gesture into separately variable vectors (such as range of individual left and right hand clusters in deference to the total registral possibilities afforded by the piano, thickness of each individual cluster, nearness of individual clusters to one-another, registral placement of the intervening blurts, etc.). So on one level, what the listener initially hears is the banging of clusters occurring over large spans of the pianos range that is to say we hear the same type of gesture over and over. But on another level, our attention is drawn to the differences between each reproduction, revealing the hidden path and leading the listener into a generalized sort of narrative. As another musical example, the composer offers Gyrgy Ligetis Requiem, drawing special attention to the staggered canonic entries of the chorus that create a web of multiple instances of the subject28. In Ligetis canonic writing, the most sonically

27

Let spatio-temporal design be understood as a reference to Sciarrinos concept of placing musical gestures in space rather than in time, creating structures that can be rather static in nature (as in the sextet Lo Spazio Inverso), or dynamic and forward moving (as in the Second sonata for piano). This will be discussed at length below. 28 (Sciarrino, 45)

arresting factor is not any sort of clever harmonic correspondence between segments of the line, but the creation of dense smoldering textures that metamorphose as new materials are gradually overlaid upon the decaying process of the former textures. As yet another musical example Sciarrino examines the chamber ensemble work Partiels of the late Grard Grisey 29. The process of growth through repetition (reproduction) is provided in this piece as an outgrowth of the information gained through a spectral analysis of the partial content of the trombone. Using the partial content as a harmonic point of departure, Grisey multiplies (repeats) the chord a complex aggregate of pitches and gradually displaces the individual partials by octaves increasing the amount of inharmonicities present in the spectra (harmonic aggregate) as the piece moves forward in time. Finally in the last repetition of the aggregate that occurs in the final measures of the piece, the spectrum is almost entirely degenerated into inharmonicity 30. The process of multiplication in this piece serves as the medium through which our attention is drawn to the increasing degeneration of the timbral identity. The anti-rhetorical quality of these examples must be clarified (especially in deference to the Grisey piece). In Ligetis piece it is not the individual pitches of the canonized lines that draw the listeners attention, but the gradual metamorphosis that is

29 30

(ibid, 47) Harmonicity describes a quality that spectra can have in which all of the partials are integral multiples of the fundamental. It is the harmonic spectra of a sound that determines its timbral identity. Inharmonicity describes the condition of a partial that is not an integral multiple of the fundamental displacing harmonic partials by any amount creates a state of inharmonicity, the aural result of this an alteration of the timbral quality of a sound (the quality that allows us to recognize the identity of the sounds source).

created not by pitch structures but through the temporal juxtaposition of the entries. The pitches of the lines dont change between entries, and harmonic designs do not appear to be central to the structure of the piece except as spatial areas that the body of the piece moves through. About the Grisey perhaps a tougher sell in terms of its antirhetorical qualities, it must be immediately said, as Rose has pointed out, that the spectral modeling procedure that Grisey uses to derive his material is highly analogous31. In using an ensemble of musical instruments (rather than oscillators producing pure sign waves) Grisey creates a situation where the true partial content of the resulting music is infinitely more complex than the model that he uses to organize it. Nevertheless, on a practical level the effect remains, however multiplied by a profoundly larger number of instances. More directly connected to Sciarrinos concerns, there is a foundationally static harmonic design at work here (there is really only one spectra that is used in recurring instances throughout the piece); with each repetition, the attention isnt on the grammatical relationship between the preceding or following chord in any traditional sense, but on the transformation that occurs within that single harmony as it is rearticulated. In both cases the gesture that is repeated is objectified, or transformed into a sonic image. What difference is aurally and structurally important is the difference between the physical position of the object, or the structural composition of the object, rather than the grammatical function or classification of the subject as obedient to an artificially contrived

31

(Rose, 11)

hierarchic classificatory structure32.

Little Bang
In Sciarrinos manner of speaking the little bang of course a reference to the Big Bang theory is not an affirmation of a particular cosmological worldview however much it is a statement about cosmology itself, that is, about cause and effect. Sciarrino clarifies: Do you remember metrics? Arsis is a strong accent after a weak accent. Thesis is a weak accent after a strong accent: this elementary combination is very useful to us. Try now to imagine a thesis with gigantic proportions, and understood as two groups of sounds. The first group is more energetic, the second is soft like a cloud and appears to be born in the tail of the first. The initial event...can even be instantaneous, a single chord...33 In the little bang concept we find the first intimations of a kind of hierarchy in Sciarrinos music. However this sense of one sound being subjugated by another comes nowhere close to negating the non-rhetorical structure of his work, but rather is a description of the relationship between two sounds that is rendered in purely physical terms. Far from being predicated upon nomenclature, grammar, or syntax the primary factors that create a sense of causality in this music are proximity, and relative weight.

32

The obvious example is the functional tonal system that is arranged into tonic, dominant, and pre-dominant harmonic classifications. Each harmony exists as a subject of one or the other family of harmonic functions. Western common-practice music is unanimously obedient to this stratification it serves as the presumed lingua franca from which every single composer operated (from the time it was established until the time it gradually dissipated). 33 As quoted in (Giacco, 98)

Proximity is the spatio-temporal distance existing between the two elements of the thesis34. If two musical events are separated by an excessive amount of time or pitch, the resulting effect is irrelevance (this of course depends on the context). Weight refers to the level of accent created by a confluence of articulation, density, and dynamic. Simply put, for one event to be seen as the cause of another they must be sufficiently near one another and the first must sound heavier. The opening of the Second sonata serves as a perfect example of the little bang principle in this primary sense. The initial chord, which is struck fortissimo and is projected in the highest and lowest registers of the piano, is followed by a series of small, murmuring, limping figures. These figures sound as if they are rebounding from the initial chord because of their consistent presence with the chords, the close temporal relationship with them, the dynamic shape (the sense of tapering off both within and between figures). Whats more, they are also linked registrally to the left hand, furthering the sense of their proceeding out of the chords. Sciarrino speaks of yet another type of little bang that proceeds from the antirhetorical strategy of surprise. If the first type of bang is concerned with causality, the second type is concerned with punctuation; it seeks to break the continuity of static situations (and will be more fully understood in the context of shapes with windows). Later in the Second sonata, the striking figures express a difference kind of causal energy. By punctuating and delimiting the space that surrounds them, they create a further sense

34

Thesis as Sciarrino refers to it, is by far the most common perhaps the exclusive type of accent pattern found in his music. It would seem counter-intuitive to expect such a bombastic, anti-naturalistic phenomena such as Arsis to occur in the music of a personality dedicated to such a subtle, withdrawn sonic world.

of propulsion that would not be available without the continual interruptions to the static background material provided by the gushing grace note figures. Without this punctuation, four or five pages of uninterrupted gushes would result in a dead, stagnant texture that to borrow critic Ian Paces rejoinder would not be sufficiently static enough to undermine the nature of stasis35. A third element significant to the meaning of little bang is a moment that could be referred to as a volta to borrow from poetic terminology a moment where the surface of the music turns or changes in a significant manner. This change is marked by a little bang, a gesture or sonic signpost of some type. Sciarrino offers two examples: the first is Schuberts Quartet in G major, opus 161, the second is Ravels Shhrizade of 1903. In the second movement of the Schubert quartet, there occurs a unison pizzicato between the two violins and cello that mark a striking textural change in measure 154. In the Shhrizade example taken from the first song in the cycle Asie the bang is not a single orchestral hit but rather a flamboyant flourish that prepares the entrance of the Soprano in the 7th measure. In both instances the anti-rhetorical aspect of the little bang is the jilt the interruption of a previously established sonic atmosphere, texture, or figuration that abruptly clears the ideological space for a new atmosphere, texture, or figuration. The fact that there is no attempt to mutate from one moment to the next is the significant factor here since rhetorical compositional procedures depend on making connections via continuous transformation through a series of shared materials. The little bang defies rhetorical composition by severing that continuum.
35

(Pace, 49)

Genetic Transformation
Having described a music that is constructed of multiple instances of a small number of gestures, it remains to consider the subtle surface differences that create for the listener, a series of audible through-paths. He speaks of these differences as genetic transformations, in keeping with his aim to create a music that, like living organisms transform, breath, accumulate, [and] multiply.36 It would seem that the terminology of genetics referred to in this subcategory demands syntax or a genetic code in order to make the analogy serviceable. After all, if there is no genetic code, then there is no creature, or at least if there is, its a cruelly deformed one. Gavin Thomas sheds some light on this objection:

Sciarrinos music demands not only the concentrated attention to microscopic sound effects, but also that one renounces traditional listening expectations the search for form, dialectic, meaning. The unfolding of this music prompts visual rather than musical analogies, concentrating on the infinitesimally changing relationships between essentially static, nondeveloping sound objects or complexes of sound objects, located as much in space as in time37.

The sense of visuality that Thomas observes is a topic at least as large as antirhetoric, as such it would be a difficult thread to pursue in the confines of this paper,
36 37

As quoted in (Giacco, 54). (Thomas, 194). I would also add a thought from Sol Lewitts Sentences on Conceptual Art: Formal art is essentially rational...Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically. (Lewitt, 1) Formal art whose substance is drawn from its technical handling of received formal language can be equated here with music whose substance is drawn from its technical handling of received rhetorical language. What Lewitt adds to this conversation is the paradox that logic and rational discourse are not the same thing.

however a few comments will serve to clarify the relationship between this quote and genetic transformation. Firstly, the general aura of visuality that Thomas refers to is largely the result of the sense of stasis that is created in Sciarrinos music. This stasis comes from the non-developing nature of the material. That is to say, Sciarrino makes no attempt to build the typical triangular dramatic shapes that are so familiar to composer and listener alike. There is no sense that the music is pushing towards some future state. To borrow further from Thomas, one could say that Sciarrinos music simply is. 38 What this lends to our understanding of genetic transformation is that secondly, the infinitesimal changes between objects are not dialectic. Rather, any changes that occur create through-paths by organizing the space into some physically observable trajectory. As an example, I refer again to the Fourth sonata this time to the grace figures beneath the large clusters. It will readily be seen that these grace figures combine to produce clusters of their own, the upper cluster always using white keys, the lower cluster always black. Here one will always find the trichord Gb Ab Bb lying underneath the trichord G A B. The relationship here is not semantic, it is physical. It is only semantic in the sense that groups of pitches are paired together continually with their chromatically altered inflections to the end of creating clusters (which are patently semantically expressionless). Here, as in Sciarrinos music for strings and winds, the harmonic material is drawn from the anatomy of the instrument itself39.
38 39

(ibid, 194) Very interestingly, in the third sonata, the rhythmic element of the grace note figures is determined by their registral proximity of the pitches to those that surround them. This creates a situation in which proximity has a decisive hand in shaping local form. Spatial

The cluster chords of the Fourth sonata move in similar, oblique, contrary, and parallel motion, whereas the grace-note clusters move only in parallel motion (for the sake of keeping the clusters tight). There is no dynamically articulated moment of climax in the piece as a whole, and there is no one moment where the cluster chords reach a span that is uniquely wide or high. Combined with the highly repetitive nature of the materials involved, there is a sense of stasis that governs the larger proportions of the piece, but does not seem to preclude a sense of movement occurring at the local level. It is the infinitesimal changes that shape local awareness through means of physically observable organization of the materials that constitutes the sense of genetic transformation. It is transformation because the materials change noticeably, and it is genetic because the changes are wed to physical factors 40.

rarefaction equals rhythmic rarefaction and spatial compression equals rhythmic compression. Here one can easily see the benefit of visual analogies in understanding this music. (Though it is amusing to note that with all of the note-writing, Sciarrino was still careful not to write triads between consecutive pitches). 40 It must be said that when Sciarrino applies this idea to the music of the past, it is typically on the textural or thematic aspects of the work never the tonal aspects. So this is not to make the claim that Beethovens music was not organized (partially) by tonal design, but to simply say that what the Sciarrino takes from the music didactically is not its tonal organization. This type of generalization is what allows the composer to take a multi-disciplinary approach in his book.

Shapes with Windows


The phenomenon of disruption (as demonstrated in the concept of rupture form spoken of above) plays a central role in Sciarrinos musical form. In fact, what he calls shapes with windows will be seen to be a ubiquitous design found in the majority of his works as the central formal principle. The reason for the pre-eminence of disruptive form stems from Sciarrinos views on memory and the role of memory in the cognizance and re-cognizance of form. In the composers multi-disciplinary language, memory is the surface of music (in the same way that a canvas may be the surface on which a painter paints); it is the space upon which the music creates for the listener its image, so to speak41. In this way, the observer of a musical performance can transcend the temporality or the linearity of the experience and in effect, see the work as they would a painting in an art gallery. Memory makes this translation possible. Sciarrino speaks of mental space because his observations about memory do not include only what one remembers from the past, but that in its relationship to what they hear in the present so that the listening experience becomes a kind of ex-temporal transience in which the listener metaphorically comes and goes between the dimensions of the past and the present. These discontinuities of conscience42 form a working model for Sciarrino that is not entirely unlike the working models of Grisy and Murail, which make analogous structural processes out of the physical realities from which they are drawn. In Sciarrinos extensive catalogue, one will find a number of works where there
41 42

(Giacco, 39) As quoted in (Giacco, 40).

exist blocks of textures that he refers to as spatio-temporal dimensions, composed of singular gestures that alternate in various ways to form the substance of the piece43. In his manner of thinking, each piece of music is actually a multi-dimensional organism and the discontinuous dimensional juxtapositions are windows between these dimensions. While this may seem like a fanciful exercise in sophistry it is by no stretch of the imagination any more ostentatious than the thought that Partiels is a meaningful representation of the trombone. Each dimension co-exists with every other dimension, and the formal discontinuity the interruptions each a window into another dimension is a representation, or acting-out of that reality, and of the reality of memorys work in the cognizance of musical form. This process creates what Sciarrino calls dimensional polyphony 44. That the majority of the examples the composer offers in the chapters of his book that deal with shapes with windows are drawn from the world of visual arts is quite significant. Max Ernsts Il giardino di Francis (The Garden of France) creates a spatial disturbance that Sciarrino refers to as a dimensional intermittence revealing the shape of a womans body hidden beneath an island in the Loire River. Caravaggios Nostra Signora della Misericordia displays the simultaneity of the spiritual and material world in a dramatic manner. The unawareness painted on the human faces reveals a sense of real and fundamental separation between the two worlds.

43 44

(Giacco, 76) (ibid, 65)

Alberto Burri, an Italian artist noted for idiomatic handling of material shares with Sciarrino a desire to compose works wherein the physical nature of the material plays a major role in the formal language of the work. It is in Burris Sacco (1953) and Rosso Plastica (1961) that the analogue to the multi-dimensional work of Sciarrino can be most clearly seen45. In both works, the tears or burns in the material of one layer of material reveal that there are layers beneath. It is particularly interesting that in the Rosso Plastica the material itself that is, the plastic of the surface layer of the work is translucent. This creates a type of double entendre between the translucent top layer and the holes which mark its surface windows in a window beneath which can be seen other windows. The work presents, in an immediately visually accessible manner, a demonstration of how the technique of shapes with windows can provide an interesting and evocative formal palate. In each case, the primary trait that holds this data set together is that each work is created by a layering process, and that the material is portrayed in such a way as to reveal those layers. As in the recitative section of the final movement of Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Grande Plastica of Alberto Burri, and the Emily Dickinson poem featured in the text46. Each work creates an awareness of its own sense of spatiality whether it is through an appeal to memory (the dimensionality of time) as in Beethoven, the dimension of literal space (which divides the gallery space in half) as in Burri, or metaphorical space (of words) as in the Dickinson.

45 46

Sciarrino, 138 ibid, 108-111, 140, and 125 respectively

Lo Spazio Inverso, one of the composers Sei Quintetti, provides a clear example of this formal concept in his own music47. The primary materials of the piece can be simply divided into three groups. The first of which consists of the flute and clarinet, both of which are severely limited in terms of the amount of material they contain. The clarinet part employs a single dyadic multiphonic, one that interestingly enough can only be created with a very low dynamic. The only continua that experience change in the clarinet part are those of dynamics (though only slightly), and more noticeably, rhythm. The clarinet figure is the breath of the piece, creating a haunting stasis whose effect on the general atmosphere can hardly be overestimated. The flute line contains no pitched figures whatsoever. It consists entirely of extended techniques such as tongue-rams, jet whistles, colpi di lingua which are sometimes also referred to as tongue-jams48, and rullo della lingua which is a pitchless sub-species of flutter-tongue. Whats more, the flute is utilized for only a fraction of the piece. The second grouping consists of the violin and cello, whose material though much more homogenous in terms of gesture and figure is almost entirely composed of harmonics. There exists in the string parts a sense of kinetic energy that is entirely absent in the winds. Though hardly able to challenge the stasis created by the clarinet dyad ostinato, the strings serve to create a sense of progressiveness on the surface.

47 48

See the formal diagram included in the appendix at the conclusion of this paper. Tongue-jams are created by percussively pronouncing hut into the flute mouthpiece creating the t by jamming the players tongue into their teeth (stopping the air flow abruptly). The resulting sound is a percussive sharp breathy attack with probably a little pitch.

The third grouping is reserved for the celesta alone, which contains a very familiar figure found also in the Second Sonata. It is the celesta that creates a series of windows in the work though a series of interruptions rending the surface of the music not unlike I suspect the rupture that occurs in the final moments of Il mottivo degli ogetti di vetro. A consistent framing of the flourish figure by large clusters, along with the absence of the clarinet dyad, emphasizes the windowing role that the celesta plays, and proves it to be of more than superficial consequence.

ensemble celesta measure ensemble celesta measure ensemble celesta measure 55 58 28-30 37 45 8 16 19 21

figure 1 : diagram of celesta windows in Lo Spazio Inverso49

49

Note that the largest window between mm. 28-30 bisects the work in terms of the number of measures. Also note that in the formal diagram in the appendix, each of the sections created by the windows is roughly about the same length adding a sense of stasis to the phrase rhythm as well.

In the Second Sonata, shapes with windows generates the form across a landscape composed of four different dimensions:

figure 2 : the first dimension

figure 3 : the second dimension

Dimensions are introduced gradually, in a staggered manner as the piece progresses. As a result of this dimensional staggering, each of the dimensions takes priority for a given period, with the second dimension forming the static layer during the central section of the work50. This allows for the possibility, present in the Second Sonata of dimensional centric conflict, a contest of sorts carried out to determine which figure will take priority in a given section. Such centric conflicts occur in two places in
50

Nearly all of Sciarrinos works contain a static figure a primary dimension that allows the sense of interruption to occur.

the second section of the work between the first and third dimensions on pages three and four, and between dimensions 1 and 4 on pages four and five. The result of the centric conflict between figures 1 and 3 is that figure 1 continues to dominate the window structure, whereas in the conflict between figures 1 and 4, figure 4 wins the day propelling immediately afterwards into the accumulation that brings the second section to rupture.

figure 4 : the third dimension

figure 5 : the fourth dimension51

In the most basic sense, the Second Sonata has a three-part form that is led into and out of by a long grace-note flourish that emphasizes the interval of a major sixth. The first section concentrates of the first dimension with the exception of one occurrence of the second dimension approaching the transitional figure. Although the repetitions of the
51

In the fourth dimension, I am including both the quartal and quintal-stacked chords, as I see no reason to separate them.

primary gesture are irregular in terms of their temporal placement, they seem to be an example of the technique of multiplication because they do not really congeal as does the third dimension on the sixth and seventh pages. Furthermore, the clear intent is that the listener focus on the infinitesimal differences between each of the repetitions. The third section is, as in Il mottivo degli ogetti di vetro, the result of a rupture that is instantiated by the accumulation and climax of the third dimension gestures ending on the seventh page. Although three of the four dimensions are present in the third section, the material from the first dimension is most represented52. However the regularity of the central section (and even to some extent the first) is taken away and the music seems to be stripped of its power to hold itself together. All that remains are fragments of what came before. Consider for example that the most present material is the transient transitional figure.

Conclusions
What is it that Sciarrinos music gains from the anti-rhetorical strategy he has pursued? We have seen when and why he chose to reject and redefine the three compositional threads (listening expectations, hierarchic syntax or structure by nomenclature, and traditional temporal thinking). We have seen that Sciarrino frustrates the expected flow and discursiveness of traditional music with a fundamental structure of
52

A fact that loudly suggests similarity to sonata form as one could imagine the first section as an exposition, the central section as a development, and the third section as a recapitulation. While there is much ideological space shared between sonata form and what Sciarrino has done here, to equate them would be to miss the crucial effect that the behavior of the dimensions has upon the form of this work. I would argue that there is something more interesting that received formal parroting happening here.

discontinuity. We have seen that traditional nomenclature-based hierarchic formal principles (in which the name or category of a chord or set is subjected to a systematic structure) have been replaced by a collection of formal principles that are utilized to flesh out the composers idiosyncratic visual sketches and shape the musical materials into audible through-paths conceived of from the perspective of the listener. In other words, the musics structure is equal to its force on the listeners perception. We have also seen that the composer has replaced a purely metrical concept of musical time with a spatial concept of time borrowed from the visual arts. The majority of Sciarrinos solo works are without time signature, a peculiarity that produces a synthesis between proportional notation and metric notation. And it can easily be argued that where he uses metrical notation in his ensemble works, he does so because of the necessity of keeping the musicians in the same temporal space. Apart from the notation though, it appears that the translation between visual sketch and musical score, combined with the nondeveloping nature of the musical material created an atmosphere where the consciousness of time does not exist, all of the events take place in space rather than in time53. Furthermore, the composer has spoken at length of mental space, as both the surface of music, and the place where moments can be separated or lifted out of time. So for Sciarrino, the memory creates form in the cognizance and recognition of musical material54.

53 54

(Entretien, 127) (Giacco, 40)

So to return to the question of what this music gains from the anti-rhetorical strategy, the composer rightly gets the final word:

The third question is too theoretical and it also takes for granted conditionings that instead I do not have and which I would like to see abolished throughout the musical world. In other words, the conditionings of serial and tonal practice. Both practices stop one from having a more creative and individual approach to music, both in the sense of listening and in that of producing new works. In short, the aridity of the musical word today is directly dependent on our schematic thinking, which reveals itself to be insufficient to break the pre-existing silence in a way that creation must be able to do. By pre-existing silence you may also understand the noise out of all possible noises, only one of which concerns and defines the creative act55.

55

Letter to the author. 21 October 2005. The third question Sciarrino is referring to is this: Is there some principle of structure in your music analogous to the hierarchic tonal system, or set-theory construction?

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