Italian music? Ah, yes, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Verdi. But Scelsi, Donatoni, Sciarrino?
Sad to say, we on this side of the Atlantic know a good deal about Italian music of centuries past and very little about Italian music of decades recent.
Last week in Toronto, the situation was different. As part of its annual New Music Festival, the University of Toronto’s faculty of music collaborated with New Music Concerts and the Italian Cultural Institute to let us hear more contemporary Italian music than the city would ordinarily experience in a whole season.
Yes, Scelsi and Donatoni were represented, along with Luca Francesconi, Francis Ubertelli, Luciano Berio, Ivan Fedele and Fausto Romitelli. But the primary focus was on a composer accorded a full three-page, double-column entry in the encyclopedic New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
For several years now, Robert Aitken, artistic director of New Music Concerts, has looked forward to inviting Salvatore Sciarrino to Toronto and, last week, in part through the Sicilian master’s appointment as this year’s Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition at the faculty of music, he succeeded.
The visit consisted of performances of Sciarrino’s music, a lecture about his music and even public master classes in which student composers presented their pieces for his critical evaluation.
Not that the evaluations turned out to be highly critical. A musician and teacher of obvious warmth and understanding, he treated the students more like peers, fellow musical travellers. His own singular musical journey has taken him from his native Palermo, where he was born in 1947, onto the world stage, with more than 100 recordings documenting his progress.
In his lecture, he said that he was not born in a school and would not die in a school. Indeed, he began as a precocious, self-taught composer at the age of 12 and his music reflects a highly personal approach to putting notes on paper.
As piece followed piece in last Saturday’s Walter Hall concert a listener couldn’t help being struck by the way the music seemed to proceed not so much as sequences of pitches or rhythms, but as breaths of sound, almost as if the act of composition had become for him an experience of meditation.
It was a music of mood and atmosphere rather than overt directionality; the music as well of an artist who had found his own voice, unencumbered by our usual expectations of linear progression.
And yet, three nights earlier in the same hall, he used that voice to inhabit an opera, a form notably linear in character. The Killing Flower, composed to his own libretto and co-produced by Toronto New Music Projects, was inspired by the great Italian composer Gesualdo, who killed both his adulterous wife and her lover.
Was the music, as one might have expected, overtly dramatic? Not at all. Complex, yes, and ferociously difficult to sing. But it had little to do with dramatized storytelling in the usual sense.
Although not a minimalist, Sciarrino pares down his resources to explore them in depth, often incorporating “noises” and an interplay between sound and silence.
A University of Toronto news release declared, “There is something really particular that characterizes this music: it leads to a different way of listening, a global emotional realization, of reality as well as oneself.”
A typical example of the difficulty of putting into words something that eludes verbal description, this statement nevertheless points to the danger of trying to listen to Sciarrino with traditional expectations. He has habitually wanted to go where music has not yet been, and an element of surrender seems necessary to enter his sound world.
Last Saturday’s Portrait of Salvatore Sciarrino concert embraced four works, three of them performed by New Music Concerts instrumental ensembles led by Aitken, the fourth by accordionist Branko Dzinovic. Collectively they represented a small snapshot of a large catalogue of music, very little of which has ever been heard in Canada.
Such, alas, is the fate of so much contemporary music. We may not be living in an age of giants. There is arguably no Stravinsky, no Schoenberg. But if a week spent in the company of Salvatore Sciarrino suggests anything it is that brilliant minds are at work pushing at music’s boundaries and they merit an audience.
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