In his book Le figure della musica, Salvatore Sciarrino addresses the need to outline some main concepts on which contemporary music - as well as historical music from which it derives - is based. The words of the title Le figure della musica (the figures of music) stand for the main abstract ideas on which composers' choices are based. Sciarrino states that any compositional work does not appear as an undifferentiated stream of sounds. What an attentive listener tends to hear is how sounds are grouped together. Some groups of sounds are more characteristics than others and as soon as they come back the listener recognizes them. Those groups mark different areas of a composition. The formal structure of a piece is built on grouping those recognizable elements in longer sections. So, Sciarrino points out how form arises from the way groups are arranged, according to the personal strategies of the composer. Consequently, musical matter is organized following some key concepts that music shares also with other disciplines. Sciarrino's approach aims to outline those key-concepts of musical construction, in order to get deeper knowledge of general aspects of music-making. The key-figures on which Sciarrino focuses are: accumulation processes, multiplication, little bang, transformations, window-form. I have been particularly interested in the window-form, to which Sciarrino dedicates the two last chapters. The window-form is based on the concept of temporal and spatial discontinuity. A first and very basic example of this discontinuity could be a photograph, which breaks the unitary concept of time and space, making possible the coexistence of the past - represented by the picture - within the present. Similarly, Sciarrino speaks about a painting hung on a wall, which can create the illusion of multiple temporal and spatial dimensions. The concept of window is borrowed from computer science: working with computers, simultaneous processes are visualized in different windows on the screen, and through these windows space interacts with time.
The sensibility relative to this kind of temporal and spatial discontinuity is implied in our contemporary way of thinking, but it has slowly emerged already before the beginning of the history of photography. Sciarrino, in fact, identifies several examples of this modern sensibility, looking at the art of the past. He mentions, for example, the painting Ragazzo morso da un ramarro (1594) by Michelangelo Merisi, named Caravaggio, as an ante-litteram example of a snap-shot (the painting represents a young boy in the moment he is bitten by a green lizard). Among the musical examples for the window-form, Sciarrino mentions the beginning of the IV movement of the Symphony n.9 by Beethoven. Here, before presenting the main theme, fragments from the previous movements of the symphony emerge from the orchestral texture. Sciarrino considers them not as simple citations, but as real windows that Beethoven opens on other sound worlds.
In a window-form, more or less complex blocks can be assembled through different editing processes. And, since each block is full of different information, the juxtaposition of different blocks can produce a traumatic friction. Unexpected changes from one world to another one allow for multiple connections in our memory. As Sciarrino points out, the way windows appear can also represent the mode of operation of our mind: following a principle of intermittence the psychological path is presented as made of moments of reflection, critique, clarification, and definition of ideas. Through fragments and repetitions a polyphony of relations emerges, combining really near and really far perspectives, which can interact avoiding intermediate levels. A microscopic and macroscopic world coexist. Therefore, a window-form somehow works also as a representation of the recursive process of our mind, which is able to go back and forward from one idea to another one, moving between different temporal and spatial dimensions. This aspect is particularly interesting to address compositional processes, considering the role that memory has in storing or anticipating a specific sound material, while consciously working with it on different time scales. From this perspective, later in this chapter, I will further focus on my own compositional practice, which usually starts from the exploration of the instrumental sound matter, to then get to its understanding, definition and organization within different time levels.
The reason for me to be interested in what Sciarrino has defined as window-form, lies also in its strong connection to the idea of frame. In the previous chapter, I have talked about stethoscopic forms of listening, i.e. listening experiences mediated by the use of the contact microphone, which becomes a sort of framing device. The use of piezos helped me in getting a better awareness of discrete and conscious forms of listening, in which the auditory space can be framed and the attention can be moved to what is inside the frame.
So, I will start by questioning how to understand the instrumental sound matter, framed by contact microphones and intended as the raw sonic stuff, distinguished from the instrumental sound material understood as the result of a process of selection and definition of the same raw sound matter. I will go on to address how the use of piezos interferes with usual habits of listening, especially in terms of how sound is perceived in its projection in space. I will moreover take into account the role of notation in the crucial moments of inscription during the compositional process, as well as its function as a means of sharing ideas and supporting the performers' memory.
>> go to 3.2 What's in the frame?