Salvatore Sciarrino

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Contemporary Music category has been granted to Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, 1947) for renewing the possibilities of vocal and instrumental music and for the singularity of his sound materials.

The jury remarks that Sciarrino “has developed a new and unique syntax,” and that “at the heart of his creations is his way of combining extreme reduction with a richness of detail. He stands out for his use of microtonality and his conscious reworking of ideas and materials from past periods and cultures.”

An illustrative example are what Sciarrino calls his “elaborations” of the music of earlier authors, like his La terribile e spaventosa storia del Principe di Venosa e della bella Maria based on music by Gesualdo, his reworking for solo flute of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ, or his versions of works by Scarlatti, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Ravel and contemporary artists like the Beatles. In these elaborations, Sciarrino filters and reconstructs pieces created according to the canons of the past, at times lending them a sonic surrealism with an aesthetic significance at several removes from the source material.

Jürg Stenzl, professor at the University of Salzburg and chair of the award jury, stresses that “Sciarrino’s originality lies not so much in the creation of new sounds as in the development of a syntax that pulls them coherently together.” His work, he continues, “has enriched contemporary music by way of detail rather than grandiloquent sounds. His impact can be felt in the music being made today, but will also radiate out to the rest of the century.”

In his first declarations, the new laureate remarked, “I was already familiar with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards and have always been positively impressed by the fact that they place Contemporary Music in the same family as other categories devoted to science.”

For the composer “the distance between classical, traditional and contemporary music is not that great. I personally feel that it is essential to understand the roots of our identity, which lie in tradition.”

The connection between music and literature

Sciarrino’s writing is characterized by its lightness, refinement and sound poetry, marking him out as an original composer with a distinct personality. “In my work there is a dual connection between music and literature, since for me they are the same language. Literature is the air we artists breathe. I myself write plays and other kinds of text that serve me as inspiration in my compositional practice.”

The language he uses in his works tests the limits of instrumental virtuosism through the use of non-conventional techniques, where the performer narrates each moment of the story. David Metzer, Professor of Musicology at Yale University, refers to Sciarrino as “a master calligrapher of quiet,” while the composer himself has written that “sound has an intimate relationship with silence, and the consciousness of that connection is new.” In his work, Sciarrino has explored different ways to model this relation between sound and stillness, with passionate characters who fracture silence with cries and outbursts, not so much embracing silence as reacting to it.

A self-taught artist

Born in Palermo (Italy) in 1947, as a child Salvatore Sciarrino felt drawn towards the visual arts, but soon began to experiment with music. At the age of twelve he wrote his first composition 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 self-taught 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, leading specialization courses attended by rising composers like Francesco Filidei, Lucia Roncheti, Fabrizio de Rossi Rei and Maurizio Pisati.

His prolific output has materialized 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 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.

International jury

The jury in this category was chaired by Jürg Stenzl, professor at the University of Salzburg (Austria). Remaining members were Siegfried Mauser, President of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich (Germany), acting as secretary, composer and conductor Gilbert Amy (France), Hugues Dufourt, composer and Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS (France), Rudolf Frisius, composer and Emeritus Professor of Musicology at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), composer and conductor Cristóbal Halffter, winner of the same award in the 2009 edition, Ranko Markovic, Artistic Director of Konservatorium Wien University (Austria) and Dieter Torkewitz, composer and Professor of Music Theory at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (Austria).