“My music is extreme music, because it seeks to rediscover perception”

After receiving the 4th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera, Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino explores in this interview the essence of his creative language and how his use of silence, extreme timbres, and minimal sonic materials allows him to express the inaudible. Sciarrino reflects on the tension between musical tradition and radical experimentation, as well as on how a work can emerge from the subtlest sound to reach the infinite.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in the Contemporary Music category goes in this fourth edition to Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino for renewing the possibilities of instrumental and vocal music and the differentiation of their sound materials. The Italian composer is a pioneer in the realm of musical timbre and the opera, with writing that is innovative and technically perfect; its lightness, refinement and sound poetry marking him out as one of the major artists of our times.