Salvatore Sciarrino
Cantare con silenzio

It is not the dark that scares us, it is what sleeps within the darkness that frightens us, and that is why we seek the light. Because the dark is full, it is pregnant: it contains ghosts, horrors, nightmares.

Silence, no.

Silence is death: sound is born with life itself, the fetus is constantly lulled by the powerful beating of the Mother's heart.

Silence is empty, and nature abhors a vacuum.

Silence like nothingness is unknowable, unexperiencable: it is just a working hypothesis.

Sound is formless, when it takes on a form we call it music. The attributes of this form are essentially two: rhythm and harmony.

Rhythm is the animal, unconscious, sensitive part; harmony is rationality. Rationalist and scientific West has always favored Harmony over rhythm; rhythm was a primary component of other music: popular, tribal, magical, childish, etc.

But the '900s witnessed the bloody clash between humanitas and τέχνη (téchne).

Art, the territory of the Human, had to fight with its weapons against technocratic rationalism using the by-products of serial and industrial production (and market techniques) as weapons to hurl against the unstoppable dehumanizing process of modernity. And music had its part in this clash.

The terms "silence" and "noise" have never been as central to the musical discourse as in the last century. The perfect logic of harmonic relationships, the architectural structure of polyphonic constructs, the clear intelligibility of the discourse underlying the dialogue between instruments reveal themselves tragically inadequate to interpret the magma-like and obtuse present. Musicians have been forced to work by subtraction, to theorize new relationships between sounds, to seek new forms of writing, to betray all the rules of harmony.

Technique does not reason: it produces. It is man who persists in wasting time with speeches, who insists on believing there can be a meaning.

Beauty is ultimate uselessness and as such is destined to succumb where the only value is the result, where the moral absolute is the economy.

"Cantare con silenzio" includes, besides the namesake composition for 6 voices, flute, percussion, and electronics, also "Berceuse" - an early work by the Sicilian composer - and "Libro Notturno delle Voci" for flute and orchestra. All recorded live in Tokyo and Rome under the direction of Marco Angius and with Mario Caroli on the flute.

Sciarrino is a loser, his music is the gasp of dying Beauty. Only by bringing your ear closer and trying to quieten both inside and outside yourself can you hope to grasp the meaning of a discourse. But Death, like Life, does not make speeches. This Music, like all Contemporary Music, does not speak to us, which is why we do not understand it, which is why we do not listen to it.

The mistake is to believe that the Present requires complex answers. That is not the case: the new Middle Ages in which we live poses simple questions and demands equally simple answers.

For this reason, pop music is triumphant. Love, hate, sadness, anger, regret; simple feelings expressed directly, possibly tied to adolescence (since adolescence is allowed to value feelings that as adults we are ashamed of, hence also the sense of loss that the memory of adolescence brings with it). Essential melodies, singability, repeated structures, instantly recognizable stylistic constructions, fast-paced, continuous rhythm (preferably 4/4 or variations of this). Precise dynamic excursions, essentiality, as reduced instrumentation as possible.

That it lulls, that it stupefies, that it does not make us think, that it calms the pain, that it extinguishes the anguish.

Technique does not reason: it produces. This is why we do not understand the world: because there is nothing to understand.

This is why we desperately need to understand and we only want things we understand. We want simple answers to direct questions: how does this record sound?

But poetry demands the active participation of the listener, it is a dialogue, it changes in relation to the Other who listens and who MUST respond.

This dialogue is the only hope of not succumbing to this mute time.

Therefore I cannot tell you how it sounds, I can only tell you why.