Salvatore Sciarrino
Studi Per L'Intonazione Del Mare

It is from the silence that sound is created and from the sound that disappears enveloped by silence that the "Studies for the Intonation of the Sea" originate and develop, a composition essentially based on silences and whispers, on barely perceptible carpets of sounds, on sudden and material clusters, and, above all, on an unexpected and overflowing cantability filled with emotion.

If the hundred flutes and the hundred saxophones that, along with the percussion, form the carpet on which this intense prayer unfolds, the soloists represent those necessary tears that give existence to the emotion that overwhelms and involves the listener, because it is sudden and at least unexpected. Music is one of the means to delve into the depths of contacts between living beings, and Sciarrino feels it is his duty to deliver us the essence of this encounter.

The mastodontic ensemble is reduced to a whisper, to a timbre that blends into time and is time in its natural spatialization. The carpet of nature, made up of the hundred flutes and the hundred saxophones, is the backdrop on which the events of nature unravel, telling a story of its own that has always been its story. For Sciarrino, composing means immersing oneself in unease, an unease characteristic of our time. This composition too, made up of immense silences and moments of sudden vitality, is part of the desire to go beyond based on a well-defined project.

The seagull that seems to appear in the Studies (first movement) is merely a reference to what the essence of the seagull brings back to us. And the raindrops (sixth movement), which from sparse become increasingly insistent, equally affect our emotions, constraining them in different spaces and times, perhaps possible for us, but existing since forever.