Lo spazio inverso

Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo spazio inverso

Performed by ensemble recherche:

Melise Mellinger - violin (tracks 1, 3, 4 and 5)
Barbara Maurer - viola (tracks 4 and 5)
Lucas Fels - violoncello (tracks 1, 4 and 5)
Klaus Steffes-Hollander - celeste (track 1)
Martin Fahlenbock - flute (tracks 1, 2, 3 and 5)
Jaime Gonzalez - oboe (track 5)
Jacqualine Burk - English horn (track 2)
Shizuyo Oka - clarinet (tracks 1 and 5)
Uwe Mockel - clarinet (tracks 2 and 3)

with

Clarens Bohner - bassoon (track 5)
Marc Noetzel - horn (track 5)
Achim Gorsch - trumpet (track 5)
Andrew Digby - trombone (track 5)
Felix Borel - violin (track 5)
Marc Fischer - contrabass (track 5)
Kwame Ryan - conductor (track 5)

tracks 2, 3 and 4 recorded on April 27-28, 1998
tracks 1 and 5 recorded on November 8, 1999

All tracks recorded at hans-Rosbaud-Studio, Baden-Baden.

Shade eaters: Through the deserts of Salvatore Sciarrino's music

I
The paradises of music have become viscous.

II
Music, set into the concrete of glass buildings, hardened to syrup by being played, is no longer palatable to the bored citizens of today. They yearn for decay, for mould, for putrefaction, if not even for the cheering cries from hell. From there, out of the place of darkness and cold - heated according to age-old belief - noises emerge, now and then, snatching fissures in the walls of beauty. Deliverances, thus, from the eternally reproducible, hoping to change to the dreadful, hoping to join the caravans on their way to the wasteland of exactions, where the wealth of memorylessness torments the recalling mind.

III
Salvatore Sciarrino's music tortures expectation. Once in a while, a mirage feigns the contours of oases in the midst of worlds of sand. The seemingness of his music stages its deceptions. In this aridity, drops stutter an annoying regular rhythmed morse code onto infinitely refined stone, which devours them as evaporated nothingness.

IV
They are easy to identify, the scores of the Sicilian, born in 1947, particularly since the problem is always only of a compositional nature, which in its insolubleness devour the score sheets ... some blackened ... some left blank.
His dissecting instruments that serve to find a compositional carcinoma are whirring and teeming, occasionally whimpering flageolet tremoli, the secco-dry impulses of wind instrument keys or soundlessly puffed breaths, sometimes tiny micro-interval slides or glissandi weakened by age, which bleed to death on their long stretches through the spaces of thirds and fourths, occasionally sound strokes, which sever the crown from the base of the sound as a laser beam, and "always-always" the thematic self-revolving figures present in all scores, strung together as the beads on a rosary, praying to themselves as the eternally thoughtless, blatantly senseless praise of the Virgin Mary, reverence to robots in Italian, mercilessly repeating, ceaseless Sisyphean thirst for the ever same, without becoming American. No minimalism, but the rotating swish of bodily streams, the scrapping wheeze where arteries bend ... set on paper.
In the middle of this operating room, Sciarrino sets the body of music below freezing point. Thus the composer dissects his brittle notes, excises the ulcers. The superfluous is suctioned off. The ear basks itself at the ice of the scores.

V
Shade eaters are the rays on melted stone.
Glass.

VI
The image orgies Salvatore Sciarrino contrives are attempts at showing analysis as a desiccated cadaver. As if the painter's brush spoke from its mouth as soon as it confronts its own works with language. Far from merely being the revelation of motivistic structures, of instrumentation, of dramatisations within musical time.
Desert stones full of riddles.
What he wishes to say is expressed in metaphors, does not retell that which resounds, but speaks what is tangible but not provable.
Sciarrino on Codex Purpureus: "...We differentiate between visions and blindness in vain: every light transgresses this threshold, when it blinds us with a train of illusions. Do you not feel as well that which is visible in sound?"
Sciarrino on Omaggio a Burri: "Unfolding the senses is the background of my music."
Sciarrino on Lo spazio inverso: "After abrogating the rhythm, movement is created out of polyphonous gravitation like that of the stars in the sky or as the profiles of the mountains on the horizon. In the desert, the physiognomic traits appear as outlines: pulsating islands of sound brush seas of silence. Within this silence we find the sounds of our body, we recognize them as our primeval own and hear the smallest tensions of the intervals like will-o'-the-wisps, which - devoid of all drama - light up as gestures in the dark. . . Our mind is generous enough to accept this wretchedly fragile music. Music is no longer made to put to sleep market places but to awaken realisation - in the moment when the market place has fallen silent in us."
Sciarrino on Introduzione all'Oscuro: "In this composition the imitation or transmission of some vital sounds of internal physiology are clearly discernable - a kind of objectivation, a speechless dramatisation of the heart and the breath. Here, music tends to reverse the relations between absence and presence, to move it toward the 'uncanny'. You do not perceive what you feel: it practically remains merely a blind, mysterious movement expressed in an acceleration and retardation of periodical pulsation, an atmosphere of fear, whose 'outer' psychological cause escapes our comprehension."
Salvatore Sciarrino's granite blocks in the vastness of scorching sand glow like lamps on operated skin. (Hans-Peter Jahn)

Tracklisting:

1. Lo spazio inverso {7:35}
(1985) for flute, clarinet, celeste, violin and violoncello

2. Muro d'orizzonte {11:20}
(1996) for old flute, English horn, and bass clarinet

3. Omaggio a Burri {12:59}
(1995) for old flute, bass clarinet and violin

4. Codex purpureus {11:14}
(1983) for string trio

5. Introduzione all'oscuro {17:48}
(1981) for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone and string quintet

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