I will also try to contribute
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Salvatore Sciarrino. Quartet no. 9: "Ombre nel mattino di Piero" (Shadows in Piero's Morning)
Written for the Millennium of Sansepolcro. Commission by the Municipality of Sansepolcro
(World premiere).
I. Preludio
II. Recitativo? Liberamente mesto
String Quartet ‘Prometeo’
Giulio Rovighi, Aldo Campagnari, violins
Massimo Piva, viola
Francesco Dillon, cello
Ombre nel mattino di Piero
'Ombre nel mattino di Piero', with this title, my Quartet no. 9 intends to celebrate the millennium of Sansepolcro.
To commemorate means to remember together. This is not only a rare appointment in the fatal completion of the round number, offered to us by a certain founding date. It is also an honorable occasion to gather and listen to something new and different, specifically created under the Resurrection of Piero.
It is the time to draw closer to ancient beauty, whose meaning fades, to encounter modern beauty. To rediscover shared principles that are yet to be shared, to discover the problems to be discussed. And then perhaps, to rediscover the pleasure of rejoicing together. What words could be more suitable than those written by Beethoven in one of the many sketches surrounding the Ninth Symphony? "Today is a solemn day: friends, let it be celebrated with songs and...".
Our culture rests on its foundations of conviviality; we must not forget this. Let us not forget our origins, Sappho and Alcaeus.
Salvatore Sciarrino
Some questions about the string quartet
Cross or square?
What will remain of musical tradition after our evening fades? Life is unpredictable, and while the experience of the past invites us to doubt, we delude ourselves into thinking that culture can be transferred from one era to another without trauma; within each, a claim to immortality lurks. Artists in particular say they work for themselves, but instead, they think of an experience projected through time. Continuity exists precisely because it awaits interruption; history is not objective but rather a commentary on a reading, it does not restore the vital sphere; nor do documents retain the details that made us happy, desperate, or indifferent. It is evident that knowledge of others' past is substantially composed of hypotheses and interpretations, even arbitrary ones. Sometimes testimonies are reduced to zero: what remains of ancient Greek painting? Its image, duplicating itself in vases, was altered by too many copies; we suspect nothing of the vanished miracle.
Memory and oblivion hold hands. Every day moves toward its sunset and, despite this, immersed in the wonder that works of art arouse in those who cultivate them, we would like to hope they are spared from the flood of time.
Sàlvino other famous repertoires, grandiose symphonies. I hope that something survives of the string quartets composed in the footsteps of the Viennese classics. Even if that were to happen, it would still be impossible, in the lurking future, to understand what this secluded genre represents for a musician today. It presents itself as a limited and rigorous space for distilling and experimenting; few composers, and only exceptionally, reserve themselves to access it; inside, great models project fruitful shadows around them to be explored. Although a small musical genre, the quartet tends to identify with creativity itself: through variety, depth, invention, and openness. Here, even my search for an absolute monody may find its place.
How much of what is beautiful and important gives splendor to human culture is rarely understood by ordinary people. I don't know: is it right? Is it natural? Some works are taken up as fanaticism, almost as icons, even relics; but relics, as we know, are not edible. Some names become famous among the masses, detached from the organism of thought, that is, without life. Italy is today submerged by music that appears harmless, which inhibits the mechanisms of individual identity. It is one of the most insidious and harmful aspects of pollution. There has always existed a multiplicity of artistic languages at various levels of complexity. What is now hateful is the tyranny to which we are subjected, such as to pursue art music only to call its very survival into question. We hear talk of the masterpieces of normality; what does this mean, if not the peaks of the banal? The ideas that animate human intelligence cannot be accepted because they would engage minds that are already obtuse. Thus is the fate of the quartet, the diamond tip regarding the cosmos of music, hidden from most. The music of the classics taught the West individual self-awareness; it taught us to awaken the individual with sound and silence, with intense emotions. The quartet strips bare and exalts the essence of this aesthetic direction; it, despite itself, opposes music as"
a pastime imposed by commerce (fashion). An extreme refuge for those touched by music, in the deafening sea of the present, fragile string quartets come to resemble a message closed in a bottle. It is a pity, because art belongs to everyone, and everyone could enjoy it if they crossed the threshold of personal commitment to improve themselves, towards the freedom of reasoning with one's own head. He who comes to know daily sweetness within himself will better know how to savor social life, the necessary ground where art is sown.
In the quartet, the myth of equality, of equidistance, of a cross-cutting or rotating dialogue is realized in which the listener is placed exactly at the center. But at the center of what? A relationship of parental affinity seems to loom in the dialogue; yet, as it would be outdated and forced, how could one delineate the physiognomies that participate in it! Would the inflections of the violin be maternal or filial? With what words to define the burnished voice of the viola? Would the presence of the cello be paternal? Let us say instead that each instrument has at least a second soul. In the quartet, a place of affectivity, all components come to measure themselves against the authority of the first violinist, the one who exposes himself more than the others and must rise by flying. And the second violin? We deceive ourselves if we believe it to be accessory, since it is an indispensable support to the first and to the general structure. Whatever the spatial arrangement of the instruments may be, a sort of virtual T (or tau) is nonetheless drawn, given by the pair of violins. The theater and its movements were not driven far from the reflective accents typical of the quartet. If anything, it is the directness of lyricism that banishes masks; and yet such directness opens up strange, unspeakable others. Thus, a particular physio-psychology comes to the fore (I think of Beethoven) without there being recognizable characters. Is it a matter of the root, or a deep, indistinct, still impersonal trait of the drama itself? Not only. It is the instruments themselves that breathe, pant: not those who play or those who write. The author represents himself and, after centuries of subjectivism, shifts the focus of perception by directly involving the listener.
Chamber music par excellence, written for the pleasure of those who practiced it in the family. It is no coincidence that a slightly understated domestic atmosphere has become an ideal field for the exercise of imagination and musical logic, up to the most metaphysical speculations. Intimacy and loftiness of style converge in the world of the quartet; a convergence almost never granted in the rest of the human experience. Expression, trimmed down, becomes devoid of redundancies; and thus, in the absence of rhetoric, tensions do not dissipate and rarefactions become absolute. Upon all this, spatio-temporal discontinuity and the introduction of my multiphonic emissions, unheard of for strings, produce harrowing results. Against every appearance of stability, form is the reconciliation of opposites.
In the musical narrative, fragments of varying plasticity appear in sequence. Emotionally differentiated moments overlap like clouds. Changing mood is also equivalent to suddenly changing scene and landscape, climate, meteorology. The whole of the narrative holds because it passes through a single objectified perspective. Not always, in the flow of events, would we be able to distinguish sections or connecting elements; when this happens, they offer pretextual footholds, almost to distract memory from the uncertainty of our horizons. Uncertainty: the enigma of form insofar as expectation. The mystery of the principle, the moment when a new piece begins, or a new part; the unknown presents itself and leaps toward us. And this can happen several times in the same piece. What references can be found, outside of music, to the irrepressible need that leads us to join what is incongruous and unjoinable? I refer here to some examples taken from heterogeneous fields: poetry collections, anthologies with a multiple gaze; those of novellas or short novels, which would mirror our experiences in their varied configuration; the uncoordinated side-by-side of medieval frescoes, grown through progressive additions, or separate requests; Piero della Francesca's Baptism itself would clash if relocated to its place, in the polyptych painted by Matteo di Giovanni. To our eyes, the fresco of a Renaissance morning does not tolerate a sophisticated Gothic wagon with bruised flesh; what embarrassment to strip bare for those ivory bodies, stopped in the clear air by Piero's brush! A further example: late Baroque collections cut out paintings following the geometry of the frames; the most disparate images were packed onto walls, without the slightest concern for coherence, placed rather according to format (see the Stallburg picture gallery). The last example of
union of opposites, this time pertinent to the quartet: what qualities are necessary for the four performers? Thinking high, inspiration and refinement, agreed; but above all the consistency that drives one to change the group's components following, as it happens, an idea of homogeneity. Discipline that refines a square of different people over the years. Long after the Florence flood of 1966, unpaired pages were circulating through the Conservatory Library. Among them, a double-sided piece of music without means of identification. One day, while I was waiting for a loan at the counter (no one could go beyond), the sheet was lying on the counter and I happened to cast a glance at it. Verdi's Quartet Andantino is immediately recognizable, even in the second violin part; when I said so, the employees looked at me askance, without words. It is a memory I have kept until now, useless to decipher.
Salvatore Sciarrino