An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata

An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata Antares Boyle (bio) Introduction: Sillabazione Scivolata in Sciarrino’s String Music Salvatore sciarrino’s recent music is characterized by a special type of repetition in which brief, distinctive melodic figures are minutely and unpredictably varied across their many recurrences. Example 1 shows a family of utterances from String Quartet No. 8 (2008) that loosely resemble each other in rhythm, pitch, melodic contour, and dynamic shape. These statements have been aligned vertically in the figure, with the precise duration of each initial long glissando removed, in order to make the varied repetition visually apparent. The excerpts are typical of a style of writing that has come to dominate Sciarrino’s recent work, which the composer once termed sillabazione scivolata, or “gliding syllable articulation.”1 My analyses of three passages from the Quartet will demonstrate how the distinctive features of this style can shape temporal experience by creating a [End Page 129] dynamic tension between the immediacy of familiar gestures and more elusive long-range continuities. But first, a preliminary description of the sillabazione scivolata technique, its transferal from the vocal to the instrumental realm, and its implications for periodization and analysis of Sciarrino’s output will provide context and motivation for this analytical claim. Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. A FAMILY OF UTTERANCES IN THE SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA STYLE, STRING QUARTET NO. 8, MM. 85–100 Sciarrino has said that sillabazione scivolata, originally conceived as a vocal style, imitates the rhythms and inflections of natural speech.2 It involves melodies performed by an individual voice or by multiple voices in unison or octaves. Although consecutive melodic statements may overlap somewhat, they are only rarely presented in harmony or counterpoint—Sciarrino has called the style “absolute monody.”3 Its identifying features are listed in Example 2. [End Page 130] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 2. FOUR ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA The extensive varied repetitions of the style establish families of utterances such as those in Example 1, and these excerpts can be considered paradigmatic instances of the technique.4 Such families are often defined by the position of specific pitches within a recurring series of gestures—such as, in Example 1, the F♯4 and F4 that end the first and last glissando of each excerpt—rather than by intervallic consistency. Canonical post-tonal operations such as transposition and inversion seem to play little to no role in this music. Although scholars have described the style as “modular,” repeated gestures are not reordered entirely freely: complexes like those in Example 1 are defined by a basic series of event types, although recurrences are subject to variation.5 The sillabazione scivolata style was originally developed for the vocal parts in Sciarrino’s operas of the 1990s; the composer first used it in Perseo e Andromeda (1990) and perfected it in Luci mie traditrici (1996–98).6 He began to apply the technique to his string writing shortly thereafter. String Quartet No. 7 (1999)—the composer’s first full-length quartet—repurposes a significant amount of material from Luci mie traditrici, and might even be considered a kind of overture to the opera, although Sciarrino makes no mention of this in his program note.7 String Quartet No. 8, from which the three analytical examples in this article are drawn, is written in a similar style but without any clearly recycled material. However, because sillabazione scivolata generates particular kinds of musical gestures, which are then subject to extensive variation, the line between self-referentiality and new [End Page 131] composition (or between “content” and “style”) is blurred in these works. Quotation and allusion have always been part of Sciarrino’s aesthetic practice—his published output includes homages to artists ranging from Hoagy Carmichael to Mozart—and his recent sillabazione scivolata works might be variously interpreted as a new frontier in intertextuality, an abundant flowering of a highly distinctive style, a strategy for compositional efficiency (one that has taken Sciarrino’s oft-noted productivity to new levels), or some mixture of the above. The composer himself does...