Vol. 4: September 14 - QuietTunes IV: Like Distant Volcanoes
Today, we’re looking at Salvatore Sciarrino’s All’aure in una lontananza from his collection of solo flute pieces, L’opera per flauto.
This work touches on some important aspects of Quiet Music: time, intimacy, and magnification.
Salvatore Sciarrino - All’aure in una lontananza
Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s solo flute collection, L’opera per flauto, is a seminal work of the twentieth century: airy, gestural, and full of new ideas and techniques. All’aure in una lontananza (To the Air/Aura in the Distance) is the first work Sciarrino wrote. It is characteristic of the set, and of much of Sciarrino’s output, in that it is quiet, agile, and long, with brilliant, piercing moments which cut through. In some interviews, Sciarrino talks about those moments as ‘distant volcanoes erupting.’
At nearly 18 minutes, this is a long piece, made longer by the singularly-focused repetitive nature of Sciarrino’s writing. For the first four minutes, not much is heard except key clicks and the occasional unstable high notes, created by trilling on the same harmonic produced by different root fingerings. At around four minutes, the flautist blows sharply into their instrument, creating what’s called a jet whistle, an intense air attack. This, in most spaces and with the reverb on this recording, lingers, like the shock of a punch. (I’ve heard this piece a few times and still jump at that moment!) There’s a brief exploration of some other rhetoric, some descending gestures, but soon we’re back literally at the beginning repeating the same large expanse exactly. After, the piece begins to open up: we hear more jet whistles, greater pitch content, directed gestures, and more varied phrase lengths. However, there is always a delicacy with this music, sort of like eating a small-portioned dessert at a high-end restaurant: you make every bite last as long as possible.
That ‘long as possible’ is important in fostering a listening to Sciarrino. Much like the ambient music we listened to last time, there is space here for you to consider the sound, to be surprised, react, and readjust, and to wander. The repeated section, which goes unnoticed as it’s a large, indistinct chunk of music, still allows us to understand more of how the music operates. This is music we can digest while listening to it, rather than music which overwhelms us with information and narrative. It’s one of those quiet rhetorics we discussed with Abrahamsen.
The sound-world has musical aspects of quiet as well: it’s airy and delicate, with static pitches which just seem out of reach so that we have to strain our ears to hear, the sharp jet whistles give a violent version of the Music Box Effect. This delicacy and distance is like listening through a monitor for the sound of a baby sleeping (finally) or picking up some fragile spaghetti art: our awareness of its fragility attunes us to our interaction with it. We are more aware of ourselves and the music because it is not forcing us to be aware of it. When there are moments of explosive volume, we are more affected because we are so invested in listening closely. When those fade, we have to re-adjust to the quiet, make a new piece with the fragility which, before was just our own listening, now has a danger to it. That danger, that unpredictability, breeds a deeper listening in which we try to balance our participation in the music with our anticipation of a shock. The disturbed quiet puts us in an intimate distance with the sound.
In the long, repetitive time of this piece, our ears explore the sound. We find not just the musical attributes, the phrases, gestures, notes, and sounds, but also we hear the flautist themselves, their breath, their fingers. We hear the production of the sound alongside the side. This is made possible only by the extremely low volume of the techniques, which brings the production and the result into a sonic parity. We are both transported to a fantastical realm of distant volcanic sounds, but also brought intimately close to the human who brought us there, like making small talk with the ferryman to Hades. The quiet techniques allow us to hear the human elements which are normally hidden behind the sound itself.
This is a phenomenal piece. It’s simple in concept, but with enough time given to explore the beauty, variation, and nuance of the thing itself, like staring at one painting for hours in a museum and developing multiple relationships with the work. It’s quietness is the object and it attunes us to the object itself.