Notes from a fellow

Periodically, I search for composition competitions I would consider entering, primarily those of an instrumental leaning. One of the major ones is the Toru Takemitsu Award, since 1997 an annual prize of several million Yen awarded to a young composer for an orchestral work composed in the spirit of the Japanese composer.  The judges befit the profile of the contest - Ligeti, Dutilleux, Berio, Andriessen, Lindberg, Benjamin, Reich and Lachenmann have all headed the panel during its history.  This year's is a figure I'm less familiar with - Salvatore Sciarrino, an IRCAM alumnus from Italy.  As a shortlist for the 2011 prize has already been drawn up, the website quotes Sig. Sciarrino's comments on the four pieces.  What I find more interesting, however, are his words on the submitted entries overall:

"The bulk of scores presented to the Composition Award offers a panorama of the present cultural situation in its complexity with all the problems that life involves (as it happens in all ages).

In my work of selection, I have been obliged to exclude some scores that were very distinct in their conception but too theoretical as to the use of instruments which made them unsuitable to be presented in a concert.

Many scores insist excessively on a hyperactivity of the orchestra, mainly rhetorical which on the contrary obtains a misleading movement, a feeling of emptiness. We deal with a diffuse aesthetical naivety which may be amazing but in reality is counterproductive.

In general, I have the impression of an improvement in musical competence and widening of information : today the technological means available to composers are much larger. This may also produce a big disadvantage, that puts(sets) combining systems against creative and inventive thinking. So the impulse to fill the page mechanically is present even in manually written works.

Even though as an optimist, I consider creativity inseparable from the human being (and therefore its development unforeseeable), I have to refuse the lack of personal effort. If the compilation is done for itself, if individual answers are silent, then the more important experiences of the modern tradition weaken and disappear. We risk, as Musil wrote, being a laboratory where no experiments are concluded. Continuity is one of the basic assumptions of the survival of culture. 

We have to further engage ourselves in music because the artist's task is to build and discover the new, the dreams, the utopia, the future.

Of course my considerations refer to social topics of such a level that cannot be analyzed on this occasion but that I cannot pretend to ignore."

I find a lot to agree with here. Although his music is unfamiliar to me, philosophically Sciarrino seems very close to my own compositional outlook.  He firstly endorses a point of common sense, although I can't be sure if by 'theoretical as to the use of instruments' he means that the instrumentation of the works was merely too flexible or whether the composer had actually asked for things not technically possible from the players.  The subsequent points are rather more insightful. In discouraging 'hyperactivity', Sciarrino is essentially warning against needless complexity which diminishes musical effectiveness, and more, that such action constitutes a technical error because it weakens the emotive argument of the work.  The undiscerning use of mechanical process, be that in the form of technology or any contrived systems, may also turn out to be detrimental to works because we become too reliant on such schemes and not on creative impulse.  Best of all, he considers a future devoid of 'personal effort' (the original phrase 'mancanza di sforzo personale' - a 'lack of personal force' is perhaps more compelling) antithetical to the deserved progression of culture.  Indeed, the entire thrust of Sciarrino's comments point towards a caveat I hold to be of the highest importance: that the personality and subjective input of the composer, the individual, is vital to the success, survival and value of their work.  I find the penultimate statement to be a pleasingly elegant way of expressing this.