Salvatore Sciarrino

Salvatore Sciarrino (b Palermo, 4 April 1947). Italian composer. A precociously gifted child, he at first gravitated towards the visual arts: he displayed a talent for figurative painting by the age of four and by the age of ten was guiding himself towards ‘informal’ abstraction.

But he found himself increasingly fascinated and challenged by music and so began experimenting with composition in 1959 under the guidance of Antonino Titone. Within three years he had achieved a first public performance at the 1962 Palermo New Music Week. A brief academic training under Turi Belfiore in 1964 provided the only interruption to this autodidactic progress, crowned by public performances in Rome (Quartetto II) and Palermo (Aka Aka to) in 1968. In 1969 he moved to Rome, where he continued to pursue his own path under the aegis of Franco Evangelisti whose course on electronic music at the Accademia di S Cecilia he attended. He quickly developed one of the most distinctive (and widely imitated) voices of his generation, making an obsessive, but impeccably calculated language from sound resources marginalized by previous generations such as string and wind harmonics and ancillary performance noises. At first these were deployed in baroque abundance – and to striking critical acclaim in his first theatre work, Amore e Psyche (1972). But during the 1970s, Sciarrino became increasingly concerned to pare down his resources to a characteristic play between sound and silence that has underpinned much of his subsequent work. This was explored extensively in the daring Un'immagine di Arpocrite (1974–9), a 45-minute adagio for piano, orchestra and chorus.