Salvatore Sciarrino / Luca Francesconi

Is it permissible to speak of absolute music? Can pure music exist, then? No, it cannot. Not even evoked by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry: if anything, the atmosphere in which the music blossoms is a rarefied one. Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Claude Debussy, Fryderyk Chopin were important protagonists in the history of music because they challenged the concept of absoluteness through (re)producing the sobbing of the melody caused by anxiety, the rustling of the leaves in a gentle breeze, the sound of the sirens and signals of the boats on the Seine or the trumpet blasts. 
Nocturnes welcomes the sounds of the world, without being either descriptive or absolute music. If anything, it is organic music that wants to ask us certain questions. Although some elements are recalled across the piece from one point to the next, the composition is made up of three distinct, juxtaposed fragments, without separation or interruption. Like phases from a much broader future, of which we have only a partial vision.

Salvatore Sciarrino

Discontinuity, not to be obliged to follow the binary thought of rational logic, the obsession of Socrates with finding meaning. There is also much more, suspended around us. In every piece I have composed over the years, I have noticed a necessary, perhaps desperate search for construction, building, for logical consistency in a coherent structure. My own nature is actually quite different. But this effort countered the landscape of ruins left by the previous generation. But I realised that episodes of a perhaps unconscious suspension of continuity emerged every time. Spontaneous epiphanies that defied the teleological effort. Time stopped and one felt lifted into a dimension of simple presence. Similar to a form of trance. There was a mystery there. Whether it was a stupor-like, silent suspension or a chthonic, violent Dionysian dance, the principle was the same. This dimension screams in our bodies. So I looked for these moments in all the pieces I wrote and decided to dwell in some of them. And secretly to see what happens. The scream, the braying of the donkey is perhaps the most convincing demonstration of the existence of God.

Luca Francesconi