The impossibility of absolute spatial determinations: from Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino's musical aesthetics to Giordano Bruno's innumerable worlds.
Francesca Guerrasio, Claudia Delle Palme · 2008
This paper discusses two works, Luigi Nono's Verso Prometeo (1984) and Salvatore Sciarrino's Lohengrin (1982-4), by reference to Giordano Bruno's cosmology. Bruno broke free of the medieval conception of the world as closed, hierarchical, anthropocentric, and with the earth at its center, to describe a limitless universe, with neither center nor circumference, consisting in an infinity of worlds inhabited by other living species, without hierarchies between them. Similarly Nono's and Sciarrino's works depart from a scripted, denotative, concept of the musical sound and from traditional, hierarchical views of performance conditions and the relationship between composer, performers, and audience. This is achieved through an ecology of (Sciarrino's phrase), which tests the limits of the sound/silence opposition; by relying on electro-acoustic technology; and by looking for new spaces allowing for infinite listening possibilities.