104 Flutes @ The Australian Flute Festival 2015
“Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni” (The Circle Cuts Sounds) (Australian Premiere Performance)
Featuring soloists Janet McKay, Lamorna Nightingale, Melanie Walters and Tamara Kohler plus 100 flute players from across Australia with staging by Elia Bossard
This performance engaged a very large group of flute players drawn from around the country in an Australian premiere performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni at the High Court of Australia. The work features four soloists forming a circle around the audience and creating an accelerating swirl of sound, only to be interrupted by one hundred 'migrating' performers, who walk in procession through the space, introducing a forward flow of sound and movement while ‘cutting the circle’ of sounds.
Salvatore Sciarrino is a pivotal compositional voice within 20th/21st century flute repertoire. He has a particular affinity with the flute, and his music explores aspects of the flute's voice in a way that is utterly unique. Sciarrino has developed a thorough understanding of the sonic world of the flute and his flute music, in his own words, 'has enticed the instrument into an unknown corner of the world'.
The Cut Ring of Sounds. (notes by Sciarrion)
The genesis of this work intersects with that of another, almost equally unusual one.
In 1985 I received a request for a composition for four pianos, to be finished in a few months. I began to write Noctural Navigation, a gradual and unhaltable development of sonic objects, based on the rotation of sounds around an audience, a particular kind of rotation that spirals in both directions at the same time, but with the same sounds.
We know that composers deliver their music late, and often the delay corresponds with the slowness of presenters in setting up concerts. In this case at the last minute, and due to the sweet and perfidious balking of one of the pianists, the whole project collapsed and Nocturnal Navigation was never completed. What remains of it is only the sump of a score on my shelf, mutely awaiting its revenge.
Now we jump ahead a few years.
An overflowing number of young people take up the study of the flute, which unfortunately leaves them underemployed. Confronted with this as a starting point, I conceived the idea of a migration of sounds, that is a promenade of generations of simple sounds, carried along by a sea of moving flutists.
The sound of great masses is fascinating. Infinite examples can be found in nature, just think of birds, crickets, a crowded market, traffic, rain.
I had the idea of applying the double rotation to four solo flutists, this time with sounds of brief and even point-like duration, allowing for a swirling acceleration.
Then the soloists create a sonic environment around the audience. At first intersecting responses echo from extreme opposite corners, and when the sounds begin to revolve, to couple up, and to multiply, we can push ourselves to the point where the coordinates of time and space are lost. The migrating flutes cut a diagonal in the sonic space, always advancing in the same direction and finally suggesting an uninterrupted flow of people.
Circularity of time and space, where the metaphor of the journey opens up a furrow.
What else?
A white butterfly crosses a field, it seems to flutter at random. Instead it has a precise goal and it is not alone.
There are no kinds of living creatures that do not change their location from time to time. Humans migrate too, and in recent times we have witnessed events we thought had disappeared from history. Dramatic events: our species is in fact restrained by a powerful opposing instinct, the homing instinct, the instinct for stability, the instinct to maintain society inside an impossible equilibrium. Impossible? Yes–life is change.
Now the rhythm of our migrations is much reduced. We don’t all succeed. But anyone seized by the fever to depart cannot easily resist it. To him, to us, we say buon viaggio. He will discover a different music, the unknown, another country.