The Way of Sound: Music as a Transformative Experience

The belief that music, both as a performing practice and as listening, can function as a way of physical-psycho-spiritual self-transformation crosses eras and cultures. From this perspective the chapter discusses the work of five contemporary classical Italian composers: Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono, Domenico Guaccero, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Dario Buccino. All five organize a music-making and a musical form that urge the performer on one side and the listener on the other, each in their own way also physically involved, to open the perception to free configurations of sound, purified from the emotional and rational encrustations –often historical style elements– which hinder the full experience of the here and now. Consciousness opens to the liberated sound, immerses itself in the sound flow and, conforming to it, thus liberates itself in turn. The different conception of each composer, inherent to both vocal and instrumental performance (as well as possibly to improvisation and theatre), is examined in its technical specificity.