A polyphony of the mind: intertextuality in the music of Salvatore Sciarrino

Bunch, James Denis

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/90482 Copy

Description

Title

A polyphony of the mind: intertextuality in the music of Salvatore Sciarrino

Author(s)

Bunch, James Denis

Issue Date

2016-04-19

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Lund, Erik

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Lund, Erik

Committee Member(s)

• Taylor, Stephen A.
• Browning, Zack
• Kinderman, William

Department of Study

Music

Discipline

Music

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

A.Mus.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Salvatore Sciarrino
• Intertextuality
• Poststructuralism
• Off-modern
• Contemporary classical music
• Avant garde
• Reflective nostalgia
• Misprision
• Musique Concrète Instrumentale
• Structuralism
• Serialism
• Naturalism
• Postmodernism
• Phonematic devices
• Julia Kristeva
• Roland Barthes
• Circular memories
• Formalism
• Music composition
• Semiotics
• New Musicology
• Topic theory
• Anamorphosis
• Sei quartetti brevi
• Efebo con radio
• Music history
• Musicology
• Music analysis
• Darmstadt School
• Structural organicism
• Process
• Hyperrealism
• Simulacrum
• Modernity
• Double
• Lucio Fontana
• Alberto Burri
• Spatialism
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Robert Hatten
• Raymond Monelle
• Melancholy, Melancolia, Nostalgia
• Fragments
• Musical quotation
• Close reading
• Ungrammaticality
• Distortion

Abstract

"This dissertation examines the work of the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947), attempting to find a pathway for analysis that can address both its apparent structural simplicity, and its equally apparent intertextual nature. The first chapter demonstrates that typical methods of structuralist (i.e., formalist / harmonicist) analysis fail to engage with what is most pertinent in Sciarrino’s compositional language. It does this by showing how three different kinds of music that the composer writes, problematize such analysis, concluding that a poststructural alternative that is both semiotically-inflected and intertextual, is necessary. The second chapter explores how such an analysis might be constructed. It examines definitions of structuralism (both Sciarrino's, and the more generally- acknowledged definitions of literary theory and musicology), as well as the influence of poststructural semiotics on the so-called ""New Musicology."" The third chapter acts as a broad and thorough introduction to Sciarrino’s general aesthetic principles and approach to musical material. The fourth and final chapter begins by setting forth a model for intertextual analysis that combines Peircean semiotics, poststructuralist literary theory, and the topic theory of Robert Hatten and Raymond Monelle, and applies it to two works that embody contrasting types of intertextuality in Sciarrino’s oeuvre: Sei Quartetti Brevi, and Efebo con Radio. This pathway into the music, though somewhat unwieldy, enables us to go beyond superficial observations of Sciarrino’s aesthetic and to see how it constitutes a critique of both structural ""systematicity"" and indeterminacy. It offers an important alternative route through musical Modernity, one that rejects an aestheticized Hegelian dialectical understanding of (music) history. In the end, Sciarrino is shown to be not a structuralist or a poststructuralist, but, in the words of Svetlana Boym, an ""Off-Modern"" composer."

Graduation Semester

2016-05

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90482

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 James Dennis Bunch Jr.

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