Instrumental Projection in Sciarrino

The first volume of L’Opera per flauto (1977–1981), almost entirely dedicated to Roberto Fabbriciani, had constituted an unprecedented field of experimentation, opening up for the flute a radically transformed sonic domain. The second volume (1991–2000), largely entrusted to Mario Caroli and Manuel Zurria, extended this gesture by consolidating and diversifying the instrumental resources involved, while confirming the importance of dialogue with new performers. The third volume, whose initial phase unfolded between 2014 and 2020, continues this process by situating it within a more recent generation of flutists, among them Andrea Biagini⁸ and the author of the present article.

These six initial pieces constitute the matrix of Volume III: they respond to a range of institutional commissions and trace a map in which competitions, festivals, and individual artistic collaborations intersect, made possible by these institutional frameworks. They testify to the evolution of Sciarrino’s relationship with his performers and lay the foundations for the critical process of rewriting undertaken from 2022 onward.

The first of these pieces is Autostrada prima di Babilonia (2014), written as the compulsory contemporary work for the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 2015. It confronts all candidates with a virtuosity that is not limited to pure technical display, but involves a virtuosity of attacks, timbral research, and embouchure precision — all central elements in Sciarrino’s writing. The piece thus requires performers to assimilate these techniques in order to bring out their musical and poetic dimension. The issue, then, is not merely to meet an instrumental challenge, but to celebrate the musicality of the writing by moving beyond the competitive framework in which the piece was conceived.

Also in 2014, Sciarrino composed Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio, initially intended for a flute fitted with a glissando headjoint and premiered by Erik Drescher⁹ at the Klangspuren Festival¹⁰. This first version reveals the composer’s curiosity toward a new technical device, which seemed to offer unprecedented possibilities for sonic fluidity. Yet this curiosity was very quickly accompanied by a form of disappointment: the timbral instability inherent in the device, together with the compression effect produced during glissandi, appeared to him as limitations that compromised the clarity and precision of the instrumental projection he sought. It was probably this dissatisfaction that led him, in the same year, to write a second version of the piece for flute with a standard headjoint, dedicated to the author of the present article. This gesture should not be understood as a simple return to an earlier state, nor as a technical reduction, but rather as a way of reaffirming a fundamental principle of his writing: an instrumental projection grounded in sonic and poetic imagination, rather than in the exploitation of a particular device (Example 2).

Example 2. Salvatore Sciarrino, Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio: comparison between the first version for flute with glissando headjoint (2014) and the revised version for standard flute 

In 2017, the Milano Musica Festival commissioned Un capitolo mancante, premiered that same year by the author of the present article. This piece marks an important stage: for the first time in Sciarrino’s writing for flute, the performer is asked to sing and play simultaneously (Example 3). Sciarrino thus introduces a fragile polyphony between voice and instrument, in which the vocal timbre intertwines with the breath and resonance of the flute. Beyond this fleeting polyphony, however, the voice is above all used as a means of saturating the sound originating from the instrument: it acts as an additional layer that destabilizes and enriches the timbre, opening up a sonic field previously unexplored in his flute writing. This approach is accompanied by the search for new forms of shadow clusters, in which polyphony emerges from a superimposition of unstable lines (Example 4).

Example 3. Salvatore Sciarrino, Un capitolo mancante: score incipit

Example 4. Salvatore Sciarrino, Un capitolo mancante: score excerpt

After this unprecedented exploration of the fusion between flute and voice, Sciarrino chose in 2018 to follow a different path: no longer the superimposition of sonic flows, but the pursuit of instrumental virtuosity pushed to its utmost limit. Cresce veloce un cristallo, commissioned by the Louth Contemporary Music Society¹¹ and premiered in Dundalk in June 2018, brings classical virtuosity to a level unmatched in the corpus for solo flute. In it, Sciarrino combines key trills with fundamentals and harmonics fingered only with the left hand, producing extreme speed and a partially unpredictable result. Far from being a gratuitous display, this technique becomes a metaphor for the process of crystalline growth: sound develops within an organic temporality, escaping the performer’s total control.

After this demanding piece, which constitutes one of the summits of Sciarrinian virtuosity, Fogli per giovani fauni (2019) seems to adopt a more pedagogical perspective. Commissioned by the Festival delle Nazioni¹² in Città di Castello and premiered by Andrea Biagini, it consists of three short pieces: Wind’s Gate, Canzone che vola, canzone perduta, and Sur des gammes chinoises. Through this triptych, Sciarrino offers fragments designed to introduce instrumentalists still relatively unfamiliar with his language. Yet this apparent simplicity should not mislead us: behind the relative accessibility of the material, one finds a richness of writing and a timbral refinement that place these pages firmly within the continuity of the cycle. More than an exercise, these fogli reveal a reflection on how to make his language accessible without impoverishing it.

This pedagogically oriented parenthesis is only one stage in a trajectory that, as early as the following year, returns to a radical intensity. With Un Tibetano a Parigi (nuovi skyline da respirare), commissioned by Milano Musica and premiered in October 2020, Sciarrino returns to a dense, rapid, and energetic writing, marked by the virtuosity of articulations and extreme speed. The piece experiments with unprecedented temporalities before finding its balance in a more rigorous structure. Here, the composer explores another form of rhythmic dynamism, in which instability and pulsation combine in continuous tension.

The six works composed between 2014 and 2020 thus constitute the matrix of the third volume. Each belongs to a specific network of commissions and collaborations, revealing the extent to which the project is bound both to its institutional context and to the composer’s imagination. Yet the trajectory is equally shaped by the relationship with performers. This set of pieces prepares the ground for the critical work that Sciarrino would undertake from 2022 onward, when he decided to reassess and profoundly transform this corpus. Over the decades, Sciarrino has indeed maintained a constant dialogue with several generations of flutists, each of whom has contributed to expanding instrumental means and redefining the relationship between conception and realization. This dialogue, inscribed both in continuity and in renewal, makes L’Opera per flauto far more than a cycle of solo works: it makes it the living witness of a shared history between a composer and his performers.

This history is reflected in the succession of pieces, their dates, and their dedications, summarized in Table 1.

This evolution leads to a central question: how should one understand the place occupied by the performer in Sciarrino’s creative process? For if each new generation of performers is called upon to extend and transform his language, it is because the writing itself rests on a singular conception, in which the musical idea is projected beyond instrumental contingencies. This dynamic finds its principle in a central notion of Sciarrino’s thought: instrumental projection.

Title	Date	Dedication	Volume
All'aure in una lontananza	1977	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Hermes	1984	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi?	1985	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Canzona di ringraziamento	1989	Goffredo Petrassi	I
Venere che le Grazie la fioriscono	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
L'orizzonte luminoso di Aton	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Fra i testi dedicati alle nubi	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Addio case del vento	1993	Roberto per Marina	II
L'orologio di Bergson	1999	Mario Caroli	II
Morte Tamburo	1999	Mario Caroli	II
Immagine fenicia	2000	Manuel Zurria	II
Lettera degli antipodi portata dal vento	2000	György Kurtág	II
Autostrada prima di Babilonia	2014	Matteo Cesari	III
Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio	2014	Matteo Cesari	III
Un capitolo mancante	2017	Matteo Cesari	III
Cresce veloce un cristallo	2018	Matteo Cesari	III
Fogli per giovani fauni	2019	Andrea Biagini	III
Un Tibetano a Parigi (nuovi skyline da respirare)	2020	Matteo Cesari	III

3. Instrumental Projection and Temporality in Salvatore Sciarrino

3.1. “Projection in Time” according to Salvatore Sciarrino

Salvatore Sciarrino develops a singular conception of musical creation, which he describes as “projection in time”. Through this notion, the composer suggests that, at the moment of writing, the musical idea is projected towards a potential future. For him, this is a form of creative anticipation: “I do not write the impossible, but I allow myself to come close to it. To confront what does not yet exist is, in a sense, to confront the impossible”¹⁵. Sciarrino thus imagines sonorities and instrumental gestures that do not yet exist, leaving it to the performer and to time to realise them fully.

He explains: “I imagined this piece, I wrote it and realised it. Then, over time, the interpretation evolved. The performance, the details, did not become fixed immediately — it took years for them to reach their full potential”¹⁶.

This attitude reveals a musical thought in which the idea precedes technique: Sciarrino imagines sonorities that do not yet exist, whose full concretisation is entrusted to time and to interpretative experience. In this sense, “projection in time” goes beyond the mere composition of a work: it is a vision of the creative act as a long-term plan, whose full realisation unfolds progressively through the work of performers and the evolution of their abilities.

Sciarrino distinguishes two fundamental moments in this process:

• Composition, which is a conceptual project freed from existing limits: the composer grants himself the freedom to conceive sonorities or gestures beyond what has already been played.
• Realisation, which falls to the performer and involves technical research and the adaptation of the instrument in order to bring these ideas to life.

This dissociation is not a fracture but, on the contrary, the site of a deferred collaboration between composer and performer. Sciarrino emphasises that instrumentalists often show an initial resistance when faced with an unfamiliar language that unsettles their habits. Yet, with experience and time, these technical obstacles become the vector of an expressive transformation. In other words, the challenge posed to the performer catalyses an evolution of instrumental playing and enriches the expressivity of the music.

By defining composition as “a great design”¹⁷ oriented towards the future, Sciarrino inscribes musical creation within a long duration. The notion of instrumental projection in time implies that a work is not fixed at the moment of its publication, but continues to realise and refine itself through successive performances. This model has profound consequences for contemporary aesthetics: it transforms our relationship to sound, silence, and virtuosity. In short, projection in time allows, according to Sciarrino, for a renewal of instrumental language, by expanding the horizon of the possible and involving the performer in a process of metamorphosis.

3.2. The Role of the Performer in Contemporary Music

4.3. Towards a Final Version: Aesthetic Transformations and the Completion of Volume III

Between 2022 and 2023, Salvatore Sciarrino undertook a profound revision of the six pieces of the third volume. The degree of modification varies from one work to another: some were condensed or synthesised, others entirely transformed. These were not mere cosmetic adjustments, but structural interventions whenever these proved necessary in order to recover the founding idea of each piece. Sciarrino specifies that his aim was not to broaden his aesthetic horizon, but, on the contrary, to remain faithful to his original conception. Thus a new definitive version of Volume III was born, the result of the composer’s critical introspection on his own work.

Concretely, the revision affected the sonic materials, the form, and even the titles of the pieces. Several works saw their structure purified and recentred: entire passages judged redundant were removed, while elsewhere initially disjointed elements were merged in order to strengthen the continuity of the musical discourse. In Philharmonie, un pomeriggio d’allarme ai parcheggi — the new title of the former Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio — Sciarrino thus reorganised the work from top to bottom, favouring a more legible and coherent writing where the first version had juxtaposed disparate ideas. Elsewhere, the modifications are more measured: Il capitolo riemerso underwent only adjustments of dynamics and tempo, although the addition of a few introductory bars nevertheless reinforces its poetic impetus.

In other cases, the transformation is spectacular: Un Tibetano a Parigi, the final piece of the original cycle, was metamorphosed to the point of becoming Nuvole impazzite sulla città, with a new central sonic material — a rapidly articulated, mutating breath — entirely replacing the syncopated tongue-ram technique characteristic of the first version. Sciarrino eliminated the contradictory tempo indications and the complex notational devices he had initially experimented with during the preparatory phases, such as the cartigli grigi, a kind of grey cartouche outside time, which were ultimately judged superfluous. The result is a piece that is more homogeneous from a temporal point of view, in which the question of multiple temporalities — formerly problematic — is resolved organically.

The example of Ai futuri fauni is equally revealing of Sciarrino’s approach. This work, initially entitled Fogli per giovani fauni, was presented as a set of three movements, the first two of which — Wind’s Gate and Canzona che vola, canzone perduta — were based on very similar gestures. Sciarrino perceived in this a lack of inventiveness and therefore fused and rethought these two sections: in the 2022 version, the first movement becomes Sigla, a short introduction anticipating elements of the following parts, while the second — now in Italian — is entitled La soglia del vento, a synthesis of the two initial movements purified of any unnecessary refrain. The third movement retains its concluding role, under a slightly revised title, Per l’aria, canzone ti perdi, instead of …canzone perduta, and pushes further the exploitation of phantom clusters, those very soft breath-chords that float at the threshold of silence.

The whole gains markedly in unity and interest: what was previously only a sequence of leaves intended for young “fauns” — in the mythopoetic sense of the faun, a figure deeply associated with the imaginary of the flute — now presents itself as a coherent triptych directed towards future “fauns”, in other words towards a new generation of flautists initiated into this demanding language.

As one can see, Sciarrino sometimes preserved the root of the idea — for example, Babilonia remains present in the first title, but is brought to the foreground instead of Autostrada — while at other times he opted for entirely new images: Nuvole impazzite sulla città recalls nothing of the original Tibetano a Parigi. These title changes clearly reflect the new poetic orientations of each revised piece. They also symbolically indicate that these works, although derived from the previous versions, are now considered by their creator to be definitively accomplished. The comparison between old and new titles allows us to measure the extent of these transformations. Table 2 offers a synthetic summary.

Original title	New title (rewriting)
Autostrada prima di Babilonia (2014)	Babilonia, autostrade, rifiuti (2022)
Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio (2014)	Philharmonie, un pomeriggio d'allarme ai parcheggi (2022)
Un capitolo mancante (2017)	Il capitolo riemerso (2022)
Cresce veloce un cristallo (2018)	Studio trascendentale (Come cresce un cristallo?) (2022)
Fogli per giovani fauni (2019)	Ai futuri fauni  (2022)
Un Tibetano a Parigi (nuovi skyline da respirare) (2020)	Nuvole impazzite sulla città (2023)

Moreover, Sciarrino did not merely rewrite the existing pieces: he added a new one to crown the cycle. In 2025, he composed Arietta, a seventh piece completing Volume III. This Arietta — as its name indicates — is a short piece of a singing character, serving as an epilogue to the collection. It brings an intimate final touch, like the last breath of this long adventure for solo flute begun almost fifty years earlier.

Finally, in a gesture that reveals particular care, Sciarrino agreed to include an appendix bringing together three pieces outside the cycle, the last of which functions as a historical wink. This appendix takes the form of a farewell addressed to the instrument: it integrates pages that would probably otherwise have remained unpublished. It includes 2 Esercizi and Canone per due flauti — two brief pedagogical duos testifying to the composer’s didactic research. Above all, it also includes Morgana (1983), a miniature for solo flute that Sciarrino had never previously published. It was on my initiative that Morgana was resurrected and placed in the appendix, since it represents a fascinating missing link: written forty years before the revision of Volume III, Morgana already prefigures the use of breath clusters that Sciarrino would later develop, notably in Hermes (1984). Including this unpublished youthful piece alongside the very latest compositions of 2025 creates a striking temporal bridge within L’Opera per flauto. Sciarrino closes the book by looking back, reminding us where he began — a gesture of humility and of bringing the circle full.

The rewriting and final supplement to Volume III should therefore not be understood as a gesture of definitive closure, but as a stage within an evolutionary process. Sciarrino does not merely make corrections: he profoundly reconfigures an already constituted cycle, revealing that L’Opera per flauto remains a living work, open to its own transformations. This work underlines the constant tension between continuity and rupture, fidelity to an initial thought and critical distance from the past.

Yet this revision does not affect the scores alone: it also modifies the performer’s posture. To confront a new version is not only to learn another form of writing, but also to accept the need to unlearn. Gestures, automatisms, and bodily memory must be rethought; certain habits must be erased in order to make room for others. The performer is thus placed in a space of tension that mirrors that of the composer: between memory and forgetting, fidelity and erasure.

It is precisely to this shared space — where the composer’s projection and the performer’s transformed memory intersect, where the act of writing meets that of forgetting in order to play anew — that the following chapter will be devoted.

5. Rewriting as Perceptual and Poetic Experience

5.1. From Textual Transformation to the Transformation of Listening

The revision undertaken by Sciarrino between 2022 and 2023 is not limited to work on the score: it profoundly modifies the listening experience of the cycle. By tightening the forms, clarifying the transitions, and eliminating certain redundancies, the composer transformed the overall perception of the works. Where the first version could seem fragmentary or excessive, the second appears more condensed, more fluid, and endowed with greater continuity.

Thus, Autostrada prima di Babilonia became Babilonia, autostrade, rifiuti. The shift in the title corresponds to a perceptual recentering: what was previously only a linear path — the autostrada — becomes a more complex cartography in which mythological grandeur (Babilonia), urban flow (autostrade), and material triviality (rifiuti) coexist. The listener now perceives the piece as a multiple sonic space, in which registers of timbre and breath intertwine within a dramaturgy broader than that of the initial version. This type of transformation cannot be reduced to a change of title or detail: it directs listening towards an expanded perception, in which the instrumental gesture becomes the reflection of a poetic cartography.

Similarly, Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio, now Philharmonie, un pomeriggio d’allarme ai parcheggi, changes its focus. The first version foregrounded the anecdote of a singular sonic event — an alarm in a prosaic place — whereas the new version broadens the perspective towards a diffuse, spatialised tension: the Philharmonie as architectural space, the parcheggi as shared urban space. In listening, this shift translates into greater continuity between sequences and into a dramatic energy that is no longer limited to a succession of episodes, but extends into a genuine architecture of resonances (Example 5).

Example 5: Salvatore Sciarrino, Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio (2014) and Philharmonie, un pomeriggio d’allarme ai parcheggi (2022): comparison between the first original version and the revised version

With Il capitolo riemerso — formerly Un capitolo mancante — the transformation reinforced fluidity and continuity. The superimposition of voice and flute, which in the first version produced punctual collisions, is now inscribed within a more organic line. In listening, the transformation is clear: the piece ceases to appear as a succession of fragments and becomes a continuous narration, in which the voice acts as a poetic saturation of the instrumental sound rather than as an external commentary.

One of the major features of the rewriting is condensation. This process is fully inscribed within the logic of instrumental projection that runs through Sciarrino’s writing: what, in the first version, appeared as an intuition still left open, finds in the revision a clarified and concentrated form. Sciarrino thus removed passages judged repetitive or too close to gestures already used elsewhere. This reduction does not impoverish the music: on the contrary, it makes it denser and clearer. The listener perceives a discourse freed from its hesitations, concentrated on the essential.

This logic of condensation is particularly evident in Ai futuri fauni, derived from the reworking of Fogli per giovani fauni. The fusion of the first two movements into a single section — La soglia del vento — eliminates repetitions and creates an unprecedented continuity, while the shadow clusters assume a central role in the final movement. The work no longer appears as a fragmented pedagogical suite, but as a tightened poetic triptych, perceived as a unified architecture.

As for Nuvole impazzite sulla città — formerly Un Tibetano a Parigi — the logic of condensation translates into a perceptual intensification. The 2023 version renounces the rhythmic fluctuations of the first experiments in favour of a tightened writing of rapid, articulated breaths. The result is a continuous and unstable energy, in which dramatic tension is concentrated within an uninterrupted pulsation (Example 6).

Example 6: Salvatore Sciarrino, Un Tibetano a Parigi (2020) and Nuvole impazzite sulla città (2023): comparison between the first original version and the revised version

5.2. Memory and Forgetting: Between Perception and Interpretation

Rewriting does not only modify works in their present form: it also acts upon auditory memory. For listeners familiar with the first versions, the new scores produce an impression of familiar strangeness. The materials are recognisable, but reordered, condensed, sometimes displaced or transformed. This sensation engages a double mode of listening, oscillating between the memory of the old and the discovery of the new. Yet these transformations, while audible in the score, also unfold within memory — the memory of the listener as well as that of the performer.

This is the case with Studio trascendentale (Come cresce un cristallo?), derived from Cresce veloce un cristallo. The fundamental gestures — key trills, harmonic passages — remain present, but are reorganised within a different, more flexible temporality. The listener has the impression of encountering familiar material, but transfigured, as if contemplating a crystal under a new light: the same edges of the crystal shine differently, the reflections deepen.

This dynamic reveals a particular poetics in Sciarrino: the work does not exist only as a fixed text, but as a living memory in transformation. Each new version enters into dialogue with the previous one, and listening takes place in this in-between space, where one compares, consciously or not, what one hears with what one believes one remembers.

This memorial dimension particularly involves the performer, who finds himself placed in a singular position in relation to the new version. Having closely accompanied the genesis of the first versions, I was the first witness to their metamorphosis. My body, my fingers, my breath had retained the imprint of the instrumental gestures of that time: a bodily memory made of automatisms and reflexes, inscribed through the course of rehearsals. When Sciarrino proposed the new versions, this memory proved to be both a resource and an obstacle: a resource, because it immediately allowed me to perceive the gaps between old and new; an obstacle, because it constantly drew me back towards abolished instrumental paths, as if my hands were replaying, in spite of myself, a vanished score.

I had to learn to compose with this tension: to recognise what my body remembered, but also to accept forgetting it, or at least transforming it. The definitive version did not merely invite me to read a new score; it obliged me to unlearn certain gestures, to suspend my habits, to let my ears guide my hands through a partially unknown sonic space. In this sense, the performer’s posture becomes an exercise in balance between fidelity and renunciation. Fidelity to the spirit of the work, which requires reinvention in order to remain faithful. Renunciation of past certainties, so that the music may recover its original impetus.

This experience led me to perceive from within what Sciarrino means by instrumental projection. The rewritten works were not only intended to exceed the technical limits of the moment; they required from me an act of rediscovery, a form of naïve listening, as if I were encountering them for the first time. I had to make myself available, no longer simply to work on a piece, but to allow it to come into being again. Thus, bodily memory is not denied: it is transformed into a malleable material that enters into dialogue with novelty. The past persists, but it is precisely by accepting and overcoming it that the revised work can unfold in all its freshness.

5.3. Closure as Opening

Finally, the reworking of the third volume is not limited to a tightening of the existing pieces. It also introduces an epilogue and an appendix, which modify the overall perception of the cycle.

Arietta (2025), brief and song-like, acts as a suspension rather than as a conclusion. Its apparent simplicity, after so much condensed complexity, opens a space of appeasement that does not bring the cycle to an end, but leaves it suspended, like one final breath (Example 7).

Example 7: Salvatore Sciarrino, Arietta: opening of the score

The appendix, comprising 2 Esercizi, Canone per due flauti, and Morgana (1983), functions in turn as a farewell rather than as a definitive conclusion. These peripheral or earlier pieces do not extend the cycle according to a logic of expansion, but grant it a retrospective reading. They place youthful pages and pedagogical miniatures alongside the most recent works, creating an effect of temporal closure. For the listener, this appendix is not a superfluous addition, but a form of emphasis: it recalls where this writing comes from and shows how, even in its most modest forms, it already contains the essence of Sciarrino’s sonic universe.

With the premiere of this revised volume at Milano Musica in April 2025, it is now possible to measure its scope concretely. The test of the concert confirmed what the score had suggested: greater formal density, increased continuity, and, above all, a renewed poetic power. Far from appearing as a correction of details, the rewriting transformed the perception of the cycle as a whole. It clarified its dramaturgy while strengthening its fragile and intense evocative power.

For the performer, this first public performance was an opportunity to experience from within the tension between memory and forgetting, between the bodily persistence of the earlier versions and the need to embrace the new ones fully. For the audience, it opened an unprecedented horizon of listening, in which the familiar and the unknown are superimposed. The revised L’Opera per flauto no longer presents itself as a completed sum, but as a living palimpsest, bearing witness to the path of a composer who does not hesitate to revisit his own past in order better to reveal its future.

6. Conclusion and Perspectives

At the end of this journey through Salvatore Sciarrino’s L’Opera per flauto — from the first sonic experiments of 1977 to the critical rereading completed in 2025 — several major conclusions emerge. We first retraced the progressive evolution of the cycle in Part 1, showing how a pioneering work, All’aure in una lontananza (1977), inaugurated a vast creative laboratory for the flute. Over nearly half a century, each new work extended and transformed the preceding ones, leading to a corpus of twenty-two pieces divided into three volumes. Through its unprecedented scale and its long-term coherence, this flute cycle now stands as a reference corpus for the contemporary flute, ensuring the vitality and continued relevance of this language.

Part 2 then examined in detail the six works composed between 2014 and 2020, which formed the matrix of the third volume. This analysis revealed the diversity of technical and poetic approaches explored by Sciarrino during these years: virtuosity of breath and attack, vocal experimentation, the search for crystalline velocity, and a pedagogical dimension. We emphasised how each of these works responded to a specific commissioning context and to collaboration with new dedicatees, indirectly sketching the portrait of a generation of performers — including the author of this study — committed to expanding the instrument’s possibilities. This group of works thus prepared the ground for the later process of revision, while laying the foundations for the aesthetic and technical questions that would subsequently be revisited.

After deepening, in Part 3, the notion of instrumental projection — a central concept in Sciarrino’s thought — we saw how it illuminates both the role of the performer and the dynamics of rewriting. Beyond the case of Sciarrino alone, this dynamic sheds broader light on contemporary music: it reveals a renewed way of conceiving the relationship between composer and performer, no longer founded on the faithful execution of a closed text, but on a shared process of exploration and actualisation. As a performer closely associated with this creation, I myself witnessed this dynamic, in which Sciarrino’s initial musical idea calls upon the commitment of the instrumentalist in order to reach its full potential over the course of years.

 

The analysis in Part 4 then focused on the genesis of the rewriting of the third volume (2022–2025), and on the transformation of Sciarrino’s relationship to his own creative past. We emphasised that this rewriting constitutes an unprecedented critical act on the composer’s part, rather than a simple minor revision. Dissatisfied with the initial form of certain pieces, Sciarrino deemed it necessary to take them up again and recast them in order to affirm their essence more clearly. Returning, several years later, to scores that had already circulated, he sought to dispel the veil that covered his initial ideas and to restore their original rightness. This act of questioning was carried out in complete autonomy — the author of these lines, although dedicatee and occasional technical adviser, remaining at a distance from the content of the revision. Chapter 4 also highlighted the editorial aspect of the project: the absence of a unified publication paradoxically gave Sciarrino the time to rethink his work before its definitive fixation in print. The rewriting of Volume III was thus accompanied by the desire to create a unified and durable edition, bringing together the revised pieces, the new Arietta (2025), and a historical appendix — including Morgana (1983) — within a coherent and publishable whole. In doing so, Sciarrino turned back towards his own past: by integrating an unpublished youthful work and entering into dialogue with his earlier creations, he brought the cycle full circle while opening it towards a broader temporal perspective.

The fifth part of the article, finally, proposed an aesthetic and perceptual analysis of this rewriting, focusing on the experience of listening and on the performer’s posture when faced with the metamorphosis of the work. From a formal and auditory point of view, the new version of Volume III is characterised by a condensation of materials and a clarification of discourse, which profoundly transform the perception of the cycle. Where the first versions could appear fragmentary or excessively abundant, the rewritten versions offer more fluid structures, increased continuity, and a more concentrated expressive density. Listening is thereby transformed: the listener now moves through a more coherent sonic space, while experiencing a strange sensation of transformed déjà vu — an oscillation between the memory of the old versions and the discovery of the new.

From the point of view of interpretation, we explored the tension between memory and forgetting implied by rewriting (Chapter 5.2). The performer familiar with the first versions must unlearn certain embodied reflexes and accept the need to rediscover the work as if for the first time. Having closely accompanied this process myself, I had to find a delicate balance between fidelity to the initial spirit of the pieces and the renunciation of past habits, in order to make myself available to the novelty of the text. This introspective experience brought to light, from within, the living dimension of the work: the score is not a fixed object, but a palimpsest bearing memorial strata that must sometimes be erased or rewritten in order better to reveal its deeper truth. The premiere of the revised Volume III at Milano Musica in April 2025 confirmed these observations on stage, revealing a clarified dramaturgy and renewed poetic power, perceived by both audience and performer within this dialogue between the old and the new. This reconfiguration leads to a definitive version of the cycle, summarised in Table 3.

Title	Date	Dedication	Volume
All'aure in una lontananza	1977	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Hermes	1984	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi?	1985	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Canzona di ringraziamento	1989	Goffredo Petrassi	I
Venere che le Grazie la fioriscono	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
L'orizzonte luminoso di Aton	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Fra i testi dedicati alle nubi	1989	Roberto Fabbriciani	I
Addio case del vento	1993	Roberto per Marina	II
L'orologio di Bergson	1999	Mario Caroli	II
Morte Tamburo	1999	Mario Caroli	II
Immagine fenicia	2000	Manuel Zurria	II
Lettera degli antipodi portata dal vento	2000	György Kurtág	II
Babilonia, autostrade, rifiuti	2014-2022	Matteo Cesari	III
Philharmonie, un pomeriggio d'allarme ai parcheggi	2014-2023	Matteo Cesari	III
Il capitolo riemerso	2017-2022	Matteo Cesari	III
Studio trascendentale (Come cresce un cristallo?)	2018-2022	Matteo Cesari	III
Ai futuri fauni	2019-2022	Andrea Biagini	III
Nuvole impazzite sulla città	2020-2023	Matteo Cesari	III
Arietta	2025	Georg Friedrich Haas	III
2 Esercizi	2023	-	III
Canone per due flauti	2023	Marco Momi	III
Morgana	1983	-	III

Sciarrino’s approach now raises broader aesthetic issues for contemporary music. By choosing to reconfigure a cycle more than forty years after its inception, the composer first redefines the very notion of the cycle: L’Opera per flauto no longer appears as a closed collection of works arranged chronologically, but as an evolving organism — a cycle capable of remaining open until it reaches a definitive coherence. This original position sheds new light on compositional practice: it reminds us that creation can be a prolonged act of reflection upon oneself, in which the composer enters into dialogue with his own past. By revisiting his works, Sciarrino made creative memory a driving force of innovation: the reformulated cycle bears witness to a fertile back-and-forth between yesterday and today, between the work as it was and the work the artist believes it should have been. For the performer directly involved, this reconfiguration of the cycle is equally rich in lessons: it shows that the legacy of a work is neither intangible nor passive, but can be reactivated and deepened through continuous collaboration between the artist and the musician. My own path alongside Sciarrino has thus led me to rethink the notion of fidelity to the text: to be faithful is not to freeze the work in its first incarnation, but rather to accompany it in its evolution in order to bring out its essence over time.

The notions of repertoire and durability in contemporary music are thereby transformed. Sciarrino’s initiative suggests that a composer may, during his lifetime, revisit his repertoire in order to ensure its durability and coherence. Instead of considering his scores as entities completed once published, he treats them as elements of a larger whole, refined over the span of a career. This attitude contrasts with the classical tradition in which the repertoire is sanctified, fixed by history: here, Sciarrino shows us that a work can evolve after the fact without denying its deeper identity, just as a literary text may undergo new editions revised by its author. We thus witness a redefinition of artistic durability: far from meaning immutability, the durability of L’Opera per flauto lies in its capacity for regeneration. By reshaping his cycle, Sciarrino sought to guarantee its future vitality, ensuring that these pieces — now in their definitive version — will pass through time with their relevance intact. There is an underlying reflection here on the posterity of a contemporary work: rather than allowing the verdict of time to impose oblivion or the marginalisation of a poorly realised piece, the composer takes the initiative and offers his own work a second life. This approach, extremely rare to such a degree in the musical field, is thought-provoking: it may encourage other creators to consider their cycles and collections of works not as fixed monuments, but as evolving entities, open to critical retouching. On the scale of the flute repertoire, the result is that, with this revised version, a reference corpus for the instrument is consolidated. Sciarrino leaves flautists an ensemble that is now homogeneous, purified, and enriched, and that will undoubtedly stand as a pillar of the contemporary flute repertoire. Present and future performers will find in it not only an exceptional field of technical exploration, but also an aesthetic lesson: that of a music which fully assumes the paradox of being at once heir to itself and constantly reborn.

Several future perspectives open up following this audacious rewriting of Volume III.

The first concerns the critical and interpretative reception of the new volume. It will be fascinating to observe how musicology and criticism receive this definitive version of L’Opera per flauto. Sciarrino’s approach — reworking works that had already been premiered — will undoubtedly give rise to analyses of its aesthetic and historical significance. On the performers’ side, reception will be just as decisive: will they immediately adopt these revised versions as the new standard, relegating the first versions to the status of archival curiosities? The first concerts of the rewritten version — including the one at Milano Musica 2025 — seem, in any case, to have demonstrated the increased expressive force of the cycle, which should encourage flautists and programmers to favour this final incarnation.

A second perspective concerns the impact on the contemporary flute repertoire. The emergence of this revised Volume III will enrich and perhaps redefine the landscape of the repertoire for solo flute. On the one hand, the integration of pedagogical elements — 2 Esercizi, Canone per due flauti — and the presence of pieces of different levels of difficulty open the door to a broader dissemination of Sciarrino’s universe, from conservatoires to concert stages. On the other hand, the strengthened coherence of the complete cycle manifests Sciarrino’s desire to conceive, for the instrument, a long-term path in which unity is also constructed through the work of revision. For the flute in particular, the consolidated L’Opera per flauto could become an indispensable corpus, the object of complete performances, renewed recording projects, and research work — analyses, critical editions — highlighting Sciarrino’s long-term contribution. One can imagine this already monumental cycle serving as a reference point for new creations exploring the flute from innovative angles, in a dialogue with the Sciarrinian legacy that is both respectful and ambitious.

Finally, a third perspective concerns questions of edition, interpretation, and transmission. The forthcoming publication of the reworked Volume III raises important editorial issues. It will be necessary to provide a clear and reliable edition integrating all the modifications, so that performers may have access to a unified musical text, whereas previously the pieces were dispersed and sometimes difficult to obtain. This editorial work, already accompanied by a preface by the composer, constitutes a precious testimony for the history of composition and for the understanding of his approach. From the point of view of interpretation, these works must be approached with their double genesis in mind: comparison between the old and new versions makes it possible to bring out the issues of writing and sonic realisation. Finally, the question of memorial transmission arises: the first filmed or recorded versions — for example, the 2019 recording in which I participated¹⁹ — become archival documents, witnesses to an earlier state of the cycle. Their confrontation with future interpretations of the revised version will offer fascinating material for the study of the evolution of a work and of the plasticity of its interpretation. More broadly, the case of L’Opera per flauto may inform reflection among educational institutions and publishers on how to preserve and transmit contemporary works when they undergo significant transformations at the hands of their own author.

In the end, the rewriting of Volume III of L’Opera per flauto constitutes far more than the simple conclusion of a cycle: it transforms closure into a threshold, a way for Salvatore Sciarrino to ensure the durability of his work by reinventing it. This cycle, now completed in its revised form, appears less as a fixed monument than as a living palimpsest, bearing witness to the path of a creator who did not hesitate to reread his past in order to reveal new potentialities within it. From the composer’s point of view, this was an opportunity for an intimate dialogue with his own artistic memory, carried out in a spirit of humility and exactingness, in the image of Beethoven reworking his Fidelio. From the point of view of the performer-partner, it was the rare experience of a long-term collaboration in which learning never stops, and in which every ending is a new beginning. As the book of L’Opera per flauto closes, a lesson emerges: in contemporary music, true fidelity to a work may lie in the unceasing pursuit of its ideal, even if that means rewriting its pages. By thus offering his cycle a second birth, Sciarrino legitimises the idea that a musical creation may reach its fulfilment not in its first edition, but in the continuous dialogue between time, author, and performer. This exemplary undertaking gives L’Opera per flauto a place apart: that of a work which, although now fixed in a consolidated text, will continue to live, inspire, and generate debate within the flute repertoire and future musical creation.