Reimagining Organicism

Abstract

Does it make sense to refer to musical sounds as “animated beings”? What does it mean to treat music as an essential part of our sonic reality? How do Sciarrino’s music and his general aesthetic, both of which he describes as organic or ecological, respond to theories of organicism, ecological approaches to musical perception, and ties between the human and non-human worlds? In this article, I attempt to weave together a framework that facilitates fruitful answers to these questions. The starting points for this theorization of Sciarrino’s organicism are Holly Watkins’s (2017, 2018) biotic aesthetics of music and Eric Clarke’s (2005) ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning, which emphasize the role of the listener and question the stance that separates meaning from form, culture from nature, and the human from the non-human. Through analyses of examples from works including Lohengrin, Azione invisibile (1982–84), Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni (1997), and Studi per l’intonazione del mare (2000), I argue that Sciarrino’s music and thinking venture into a holistic reinvention of organicism. A key aspect of this organicism is its formal affinity with behaviors characteristic of systems of chaos, including self-similarity, circularity, and turbulence. In addition, I illustrate how the wide-ranging analogies that Sciarrino’s music draws to the world of animate and inanimate beings involve both formal issues and the bodily, performative, and societal dimensions of music-making.