A Notational Puzzle

A Notational Puzzle

While I love Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci for its quiet bravura and powerful, concise musicality, I find its notation a sometimes-exasperating exercise in code breaking.

Written By

Yotam Haber

In 1976, Salvatore Sciarrino wrote an extraordinary 15-minute piece for solo violin: the 6 Capricci. Each section inscribes a delicate yet fleetingly violent motion, and its premiere presented a new voice in the landscape of contemporary music.

Sciarrino tackles string harmonics like they are going out of style. Each movement is an etude, an exploration, of various fiendishly difficult artificial and real harmonic techniques.

While I love this piece for its quiet bravura and powerful, concise musicality, I find its notation a sometimes-exasperating exercise in code breaking.

The first few figures are clear enough:

Without any explanation from the composer, we can deduce that these are written natural harmonics, not sounding harmonics, to be played on alternating strings. In other words, touching the string lightly as indicated should produce the following:

The real puzzle begins just afterwards when he presents a stratospherically high, glissando-ing passage that diminuendos as it ascends:

The first four pitches are the open strings of the violin, G, D, A, E, two octaves higher–no problem, they’re all fourth-partial harmonics. But now we’re talking about sounding pitches or written pitches? What about the next four pitches, E#, A#, D#, G#? These ain’t your mama’s harmonics anymore.

Did Sciarrino switch notation systems on us midstream? He probably wants this passage as sounding rather than written, but it is up to us to deduce this and it up to the player to figure out how to produce it.

For some of us, this can be as fun as a Sunday Times crossword but I wonder if there is perhaps a more efficient, “universal” agreement on the clearest way of notating harmonics.