During this past month, I made videos of the Six Caprices for violin by Salvatore Sciarrino. I’m very proud of them and I hope you’ll listen and watch. They’re very beautiful music.

Written in 1976, they are classics of modern music and I first played them back when I was starting to play a lot of newer music. I feel strongly about the expression and sound world and there’s a lot I can say and explain, but I’m not in the mood to write it down, so for now I’ll post my interview from the West Cork Festival in Ireland, where I’d been invited to perform the six of them. While they certainly draw somewhat from Paganini’s caprices, I feel Sciarrino’s caprices have a feeling of wonder, mystery, and sparkle that comes from the combination of notes, noise, and silence-as-environment. The effect overall is more Mendelssohnian than noisy, and silence is the essential ocean-like world that sounds emerge from and sink back into.

My interpretation of Sciarrino’s harmonics is that some produce noise and some are harmonics that will sound as pitches, which give the music a radiance and elements of melody rather than a pile of gestures.

Youtube playlist of all six Caprices is here.