Topic of the paper is Salvatore Sciarrino’s (born 1947) manipulation of temporal perception in his vocal music, comparing the sleepwalking scene from his opera MacBeth (2002) and movements from the Quaderno di Strada (2003). The paper uses the concept of gestural time (Kramer 1988) as its starting point to reveal how the interrelation of melodic work, texture and density are manipulated to create and modulate temporality within the formal process. Sciarrino’s own aesthetic philosophy as elaborated on in his main theoretical work Le Figure della Musica da Beethoven a Oggi (1998) can serve as a foil as his concepts such as accumulation and multiplication can be read as elaborations of gestural time.

A comparison of the movement „…smarrita“ from the Quaderno di Strada with the sleepwalking scene from MacBeth highlights the subtle techniques that Sciarrino employs to sculpt temporality. The former dilates time by extreme repetition of one motif while the latter works with minimal variations of few modules. Yet, Sciarrino orders time in the Quaderno by structurally adding  — what I will call — gestural cadences, while the Lady’s descend into madness destroys any feeling for temporality by providing no conspicuous formal ordering.

Carlo Caratelli writes that Sciarrino showcases the „cognitive structures of perception“ in his music (2006), and in a last step I will argue that especially the sleepwalking scene is a uniquely music-theatrical expression of a new temporal feeling of our modern times, which can be seen in analogy to the analyses that Gilles Deleuze based his book The Time-Image (1985) upon. This is especially evident when comparing the sleepwalking scene with its parallel scene in the second version of Giuseppe Verdi’s MacBeth (1865). While both libretti follow a similar path, Verdi writes an eminently teleological music while Sciarrino’s Lady seems to be stuck in a infinite now.

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