^{Page 46 note 1} Programme book, 1996 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, p.89.

^{Page 49 note 1} For more on this point, see my review of Emmanuel Nunes’ Quodlibet in Tempo 198, p. 63.Google Scholar

^{Page 49 note 2} Gavin Thomas's article on Sciarrino's work (‘The poetics of extremity’, Musical Times Number 1802 (04 1993Google Scholar)), in an absurd comparison with the composer ‘he most obviously resembles’ - Helmut Lachenmann - celebrates Sciarrino's work as ‘an art of submerged nostalgia. He retains, however great the irony or distancing, an essential affection for what has passed’ though this is ‘too clear-sighted to be entirely comfortable’. There seems to be a sub-text at work here: Sciarrino's work is acceptable because the element of critique is sufficiently muted as to be unthreatening. This is born out by Thomas's earlier comment that ‘Sciarrino's work lacks Lachenmann's socio-political subtext, its black humour, its visceral impact and destructive commentary on past models’. This seems to trivialize Sciarrino's very real intentions in all these directions, which are of course viewed as dangerous by the dominant aesthetic ideology in Britain today; yet the comment would seem to be undermined by the later remark that ‘Sciarrino, like Lachenmann, stresses the elements of cruelty and irony, the dangerous dance at the limits of perception and performance in diis music rather than the incidental seductiveness of its soundworld.’ i.e. the above-mentioned qualities are acceptable when they can be ensconsed in high-flown artistic terms, rather than nasty politics (heaven forbid!). Quite apart from this, the Lachenmann comparison has about as much validity as the frequent banding together of Ferneyhough and Finnissy, and reflects the extent to which ‘sound-bite’ criticism, a clear product of the consumerist age, where surface style rules, has become prevalent in Britain today. If Sciarrino resembles Lachenmann because he uses extended instrumental techniques, then why does he not equally resemble Hespos, Holliger, Globokar, Klaus Huber, early Kagel, or the Ferneyhough of the Time and Motion Studies and Unity Capsule? Or Chris Dench because he has also written numerous works for solo flute?