Creativity and Cognitive Niche Construction in Salvatore Sciarrino’s L’opera per flauto

Abstract

The emergence of new musical ideas, and new forms of musicality, is described here as the transformation of conceptual spaces in a cognitive niche, a distributed and self-organised set of intergenerational concepts, materials, and actions. According to this approach, there is a direct co-dependence relation, a co-evolutionary causal looping, between new, acceptable (valid) and surprising musical ideas (which define what is creative in a certain context), agents, tools and artifacts (instruments, musical notations, types of equipment, performance space), and conceivable epistemic and pragmatic actions (instrument techniques, dynamics of collaboration, scenic procedures). This co-evolutionary relation defines a conceptual space of musicality. To demonstrate our thesis, we detail the development of extended techniques for transverse flute, a phenomenon strongly dependent on performer-composer collaboration. We focus on Salvatore Sciarrino’s L’opera per flauto (1990), which was developed in an intensive work with the flautist Roberto Fabbriciani, through investigation of sounding possibilities of the instrument. The collaboration resulted in new and surprising sounds for the transverse flute, including the combination of extended techniques, and their notation, largely applied by later repertoire.