Stefano Scodanibbio is
not a household name, and unless we all learn how to pronounce it, this
avant-classical composer and innovative double bassist may remain unknown.
"Just one thing," Scodanibbio says during a phone interview
from a Southern California hotel room, "Stefano. Accent
on the first syllable."
"Oops, sorry."
"That's OK,"
he offers, "all Americans do it."
That said, understand this:
Calling Scodanibbio a bass player is like suggesting that Paganini was
a fiddler. Or that Jimi Hendrix was just a guitar picker. Or that Magellan
was a mere cruise-ship captain. "Stefano Scodanibbio is amazing;
I haven't heard better double-bass playing than Scodanibbio's,"
the late composer John Cage marveled upon first hearing the musician.
"I was just amazed. And I think everyone who heard him was amazed.
He is really extraordinary. His performance was absolutely magic."
For a sample of what makes
Scodanibbio so special, spin the 2001 recording Six Duos (New
Albion), on which Scodanibbio performs with violist Dov Scheindlin,
and also violinist Irvine Arditti and cellist Rohan de Saram, both of
the London-based Arditti Quartet, those intrepid interpreters of contemporary
music. Throughout this haunting release, Scodanibbio can be heard exploring
a surreal-sounding microtonal landscape with what The Wire
dubbed "exquisite tone, nifty arabesques and, most importantly,
[a] range of percussive effects [that] are all devastating."
Or catch him in concert,
as he navigates the virtuoso technique of Julio Estrada's Yuunohui'nahui
or Salvatore Sciarrino's Esplorazione del bianco, just two of
the many solo bass works composed for Scodanibbio and rife with complex
fifth- and sixth-position fingerings, glissandi, tapping, and an assortment
of bowing techniques. Indeed, Scodanibbio's stamina is legendary—in
Rome, he once performed a nonstop four-hour marathon, playing 28 pieces
by 25 composers.
But Scodanibbio, whose early
musical interests ranged from guitar to saxophone, didn't start
playing double bass until age 18. He arrived on the scene at the height
of the double-bass renaissance, which started in the 1960s when Bertram
Turetsky began soliciting solo works from top contemporary composers.
"I think that the double bass was the most neglected of the stringed
instruments for characteristics that in the past were considered negative—the
big body, the length of the strings, the great distance between the
notes," he says. "But now those are considered positive
characteristics with a wide spectrum of possibilities."
Scodanibbio, who began composing
as a teenager, already had a grasp of the fundamentals of contemporary
music when he began his double-bass studies at the Conservatory of Pesaro
on the Adriatic Coast of central Italy. "I had the good fortune
to study with the big European master of concert bass, Fernando Grillo,
who after Turetsky in my opinion has been the most important bass player
of the past 50 years," he adds. "In the 1970s, Grillo really
gave a new, strong aspect to the double bass."
But it was the book Six
Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage International, 1993), an
investigation into literary values by post-modern novelist Italo Calvino,
that laid the groundwork for Scodanibbio's own unique musical philosophy.
Calvino's landmark work assigned a series of attributes—lightness,
quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity; a sixth lecture
on consistency was preempted by Calvino's death—that he thought
could serve the writer in the 21st century. "These are all attributes
that could be transformed to the double bass," Scodanibbio says,
"an instrument that until recently was considered to have none
of these characteristics."
Over the years, Scodanibbio
has developed and refined several new techniques for the instrument.
But he regards himself first and foremost as a seeker. "All I
can say is that all the others are bass players because I don't
consider myself ‘a bass player,'" he says with no
hint of conceit. "My interest in music is not the instrument itself
but the composition. I need the double bass simply to express a deep
desire that I have within myself to discover something new.
"At first, it was
very clear to me that double bass was full of potentialities to be explored—those
potentialities were just there, waiting, and they just needed someone
to do this job, this dirty job," he adds with a laugh. "At
the time, for whatever reason, nobody else wanted that task. So I took
it up."
