“A consummate artist and refined teacher, Salvatore Sciarrino is universally recognised as one of the most original and influential voices of our time” – read Ivan Fedele, Director of the Venice Biennale, announcing the Leone d’oro award for lifetime contribution to music. “Sciarrino has dedicated his existence to the art of composing with a spirit of incessant inquiry and invention which has led him to uncover an extraordinary world of sound, thereby giving a decisive impulse to the renewal of contemporary music, and demonstrating how music, in order for it to be renewed and rediscovered, has to step outside its historicised form and become a listening experience in which the spectator is at the centre of mysterious and almost ancestral phenomena”.