After several in-depth studies devoted to the guitar music of Stefano Scodanibbio, we decided to conclude our cycle of dialogues with one of the figures who most significantly contributed to the dissemination of the Marchigian composer’s work.
In a conversation rich in memories, anecdotes, and details about the artistic life of those years, Julio Estrada retraces a dense and passionate journey, through which it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of the nature of their collaboration and friendship.
What emerges is a portrait of a profound human and artistic partnership, which contributed to the birth of a new way of conceiving the double bass and, more generally, of approaching the music of our time from a different perspective.
How did you meet Stefano Scodanibbio?
In Mexico City, at the beginning of the 1980s, when we met at the home of the composer Mario Lavista, for whom we had commissioned a work for Bertram Turetzky, then a major figure in the world of the double bass, within the concerts of the Compañia Musical de Repertorio Nuevo, which I directed at the UNAM. We exchanged only a few words, but I was deeply struck when I heard him perform a short passage from Bach’s Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello: his perfect intonation of the G, his extraordinary musicality, and his natural expressiveness stayed with me forever.
One or two years later, we met again at the home of the guitar duo Castañón-Bañuelos, where Stefano was periodically staying during his frequent visits to Mexico. I particularly remember the meeting in Temixco, when my family and I moved to the country house where we have lived since the 1985 earthquake. He came to dinner accompanied by the composer Ana Lara, and it was only on that occasion that we began to see each other regularly as musicians and colleagues, although we were not yet close friends.
I showed him the score of yuunohui’nahui (Zapotec: yuu, earth; nohui, humid; Nahuatl: nahui, four) for double bass, fourth bowed instrument, written before and after the earthquake. The work, due to its technical difficulties—independence of both hands, glissandi and tremolos with differentiated speeds and accelerations—had been rejected by several performers and, months earlier, had even provoked the agitated reaction of a French double bassist who, after having had the score for a year, called me two days before the premiere to complain about the difficulty of the piece. I replied by appealing to her professionalism and informed the Lille Festival, which cancelled her participation.
Seeing the score, Stefano told me:
— Julio, you need to go back to studying solfeggio: as it is written, it is impossible.
— No, Stefano, you need to learn how to read my notation.
— I don’t think so. If you want, we can meet tomorrow afternoon.
— Yes, at the Castañóns’ house.
It was almost a duel between our characters. The next day we spent about four hours in front of the score: I explaining, he deciphering the most complex passages, which he immediately understood in their different sections. After hearing him play for a total of only a few seconds—one per section—I realized that only he could be the interpreter of the work.
— “Not a chance,” he said jokingly, recalling a phrase a violinist had once told me years earlier when refusing to perform another of my works, Canto oculto.
— You’re the one who can do it, because just a few seconds of the music are enough to understand how to perform it.
— It’ll cost you dearly…
— Not me. I will never pay for a performance. We’ll see when…
— …or who pays — he added, mentioning a hypothetically very high fee.
In 1989 I was called by Peter Revai, director of the Komputer Musik festival in Zurich, who asked me whether I had any work for computers. I replied that I was not interested in that field, since at the time I was focused on new instrumental techniques and yunohui’nahui had not yet been performed, precisely because it was difficult to find performers willing to tackle it. It required a double bassist of the highest level, comparable, in interpretative capacity, to an ideal “machine”, or system.
Revai asked me for the name of the performer:
— Stefano Scodanibbio: no one else.
He contacted him immediately and called me back shortly after:
— He is a difficult and very demanding person.
— You will know how to handle him.
After a few hours he accepted and invited me to the premiere to evaluate the result, which Stefano and I both found perfect. From that moment on, Stefano began calling me more and more often—first for organisational matters, even to arrange the date of his wedding with Maresa, and later for technical issues related to the performance, as concrete score passages.
— Julio, I’m calling you from Vienna: always keep the score at hand!
— I will.
He would call me at any time.
— “You’re crazy, completely crazy,” he would sometimes say.
— Yes, and you already knew that.
— This music forces me to split myself into multiple layers: pitch, intensity, bow colour, bow pulse, and vibrato. It is no longer schizophrenic, but “penta-zophrenic.”
Those were between amusing days for me and intense for him, during which I often thought he would give up. Instead, he worked with great professionalism, a quality that has always distinguished him. Without any doubt about his capacities, we only met again in Zurich, on the day of the concert, in the dressing room of the hall. I listened to him perform the entire work: finally I could hear it realised. I only made a small remark about the accent in the bow changes, which he immediately applied with total precision. At that moment I understood definitively that my intuition had been right: it was him, the ideal performer, the only one capable of fully realising the score. The performance was impeccable and unforgettable.
At the end of the concert we embraced in the street: a gesture that sealed our musical friendship. We then went to dinner in a restaurant he had chosen on Revai’s recommendation. Stefano offered a bottle of excellent red wine to celebrate the premiere: a true “chalice of peace”, which later became a tradition after many of his recitals.
“Stefo,” as I called him, began to perform this work frequently in his concerts, also in a rock context in Italy, helping to introduce the yuunohui cycle to other performers, including members of the Arditti Quartet, Irvine, Garth, and Rohan. With Rohan de Saram—who passed away at the end of 2024 and whom I remember with great affection—Stefano performed the duo yuunohui’yei’nahui (Nahuatl: yei, three) several times, as well as including miqi’nahual (Nahuatl: miqi, death; nahual, protective animal spirit) for solo double bass in the Arditti Quartet’s recording dedicated to my music for strings.
What was he like on a personal and professional level?
I refer to both aspects, because in our case the artistic bond made the two dimensions inseparable. After Zurich, we became close friends and Stefano, together with Velia, my wife, became my preferred performers, to the point that I called them both “my accomplices,” capable of performing my works in any context. With an exceptional talent and a strong traveller’s vocation, Stefano gradually became the main advocate of my work in every setting he was invited to. I remember how, during the 1990s and 2000s, he incorporated yuunohui’nahui into his recitals, also in duo versions within ensemble settings such as ensemble’yuunohui, with Barbara Maurer, the German violist, and on many occasions across Europe, dozens of times, with Rohan de Saram.
All yuunohui pieces derive from the original chronographic drawing I created for yuunohui’yei, employed to obtain all the other versions (duo, trio, or small ensembles with strings, winds, or noise instruments). In the ensemble’yuunohui versions, the five components of each work are synchronically superimposed, forming a macro-timbre that expresses a synthesis of harmony and counterpoint as a collective timbral evolution, which Stefano, as Rohan, understood better than any other performer. This led Stefano to defend the cycle so strongly that he quickly became one of the most refined promoters of my string music, alongside Rohan, because both were able to highlight with great artistry clashes, contrasts, frictions, compensations, and other interactions produced by their respective macro-timbres. Because of his dedication, his interpretation, and his extraordinary contribution to the dissemination of these versions, I have dedicated ensemble’yuunohui to Stefano Scodanibbio.
Attending one of Stefano Scodanibbio’s recitals was a musical experience so extraordinary that he transformed it into a ritual, restoring a new dignity to each work in his repertoire. The poetic authority of his interpretation quickly elevated them, turning them into wonders preserved in memory, recognisable in the same way on every new occasion.
Stefano never played out of obligation, friendship, or commission: he always said with absolute honesty what he thought and perceived, and if a piece of music did not convince him, he expressed it with complete respect for the other. In the end, that respect was directed toward himself, because from his artistic conviction emerged his repertoire—aimed at presenting transparent interpretations of many authors, alongside the refined music he himself created and continued to develop around the double bass. On several occasions we also visited Nancarrow together at his home-studio O’Gorman-Nancarrow, and Conlon mentioned he almost never missed Stefano’s recitals. With his usual frankness and admiration, he would say to him:
— Of everything you play, I like your own works. They are fantastic, magnificent!
He said it sincerely, with a shy and uneasy laugh. Then he would add that he should play only those, because everything else did not interest him—although this did not necessarily exclude me.
After that, he would ask us whether we wanted to listen to some of his works, a private pleasure with which we would end the evening.
Stefano should have encouraged him to write a work for double bass, but Nancarrow’s everyday life made such a project impossible, since he devoted six months to the written conception of the music and another six months to punching the piano rolls. I regret that he never wrote a piece for him, because Stefano would have turned it into a jewel, capturing the tones closest to the character and to the originality of Conlon’s music.
Stefano Scodanibbio was a great human being who managed to transcend into the musical sphere, becoming unique both as a performer and as a creator of a music whose refinement was initially associated with the double bass and its interpretative possibilities—a fusion that was astonishing for the discoveries born from his constant creative exploration. He came from an ancient tradition whose closest link with another composer–double bassist is Giovanni Bottesini (1821–1889)—also a lover of Mexico, where in 1854 he conducted the first performance of the Mexican National Anthem. Scodanibbio turned the double bass into one of the newest voices among bowed instruments, undoubtedly the most revealing of the vast richness of a timbre emerging from its enormous physical volume, something Stefano illuminated through a refined exploration that gave him, day after day, an incomparable technical mastery of the instrument. He managed to produce percussive sounds as if they were of fine or raw metal, frictions of skin or fabric, renewed whistles of flute-like sounds, and unheard sonorities reminiscent of horn or clarinet; and, of course, as bow-generated timbres, glissandi that in his hands felt like exotic birds or voices from the imagination. All of this was achieved through unprecedented articulations, as original and singular as his most subtle discovery: the multi-fonic “alla Scodanibbio”—a surname as characteristic as Bartók’s pizzicato—hidden harmonics drawn from an extremely narrow point, where the bow rests near the bridge and the finger can touch only in the small space left between the bow hair and the string above, all within a refined, discreet form that reveals his elegant musical conception.
The sense of form in Stefano Scodanibbio deserves close analysis for the way it unfolds at every step, as if narrating becoming itself, approaching a moment and carefully surrounding it before revealing it, like a novel made of thematic characters, surprises, and revelations that were part of the fusion between his instrumental craft and creative imagination. The double bass was the intimate chest where he kept his secrets, to be extracted only at specific moments, always with the master key of his bow. Being the one who set this process in motion, he always adhered strictly to what was written, as if interpreting someone else’s work, without last-minute changes but instead following a rigorous and precise score. From this emerged a carefully constructed chain of discoveries, developed one after another within a private dialogue, an encounter that produced the emotion of witnessing exact revelation: neither a sound more nor a sound less.
Stefano’s oeuvre grew, first of all, thanks to the strong influence he exerted on numerous composers, who would enrich certain passages of their works with a “Scodanibbio-like” touch of colour; secondly, thanks to his musicality, which began to expand through refined arrangements of other composers’ works, such as his version for double basses of Terry Riley’s In C, titled In Re in the performance by Ludus Gravis; and thirdly, thanks to his relentless contribution to the new timbral world of the double bass, as well as his various works for double bass, string quartet, or guitar—a instrument I never heard him play, but which I knew he knew very well and whose writing he fully mastered.
Regarding the guitar, I recall that in 2006, when I was invited to serve as a jury member for the Giornate Internazionali della Musica Nuova in Luxembourg, I had a curious experience: my flight from Mexico was delayed, so I arrived on the first day late. As soon as I got there, I had to go through several boxes of scores from the archive, where I unexpectedly found a work by Stefano for guitar, Dos abismos (1992), whose writing struck me as too simple and, strangely, almost initially disappointed me. However, the folder also included a cassette recording: I only had to listen to it to be struck by its exceptional artistic quality.
The following day I learned that Dos abismos had been eliminated, and since I had not taken part in the selection process, I apologised for my delay and asked to express my opinion in order to defend the piece, which for me was one of the finest creations in Scodanibbio’s output. Almost everyone accepted my remarks, but the jury president, Wolfgang Rihm—whom I maintained a friendship with for many years—told me something unexpected:
— Scodanibbio is your friend, isn’t he?
— Of course he is, just as you are, and just as Stefano’s wife and mine are. But here our friendship has nothing to do with music; I base myself on aesthetics, as I do with anyone, even in the case of a personal enemy. In music this does not matter: please listen to it.
After listening, the voting took place and the piece was accepted and included in the programme. Among all the selected works, it was, in my view, the best of the festival for its extreme simplicity, built on the contemplation of a slow and lightly low tremolo, some string friction, a persistent harmonic, trembling glissandi, or glissandi produced with friction on the strings without bowing, pizzicati played directly with the fingers, rasgueados as a principal voice while an interweaving texture binds these elements together, creating the impression of a dreamlike scene.
A music whose originality lies in the simplicity of the score and the extraordinary richness of its texture—articulations that merge both “abysses,” as can be clearly heard in the version by Magnus Andersson.
Stefano and I built a deep friendship, marked by an extraordinary and singular trust, always full of humour and mutual support in every circumstance. Even though we argued quite often, I never stopped relying on his artistic capacities and complicity, as in the initial conception of my work based on Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955)—which I consider related to another novel written shortly afterwards, Il Gattopardo by Lampedusa (1954–57), both very different yet both centred on the dominance of a male figure. I remember that Stefano and his wife, Maresa Bonugli, came to Paris at the end of 1990, a few days after Spanish National Radio had selected my project to realise Doloritas, almost a radio opera, the first part of my complete opera, Murmullos del páramo, whose first score I conceived as a trio, mictlan (Nahuatl: mictlan, place of the dead), to be recorded by Fátima Miranda on voice, Llorenç Barber as noisemaker, and Stefano Scodanibbio on double bass. We celebrated the project by dining and drinking in an old French restaurant near the Bastille.
The next day we met again at Gérard Grisey’s house, who had made his apartment available to them. There Stefano showed me several results of his creative research, presenting and demonstrating discoveries from his most recent work—something very few performers do. Not Stefano, never self-centred, but always willing to share all his resources; he was proud to present them privately to those he considered colleagues, and everything I heard I liked very much, as on many other occasions. However, my creative ear is not interested in what is already made, in a stabilised form of beauty; it is always oriented toward the search for new, personal solutions, as close as possible to what I imagine. Thus, in that desert I build my own oasis, an autonomy of my musical universe. For this reason, among everything I heard from Stefano that day, only his original articulation of the multi-fonic “alla Scodanibbio” struck me, surprised me, and fascinated me deeply, producing the most delicate and ethereal harmonic ever created on the double bass—a floating voice that seems to emerge from light.
Without any doubt, and with great gratitude, I integrated it into the final solo part for double bass dedicated to Stefano, miqi’nahual (1994), extracted from mictlan, part of the group of instrumental solos in the work that can be performed independently or combined in chamber versions, or even performed outside the work itself. The final section of this solo consists of Stefano’s multi-fonics, which I intertwine with torsions obtained through bow pressure, transforming that limpid matter in a continuous flow—what my beloved Velia used to call my “other beauty.”
In 1990, I had already been vaguely imagining for about a dozen years a rough, fibrous sound produced by a different kind of friction, which I had never managed to incorporate into yuunohui’nahui. However, during that Paris session, after listening to every jewel extracted from Stefano’s “treasure chest,” I had the idea of asking him to lay the double bass in its case and try, on the floor, something I had intuited in those days: the sound of Juan Preciado’s huaraches on dry, stony earth in Pedro Páramo.
I sensed that one should place a fixed bow on the strings and press with another bow on the hair in order to make it sing—a way of giving an almost human voice to the instrument, in which the double bass becomes the embodiment of Juan Preciado, Pedro Páramo’s son.
While I was trying to show him how to realise the idea with his bows, he immediately stopped me, very nervous and aware of the risk involved for him in allowing me to touch even one of his most precious resources:
— Don’t ever touch my bow. You can’t even imagine how much each one costs! Don’t come near it: never, Julio!
His “never” did not allow me to come within a finger’s distance of either the bow or the double bass. Even after the session, he would not let me help him put the instrument back in its case, so I was obliged to accept that limitation, even though to this day I would have preferred to show him with my own hands how to do it. Being left-handed and having studied cello for only a few years, I was a poor performer, and my only option was to improvise with him with great freedom, which made it easier for me to explain step by step how one could play with two bows. I understand the risks Stefano perceived, but I must add a parenthesis here, because I do not understand nor accept any prohibition that restricts musical imagination, however strange it may seem to others.
I remember a Montessori teacher who asked me not to hit the cymbals too hard, while my great pleasure was to feel the vibrations in my hands and make my arms fly. This scene made me long for the freedom I had lacked as a composition student—more an adaptation to cultural taste than an education—and led me to move from “composition recipes” to the solitary risks of creation, where my imagination and my ear take command. Returning to what I was saying: the friction between two bows, above or even away from the string, was a decisive idea for obtaining what I was searching for—the dry, harsh voice that fascinated me to the point of understanding that from there my new work would evolve, in which the use of the “normal” bow appears only a couple of times, while for the rest both bows are used through mutual friction, or friction on the string, percussive actions on the strings, or blows of one bow against the other, bow frictions like whips in the air, and more.
I know all this may seem like barbarism to audiences, composers, or performers, but it seduces and convinces me to the point that I integrate it into my music, because it emerges from what my ear intuits in a process aimed at finding the deep voice of each instrument—or even of each object—that hidden beauty I have been searching for for decades, what in my work has become the “noisist” or “noisemaker.”
Even if Stefano remained waiting, perhaps hoping I would eliminate those problematic sections, his protest was immediate:
— I am a double bassist, not a butcher dismembering a pig.
The following year I sent him the score, which calls for an alternation between two double basses: one standing for passages with a single bow, and the other laid horizontally on a table to be played with two bows simultaneously: A1 and A2.
In general, one bow presses the string or the body of the instrument with the hair, while the other acts on the hair of the first in order to produce that sound of a “dry object,” dark, rough, and also mournful in its voice and body—qualities that inhabit Juan Preciado. Both bows extract the instrument’s own voice from its body, and they are ideal for the private version in my own “treasure chest”. In the CD featuring my works for strings in 1994, it is the piece that critics considered with the greatest interest, as Scodanibbio himself confirmed to me after reading a review.
However, in December 1991, a year after our first parisian meeting (Grisey wasn’t there, and he left his apartment at our disposal) the Scodanibbio couple came to Paris to work with me every morning for a week. We lived through tense and almost terrible days in the Neuilly apartment, where voices and shouting crossed walls, doors, and windows due to Stefano’s constant objections to the score and my insistence that it was correct:
— What bow is each bow? Nothing makes sense, Julio! A year ago I showed you my most precious jewels and you wrote to me this barbarity!
— Your jewels, not mine: I like them but I don’t need them. It is the beauty of my ugliness that I am searching for, not your beauty.
— How do you play this crap?
— Bow 2 on the bridge and Bow 1 above Bow 2.
— What a disaster!
— It isn’t, and I see no other way: it must be played like that.
— I told you not to write to me these things.
— Yes, I know, but this is what I want and for me it is all perfectly clear; if you want I can explain it again, otherwise we cancel everything.
— Let’s continue.
And so, every day, under extremely tense conditions for him and for me, as well as for Maresa and Velia, who listened to our loud discussions while they spoke, read, or prepared food or dinner—the only moments that softened the tense atmosphere.
He insisted that those pages were almost impossible, and I completely rejected his objections:
— Absolutely not, Stefano. Nothing I have written is impossible. I know it, I have imagined it, I have tested it in my mind, and I have even sung it to you with absolute precision.
He remained irritated for almost the entire time, and I was ready to cancel everything and call Spain, but both Velia and I had the feeling that he and Maresa had spoken, and that she had helped calm him and contain his daily reactions. Velia did the same for me, and a significant part of the final result is due to both of them: so we said, he and I, and even today I thank each of them for their wise and gentle contribution, decisive for the successful outcome of the work, because neither of us wanted to yield.
Our disputes, stubborn and driven by conflicting aesthetics, made our relationship seem almost irreconcilable; we barely exchanged good mornings, mostly out of mutual indignation, although in the evenings, after dinner and with a little wine, Armagnac or Calvados, we managed to smile faintly and recover from the tensions of the day.
At the end of that difficult, sharp, and tense week, they left by car towards Madrid, probably finally calmer in order to prepare for the next rehearsals, while I had to leave earlier to create the sound track with voices and dialogues, and the rural environments of “Doloritas,” the first outcome of the long journey of the Multi-ópera Murmullos del páramo (1990–2006). In December 1991 we met—Fátima, Llorenç, Stefano and I—at the Madrid headquarters of Radio Nacional de España, in the Prado del Rey studios, with those who had supported my project with great conviction, commitment, and affection: the composer Carlos Cruz de Castro, head of Classical Music at RNE, and the sound artist José Iges, the project’s producer, to whom I will always remain grateful for their willingness to allow me to launch Murmullos del páramo, as well as for the extraordinary sensitivity of the human and technical team of Radio 2.
There, the tensions regarding the interpretation of the work resurfaced, with disputes with Fátima—quite similar to those I had had with Stefano that same month—, who at each new difficulty in turn reproached me for something analogous: for not having resorted to her own ways of creating and shaping vocal expression, and for what she called my “parti-tortura”—a term I adopted without hesitation from then on—which forced her to confront extreme vocal difficulties in shaping the character she was interpreting, Doloritas, the dead voice of Juan Preciado’s mother. Under these conditions we began recording, first each performer separately, then forming duos, and only from the trio onwards did one begin to perceive the fusion between the individual timbres and to better understand the musical drama of the work. Only then did a true encounter take place, because for each of them the “parti-tortura” began to sound like my music, and the noisy “Estradavirus”—my self-coined term to express relief—entered the very different ears of my three great accomplices: admirable, irreplaceable, ideal musicians and performers, great friends, among whom Llorenç was always the most flexible thanks to his light character, someone with whom I have maintained a strong sense of identification, perceiving him as my Spanish brother since 1980, the year we met.
In his apartment in Mesón de Paredes, Llori often cooked his “oven paella,” a peasant-style vegetarian version to be eaten directly from the tray, each of us marking our territory with a wooden spoon, while on other evenings Fátima served us dried tuna as a starter followed by her Chinese or salmon soup. At the end of work, I would invite everyone to dinner, together with my family—Velia, Amadeo, and my mother, who along with a couple of friends had taken part by providing some of the voices in my murmullos—to enjoy turbot or Basque-style rib steak at El Asador Frontón. That Christmas evening, in the Habsburg Madrid district, Fátima and Llorenç’s neighbourhood, Stefano invited me to toast with a glass of his favourite brandy—Gran Duque de Alba, Cardenal de Mendoza, or perhaps 1866, I cannot recall now—which shifted the tone from conflict to concord: finally everything began to make sense. From that moment, complaints about my music ceased, and he and Maresa left quickly by car for Barcelona and the following day for Macerata.
Because of its harsh, rustic, or noisy sonorities, and the combination of two bows, listeners to miqi’nahual often struggle to understand which instrument it is, or what is producing the sound and how, usually tending to reduce it to the idea of “noise”—a crude word of perception that still cannot name what it hears and must struggle to understand what it is. In reality, it is an extremely rich material, far more malleable than any other sound: this is its fascination, something that brings us back to our earliest auditory experiences—“where does this sound come from?”—through which we try to relate to timbre in terms of its origin, an essential aspect of listening adventure. In a slightly less extreme way, something similar may occur when listening blindly to Caja con trenzas for guitar, one of the five solo modules of Murmullos del páramo, personification of Susana San Juan, where I likewise require a pair of bows and which, I believe, can be perceived as an even more radical work than miqi’nahual if judged by its wild dramatic content.
Here I allow myself, in presenting this publication, to expose at the same time the subjectivity of my critique of the guitar, alongside texts concerned with its new instruments, although it also seems to me the most appropriate place to point out that my designation, caja con trenzas, carries my objection to the instrumental code—too influential on performers and composers, who tend to think less about how the material itself sounds and more about memorising and calculating finger positions on the strings.
The territory I seek when I create music lies beyond all boundaries implied by compositional premises such as written musical code or the overly tonal weaving of strings that traps the instrument. In this regard, it is worth recalling my visit to Stockholm for a seminar at its Conservatory, when, kindly hosted at the home of the magnificent Magnus Andersson, he remarked that for at least a decade he had been asking me for a piece and I still had no idea. With great caution he tried to show me the resources of his guitar, a subject that still did not attract me, because I essentially detest its writing, and its sonorities still seemed to me like clichés—despite the fact that I very much enjoy hearing them when they intertwine with the harmonies, melodies, and rhythms of flamenco singing like no other instrument.
After about half an hour of demonstrations of contemporary guitar music by reputable composers, I remained impassive, and only thanks to the fact that Magnus went out to answer the phone did I find myself alone with his guitar right on the living room carpet—similar to the Stefano’s doublebase position for miqi’nahual—with, due to his urgency in switching devices and going up to another room. It was precisely at that moment that I felt freed from having to listen to all those demonstrations, and I was able to explore on my own—an idea that, for me, is more useful than any music treatise—the common, ordinary object I had known since childhood and that had never attracted me, in contrast to my fascinated listening to his gypsy rasgueado. I approached it as what it continues to be for me: a box with strings, crawling on all fours on the floor to discover what I could do with that guitar, questions to which I gradually began to respond from the very first idea: loosening each string of the instrument in order to literally hear its entrails and, once released into the air, intertwining the strings like horse reins to begin galloping with that image in a pleasure of listening to every kind of friction with the strings outside their normal order.
After five minutes of solitary exploration, Magnus arrived, agitated, asking me whose music that was, thinking I was listening to a recording unknown to him. I reassured him, telling him it was me, and seeing me sitting on the floor with his guitar, he immediately understood my exploration. He did not become irritated at all; on the contrary, he encouraged me to continue exploring those initiatives, and from that moment I began to ask him more often to realise the ideas that came to me for constructing the work dedicated to him, knowing that the nature of my “barbarity” relied on his full complicity. All of this led to the dramatic solution of the cruel scene in the novel, in which Susana San Juan, still almost a child, is tied with a rope by her miserable father Bartolomé and lowered into the depths of a mine, ordered to find gold coins—something that for me represented the symbolic merciless figure of a rape.
Returning to miqi’nahual, despite its favourable reception in concerts and its central place in my work—I remember with great emotion the only premières of the solo performed by Stefano: Odense in Denmark, Madrid, and Mexico City—I believe he only performed it publicly on those occasions, perhaps because it required two double basses, one lying on a table and the other standing [on its foot?], which is logistically and scenically complicated, or simply because he felt that playing with two bows was degrading, not so much for the double bass but for himself. Moreover, he was annoyed by having to handle rosin-covered fingers, which forced him to carefully clean all the strings after each performance. In addition, in the work he placed the score pages on a series of stands and even on the double bass itself, turning it into his wall of protest, perhaps part of his objection, since as a soloist he felt that all that staging was excessive for presenting it within his recital repertoire.
In contrast to this relative absence from his repertoire, Stefano sent me a positive signal: his excellent transcription from cello to double bass of Canto alterno, which he integrated into concerts such as the one at the Madrid Auditorium—a first part with my works and a second with his own compositions—at the invitation in 2004 of Músicadhoy, where he included miqi’nahual and yuunohui’nahui. Perhaps he preferred the latter, to the point that he would privately demonstrate it to me by playing several passages from memory, just as he also performed Canto alterno from memory.
Stefano Scodanibbio has been—and continues to be—one of my closest friends. The musician and the man are the same sensitive and intelligent being, always eager to learn from the places or people he loved, as happened with Mexico, his second adopted country, where he felt the need to breathe that “good chaos” we experienced for many years, so different from the dull chaos of the idiotic order toward which our current society is heading.
He would come here alone or with Maresa, and we—myself, Velia, and my two sons—would offer him our studio as a place to spend those days, which for us were moments of great joy. I remember how much Julián enjoyed it when Stefano proposed a game of chess, or Amadeo discussed with him about cello or viola de gamba Baroque music performances, always before lunch, if he was not the one cooking and when it was Velia—and not me—who prepared our usual paella, since we never dared to cook for them a pasta “in our own way.” What a danger, because when he was the chef he became the Grand Dictator!
— Julio, don’t touch the pot, or the spoon, or the fork!
Then, like in one of his concerts, he would begin to organise the utensils, the type of pasta, the ingredients for the sauce, and everything needed to start the execution of another of his memorable kitchens—refined and precise like his musical creations or interpretations. Stefano turned his private cooking into a performance, in the way he “played” everything—from the food, to the type of dishes he could use, to the necessary order from the very beginning of preparation—giving precise instructions to everyone and with his unmistakable command, as if he were speaking of his bows:
— You don’t touch anything, Julio, stay away!
The result was undoubtedly a unanimous delight for the palate. On several occasions he cooked at our home, and Velia therefore memorised one of Scodanibbio’s special dishes, pesce all’acqua pazza—which already sounds beautiful in Italian—with white fish, garlic, parsley, pepper, and tomatoes fried in olive oil, with a touch of mulato chilli, water only halfway up the fillet and brought to a boil until it reduced into a more or less thick sauce: a concert of nerves, in which Maresa’s role was to have everything ready at hand, immediately pass him whatever he needed, and serve each dish together. During those meals Velia often joined in, preparing her ceviche as a starter and, at the end, her selection of cheeses and desserts.
At Ana Lara’s house, and I believe also at Fátima’s or Llorenç’s, Stefano offered us some of his original dishes, even better when they required Maresa’s presence, his beloved ally: carefully mixing the pasta in the water with that touch of chipotle to give it la cossa sua, “its own thing,” stirring the spatula in the sauce, finely grating the cheese and serving it over the pot just as a bit of the pasta’s viscous water emerged and the heat of the pan melted it, continuing to stir without pause, warning me—half seriously, half jokingly—with his rough, deep voice, the usual:
— Julio…
which ensured I kept my distance, so that nothing would be contaminated by my heavy spoon or twisted like my music, but instead remain as exquisite and suggestive as his.
Despite all this, we always ended up laughing at the overly serious tone of the French chef—“to-ma-te con-cas-sé,” literally crushed tomato, or figuratively “con cassé,” broken stupid—or during trips to Germany, where we opted for grilled meat to avoid the sausage-heavy choucroute. We never went to England, but we would have done the same just to avoid seeing, touching, or smelling a meat pie. Food was, for both of us, each in our own way, a celebration of life in private, and in social terms a way of expressing mutual appreciation and sharing knowledge, pleasure, and creativity around the table. Good eating and good drinking brought us together, and even when we ended up eating a sandwich with a beer on a train or while travelling, our first choice was always to enjoy together the best things for the palate.
Stefano also appreciated the company of extraordinary figures, such as Edoardo Sanguineti, whom I had admired since the Parisian ’68 as the creator, in Laborintus II by Luciano Berio, of a poetic labyrinth made of fragments of Dante, Eliot, and Pound, as well as the author of the texts for the Postkarten (1979). He came to my house with Stefano to have lunch and share a Saint-Émilion whose velvety taste I still remember as vividly as the delightful conversation we had after lunch. Another great friend was Manolo Arroyo, a Spanish publisher and author of a satirical text, Contra los franceses, “Against the French”, whom I met by chance on the beach of Troncones, in northern Guerrero. After a brief conversation about Rulfo, in contrast with the “Octavio Pacian” intellectuals who in Mexico fully enjoyed—and were fully funded by—official support, we became close friends. I remember presenting at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid El sonido en Rulfo: ‘el ruido ese’, a book that gave rise to my work, to a strictly “handful-of-people” audience: Fátima, Llorenç, Stefano, and Manolo—five including myself in the room—the most intelligent and critical Spanish intellectual I have ever known, who from then on also became our best group friend.
Two or three years later he helped make it possible for Chavela Vargas to sing “Mi novia me dio un pañuelo con orillas de llorar”, from Pedro Páramo, at the world premiere of Murmullos del páramo at the Teatro Español in Madrid. Whether before, after, or during the rehearsals and concerts of my work, Manuel Arroyo always welcomed the Scodanibbios and the Estradas with great generosity into his large apartment on Calle Génova, and, from the moment I began preparing the final version of the score, also into his delightful adobe isolated house open onto the Pacific Ocean in Playitas, Guerrero, which Stefano and Maresa also visited quite frequently.
When Stefano came to Mexico, it was customary to invite him to give composition or performance courses at the Laboratorio de Creación Musical, LaCreMus, which I directed at the then Escuela Nacional de Música, today Faculty, of the National University, UNAM—one of many places that welcomed him with open arms. There he presented his music and new techniques to composers, double bassists, and string players in general; the reception he received was always a success, with classrooms full of students and teachers who admired him both as a creator and as a performer. Although he did not hold a permanent professorship at a conservatory, the combination of his sensitivity and intelligence made him an extraordinary pedagogue, open to presenting his methods and demonstrating them through each of his techniques in both fields. His classes became a unique musical experience, confirmed by his activities at the National Conservatory, the Composition Workshop, the Conservatory of Morelia, the University of Guanajuato, and many other institutions, as well as by frequent lectures at universities and musical institutions across Europe, Latin America, and the United States—particularly in California, at Stanford, UCLA, and La Jolla—where he was offered a permanent position, which he refused because it would have limited the freedom he enjoyed.
Today he is remembered everywhere with gratitude for his generosity, with joy for having known him, and with sadness for no longer having him among us.
What do you currently remember about him?
Everything I am able to remember; the happiest memories are those from my first visit to the Rassegna di Nuova Musica in Macerata, when I heard again my music, yuunohui’nahui, performed by him, or by other wonderful interpreters, and then our gatherings at “il pozzo”, which I used to call “the cave”—the place Stefano preferred most, where we would enjoy pizza and focaccia baked in a wood oven, accompanied by fresh Italian white wine. What moments those were!
Because after so many tensions, he knew how to relax among his collaborators and joke freely about the experience, whether in the company of the Arditti Quartet and that immense human and musical pillar that was Rohan de Saram, or with closer friends such as Vinko Globokar, Terry Riley, or Italian composers delighted to hear their own works. Stefano turned Macerata into a worldwide reference point for new music and for Italy itself—a festival that became a resonating chamber for his listening and musical preferences. Travelling to Italy had been one of my childhood dreams, because my parents, Spanish Republican exiles, used to take me to see all the Italian films that arrived in Mexico: my father was fascinated by Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, and my mother by Vittorio De Sica and Marcello Mastroianni—artists who had lived through the postwar period and who suggested what that reality might have been like in Spain. Thus, Italian was often spoken at home, and I even learned a few words, an experience that brought me closer to the joyful and spicy sonorities of Vivaldi.
Beyond my affinity with Italy—almost quasi identical to Stefano’s with Mexico—among my many memories I still hear our shared travels to places where my music was performed: we would go out for lunch and dinner together, drinking good wine chosen by him, or we would be invited to the homes of mutual musician friends, where we enjoyed gastronomic pleasure even more intensely. I remember Robert Aitken, composer and flautist, who after one dinner had filled the empty spaces of his table with a dozen and a half bottles of wine and a variety of liquors that left us astonished. Another precious moment was when Stefano worked on his radio piece One says Mexico, his tribute of love to our country, in which I sometimes accompanied him by reading, in a Hispanic tone, texts he had selected, or by taking him to record the sounds of the Cuernavaca market, which once again confirmed Neruda’s phrase that Stefano would often quote with emotion and pleasure: “Mexico is in its markets.” This leitmotif guided his exploration through corridors, fruit and vegetable stalls, shops and small stores, and the continuous murmur of tireless voices of vendors, announcements, live music with violins, guitars, small ensembles, or even radios of all kinds at full volume, resonating endlessly in that space.
I also remember with great sadness his most difficult days, when we visited them in the first of the two houses they lived in here in Cuernavaca, the one that had belonged to the sculptor Augusto Escobedo and the visual artist Jody McGrath—who from then on adopted the nickname Maresa used for me, “cabronnaccio”—and, already very close to the end, in the second house, when I brought a raw huachinango and cut it for all of us, with the idea of sharing sashimi together and speaking in intimacy, breathing beside them the very sad air of farewell. Stefano Scodanibbio remains the friend I chose as the brother I neither had nor ever had, with whom I lived through difficult moments when Velia fell ill and he and Maresa came to visit us, accompanying us only with their smiling gaze and a silent embrace. Maresa and Velia, in a sense, maintained a bond of friendship and even affinity as wives of overly demanding husbands: Maresa, his guiding figure in adult life; Velia, my muse since adolescence. To both of them our music owes far more than can be imagined, having endured our creativity and its capricious forms.
I add here a brief parenthesis to clarify the reason for my inclusion of certain passages from another recent text that will be published in Spanish as part of the introduction to Stefano Scodanibbio’s No me basta; I am aware that my participation in this project exists only in Spanish, and therefore I adopt ideas that allow me to complete what has been said so far more effectively, bearing in mind that repeating my ideas in various parts of this interview, sometimes literally and sometimes almost so, would not alter the positive direction I perceive in this collective testimony—I apologise to the editor for their tolerance of my frequent digressions: the attempt to explore together the multiple facets of an irrepeatable musician. At the end of 2025, thanks to Ana Lara, I learned of the recent Italian publication of Stefano Scodanibbio’s selected texts collected in Non abbastanza per me, a book Ana is preparing in Spanish translation; hence the invitation to write an introductory text whose slow and demanding process of recollection remains closely tied to this part of my testimony.
Reading Stefano’s writings—mostly about travels, music and musicians, or about himself—made me discover a lesser-known facet of him, which I had only partially sensed through the conversations we shared on those topics. I did not even know that he wrote, and that he did so so well, and moreover with such consistency, around his frequent perception of accumulated moments throughout the, unfortunately, barely five decades he was able to live. I clearly remember the words or short phrases he would often use, almost as winks during private conversations, or which he would send as postcards to friends—almost always in a tone of playful sharing about some subject. Looking at that aspect today from a distance, one realises that he was not necessarily informing us about his travels, but rather about the fact that he was still, as always, alive among us.
Reading today someone who, years ago, so often sent greetings from afar revives the memory of his presence and is deeply moving; it binds us to emotion and keeps us anchored in the shared moments with the friend from beginning to end—the sensitive and singular creator, and in my case, as in that of others, the great accomplice in the idea of the perfect performer. In those difficult times, almost unimaginable, knowing that he was approaching the end of his life and that he wanted to return to Italy, I told him that I wished to see him there and accompany him, creating a work for him with Ludus Gravis, the double bass ensemble founded by Daniele Roccato, a person I had met thanks to Scodanibbio and whom I had later invited to give a lecture on his work in Mexico. Stefano had written for all those young double bassists what would become his last work, Octeto, a score I saw in its emergence and development a year earlier, when I visited him in his first house in Cuernavaca, and which I was able to hear as one of his most creative musical testimonies.
After telling him that I wanted to go to Macerata to be with him, I proposed my idea of creating a creación en vivo, a live creation of music.
— What is this thing, Julio? What we have planned is a festival of improvisation with people known in that field, not you: there you are a stranger.
— This is better than improvisation, and I have been working on it for a decade. It is my escape from the work table: I create music without preparation or knowing anything, outside the known, precisely in order to find myself alone with the new.
— You are crazy.
— You already know that, but I insist: I want to create a live work for you. I will pay for my own flight. There I would need to work with the musicians for five full days in an isolated place in the countryside, locked in to prepare what the work will contain, which I imagine will last about ten minutes. It is something very serious, and I would also like you to be able to hear how everything emerges from nothing. Do not have any doubts.
— “Bah,” he said, perhaps with his usual grimace, like “ugh, if there is no alternative.”
— All right. I would like to place the musicians around the audience, on the balconies.
— No, Julio, no! Forget it! Madness! Forbidden!
— All right, Stefo, even though everyone will be in front I know it will still be something very good, and it is dedicated to you: you will hear it.
That time I accepted that he imposed his conditions, but at that point it no longer mattered: it was about seeing him again and saying goodbye by creating something live.
So we agreed, and the work was scheduled to be realised with Ludus Gravis and presented after five days of rehearsals in April in Macerata. Stefano Scodanibbio had died in Mexico, and I could no longer see him in Macerata, which charged this creation with a strong emotional intensity and with anger over his loss. It was precisely during the final rehearsal, in the foyer of the Teatro Lauro Rossi, while listening to the result, that I realised the title, Sotto il vulcano (Under the Volcano, Bajo el volcán), first because it came from the novel that had most deeply marked Stefano’s relationship with Mexico, and second because the sonorities were telluric, produced by everyone on stage in a single large sonic eruption.
I must admit that Stefano’s prohibition of my spatialisation ultimately proved beneficial in better fusing the sound masses. Bringing that work to life in that place was a celebration of intense private and collective emotion: since each musician had two bows, I asked that at the end each one should look upwards and strike the air with both bows—a personal and collective silent farewell to our beloved friend—then place both bows in front of them on the floor, creating an imagined circular bonfire before everything faded into darkness.
What elements of his compositional practice would you highlight in order to understand his singularity?
In these pages I may have missed something that is perhaps obvious to many, namely to emphasise the musical genius of Stefano Scodanibbio—a rare sum of multiple abilities that made him one of the most complete musicians I have known in the history of music. In my view, this was due to the richness and balance ensured by the combination of his undeniable qualities: researcher–creator–performer.
First, he was someone who writes from his own instrumental knowledge, responding to the canons of tradition or modernity through the Studi per contrabbasso, an involuntary treatise of methods and techniques expressed by the performer-creator, as demanding as he was intuitive. Second, because this background, together with the precision of his ear, his musical perception, and his critical judgement, allowed him to approach the work of others as an experienced creative colleague, always open to discovering the music that could emerge from each score, committed to tearing it away from the code and transforming it into living matter—so much so that this impulse turned it into a form of truth. Third, in performing the music of others with the same rigour he imposed on himself in his own playing, we came to know Stefano’s inner struggle, as can be read today in some of his texts, when he was perceived more as a perfect performer than as a composer. Given his abilities, such a reproach could be read as a lack of reciprocity. While I do not share his complaint, and while it is unnecessary to underline the intrinsic value of his work, I feel it is right here to acknowledge his inventiveness: his creative experience was the product of a skilful alliance between imaginative impulse, instrumental research, and musical intelligence, all nourished also by reading and travel—essential for him in order to access a different mode of thought, beyond the habitual, or beyond so-called “contemporary music,” towards what led him to listen to the other music, set of heterogeneous resources fed a reflection constantly rooted in perception, a trait that allowed him to arrive at original invention. This invention arises from the interplay between his ear and his unique way of understanding what, on the strings, was offered to him only by the hands: it is the hands that understand the speech, the whisper, and the song through which he builds his own authentic self-portrait—an expression of his full artistic autonomy.
Reading Guide
yuunohui’nahui (1985), Julio Estrada. Stefano Scodanibbio, programme note, Rassegna di Nuova Musica, Macerata, Italy, 1989.
When I first encountered the score of yuunohui’nahui (Zapotec: fresh, moist earth without stones), this work did not yet was a legend. I was struck by the overall conception of the piece, the total “wildness” that in fact emanated from every page. But the enormous difficulty of the notation (which I was not yet able to fully understand), combined with my innate laziness, led me to refrain from attempting its performance. Later, I had the opportunity to meet the composer in Mexico City and to spend an afternoon with him. He explained to me his conception of music and the intrinsic problems of this work. I finally understood the reasons behind what, at first sight, had seemed obscure. His need to make a tabula rasa and start again from the very foundations of music had taken him so far that the work appeared at once like a product of computing technology and something deeply archaic—or rather “primary,” as he himself likes to call it.
The project of this piece remained clear to me, even if it continued to present a series of seemingly insurmountable difficulties. The independence of the left hand with respect to the right hand—which for the first time in Western music makes it possible to separate rhythm from sound—the systematic use of quarter-tones and third-tones, irrational intervals within a non-octave-based scale divided into 5, 9, 13, etc.; left-hand pizzicati interfering with the bowing line; bow movements between fingerboard and bridge in complete autonomy from the rest of the discourse… All of this is superimposed simultaneously, in such a way that the performer must divide themselves into five or six entirely independent layers. The aura of impracticability surrounding this piece was confirmed to me by reports coming from various parts of the world: performers refusing to tackle the music, last-minute cancellations of performances, and all kinds of accusations directed at the composer. I was asked to perform the work in Zurich at a festival dedicated to the use of computers in music.
The preparation of the piece was an extraordinary adventure… marked by crises and moments of exaltation that accompany every new project, progressively overcoming limits, enriched by the instrumental insights that the score’s indications provided me—and continued to provide me incessantly. The performance took place on 11 December 1988 at the Zurich Conservatory, in the presence of the composer. yuunohui’nahui is the freshest music to have sounded in recent years. A freshness that only the finest wind of the American continent could provoke, as a stimulus not to stop in front of the certainty of our Eurocentric tradition.
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