GIACINTO SCELSI

Giacinto Scelsi is one of the most extraordinary composers who have ever lived. A profound mystic, he saw the future of music as residing in a return to an atavistic state of a distant Indo-European pan-culture, and devised exact music to fulfil his ideals.

The music of Giacinto Scelsi is perhaps best described as being that of a spiritual Edgar Varese. This is merely to serve to depict a kind of sound-picture of the basic energy of Scelsi’s works. It has the elemental quality of both Varese as well as that of Tibetan Buddhist orchestral music, and likewise the attention upon Sound in-and-of-itself, yet, through Scelsi’s innate spirituality and deep commitment to Far Eastern philosophy and spirituality, it transcends the realm of mere sound, touching an area of our being left largely untouched by all other music. His music is not for those of a nervous disposition nor for the faint-hearted. It is utterly naked, raw music and totally uncompromising. He considered that all composition since Pythagoras had been in error - that composing (putting together) was a mistake. Devising new music should consist in the analysis of one note and its overtones.

Scelsi began to create massive works based on one note. Earlier in the century the Austrian mystic, occultist, and founder of the Anthroposophical movement Rudolph Steiner had described how the content of one note and its overtone series (and its "undertone" series) could be enough in the future music to provide the raw material for a composition, but Scelsi went further, exploring the microtonal deviations from the chosen note.

Increasingly his works centred around the narrower examinations of the very nature of sound itself, bearing mystical titles, quite often coming from the Vedic tradition of India, and making increasing demands on the performer, in a manner normally only met with in much of extreme Romanticism or Expressionism. Yet with the mystic's rejection of self, this music is as far from expressionism as can be.

A personal favourite of mine is UAXUCTUM a fabulous piece including the eerie sounds of the Onde Martinot, and the sound of choirs breathing then singing accompanied by an array of percussion and orchestral instruments. People to whom I have played it seem to get taken back to some primeval period of history - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Having much in common with the elemental music of Tibetan ritual orchestras - this piece comes close to being a musical depiction of those opening words of St John's Gospel "In the beginning was the Word". Creativity on an intergalactic level! Certainly, it is electrifying and creates a space which one can seemingly walk right into - a kind of sculpting in sound. Another favourite is OHOI - 'the creative principles' according to Scelsi (1966) (Forlane UCD16800) for 16 string soloists. This piece positively shimmers with spiritual light whilst being a feast for the ears regarding microtonal shifts and ranges in timbre stemming from Scelsi's experiments in bowing techniques. One can seemingly hear an entire orchestra within this world of strings!

Frank Perry.

“Giacinto Scelsi died in 1988 at the age of 83, having seen the tentative first moves towards performing, publishing, recording and appraising his 150-odd compositions begin to blossom.

Why did it take so long for Scelsi’s music to reach the outside world? The answer is probably to be found in his background personality. Born into the Italian aristocracy, he never experienced the need to earn his living from music or anything else, and was never inclined to plunge into the life of a “public” composer – he didn’t do interviews or photographs and only occasionally organised concerts in Rome (where he was associated with the Nuova Consonanza group, one of those more unlikely members was Ennio Morricone). So the inevitable image was of a wealthy, eccentric dilettante – much like that of Charles Ives before people actually began to take notice of the music.

Any resemblance to other composers living or dead ends there. The earliest work to have been recorded (acknowledged works date back to 1930) is the half-hour First String Quartet of 1944: recorded twice, in fact, by the Arditti Quartet – on the Italian Raretone label in 1982 (FORE 80/13-14) and for Editions Salabert in 1988, to which I’ll return later. Although standing firmly in the 12-tone tradition, and frequently overstretching its dense chromatic counterpoint, some moments of rarefied stillness form fascinating premonitions of what was to come.

What did come next in the late 1940’s was a crisis in Scelsi’s life: dissatisfaction with his work and existence to the point of mental breakdown, from which he gradually emerged via a self-enforced contemplation of the “inner life” of single, endlessly-repeated piano sounds. (Here the accusation of dilettantism begins to look a bit silly) alongside this came a first turning to creative ends of a study of ancient and Eastern arts and beliefs (compare John Cage at much the same time). When in the early 50s, Scelsi began once more to compose, his and Western music’s past were decisively jettisoned.

The first results were extended sets of short piano pieces such as form the Suites Nos 9 and 10 (1953 and 1954), recorded by Marianne Schroeder on hat ART CD 6006: music which depends almost totally on the listener as it were, entering the resonances of the instrument, to which the attacked “notes” themselves seem peripheral, the frequent (but seldom exact) reiterations forming gradual evolutions like the stately unfolding of a single massive bell-sound. Restless people, as Scelsi points out, should keep away – but the degree of concentration required is, if anything, greater in the works of his subsequent phases, beginning at the end of the 50s with the String Trio of 1958 and the Four Pieces For Orchestra (“each on a single note”) of the following year. At this point the chromatic resources of the piano became too constricting for Scelsi’s exploration of the interior of sound; his gradual shift of attention towards stringed instruments (in a largely modal, quasi-improvisatory context, as in the Divertimento No 3 for violin and “Coelocanth” for viola, both from 1955, on Accord 200622 together with other solos, duos and the String Trio) brought with it the possibility of the finest microtonal and timbral flexibility.

The Four Pieces appeared on the first widely-released Scelsi record (RCA FY103), made in 1982 by French “Ensemble 2e2m” conducted by Luca Pfaff, together with “Kya” (also 1959), which combines folk-like modalities in its solo clarinet part with glacially-changing accompaniments for a seven-piece ensemble, and two later pieces: “Okanagon” (1968) for harp, tam-tam and double bass, an evocation of massive spaces and durations (though only 10 minutes long), and the even more compressed “Pranam 11” (1973) for nine players.

That album was quite a revelation in its time, but the more recent recording of the Four Pieces, by the Radio-Television Orchestra of Cracow under Jurg Wyttenbach, shows how even a few years awareness of Scelsi’s style lends anew confidence and commitment to the playing. The title should be somewhat qualified: the “single note” also includes transposition by octaves and shifts of up to a semitone – but the unity of the sound is justification enough. The essential elements of Scelsi’s mature music are now in place. Continuous fluctuations in intonation and sonority, disturbed by implacable, volcanic outbreaks, give an impression of worlds distant in space and time from this one, a grandeur poised between melancholy and ecstasy unique to this composer.

Wyttenbach’s recording on Accord 200162 is combined with two works from the mid-60s, “Anahit” for violin and chamber orchestra where the microtonal clusters open out into consonant chords with almost unbearable poignancy, and “Uaxuctum” (“The Legend Of The Mayan City Destroyed By Its Inhabitants”) for Ondes Martenot, (wordless) chorus and orchestra, whose fragments of melody and harmony emerge from and are subsumed by a pulsating deep-bass continuum. This is perhaps the necessary Scelsi recording. Its companion disc, with the same performers (Accord 200402), is almost as stunning, though – besides “Aion” (1961) for orchestra are two more recent pieces with chorus, “Konx-om-pax” (1969) and “Pfhat” (1974), the latter subtitled “A Flash Of Lightning. . . And The Heavens Opened”: after an immense, turbulent orchestral culmination, the last quarter of its nine-minutes duration is an unbroken texture dominated by the entire chorus and most of the orchestra playing small bells – a gesture prevented by the austere conviction behind its extravagance from descending into the realm of cheap picturesque effects.

In the domain of chamber music, the one not to miss is the Arditti Quartet’s just-released two discs (Salabert SCD 8904-5) of all five string quartets, the String Trio and “Khoom” (1962) for female voice and horn added to the quartet. Quartets two to four, all written in the early 60s, form points along a progression towards the total refinement of Scelsi’s string style, resulting (in the fourth) in a single accumulation of expressive tension in which each string of each instrument is eventually notated separately, s to accommodate the unprecedented timbral sophistication of the writing. (The instruments are also retuned to facilitate double-stopping in microtonal “close harmony” over all four strings). Needless to say, the Arditti Quartet is probably uniquely qualified to clarify such complexities, and, again, comparison with their earlier recording shows a striking increase in interpretative depth.

“Khoom” also features the voice of Michiko Hirayama, close collaborator in Scelsi’s extensive output for solo voice whose culmination was “Canti Del Capricorno” (1962 – 72), a 50-minute cycle of 19 songs recorded on Wergo WER 60127-50. A few are accompanied by one or two instruments, but the centre of attention is never anything but Ms Hirayama’s voice, combining classical European attributes with the enormously wider range of pitch, vibrato and colouration found in the vocal traditions of her native Japan. Scelsi’s writing, again using abstract phonetic values rather than words, seems to serve here primarily as a means of liberating this vast technical vocabulary – it’s difficult to imagine it being taken up successfully by anyone else, so the disc is pretty definitive.

Another performer who worked extensively with Scelsi is the American cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, whose recording (Raretone FORE 6) of his 40-minute solo Trilogy (1957-61) must equally constitute a standard by which other renderings will be judged: as the dates of composition might suggest, this work (subtitled “The Three Ages Of Man”) contains within itself the transition between (marginally) traditional virtuosity with Scelsi’s inimitable and “unplaceable” melodic style, and, in the third part (“Old Age – Memories – Catharsis”), eventually “finding the right note” on the cello, an extended moment of complete serenity.

The last phase of Scelsi’s work concentrates itself into less and less eventful sound-surfaces, like the three solo bass pieces “C’est Bien La Nuir”, “Le Reveil Profound” and “Maknongan”, all from the mid-70s, played exquisitely by Joelle Landre on ADDA 581043; “In Nomine Lucis” (1974) for organ (Eric Lundquist on RCA FY119, combined with “Three Latin Prayers” and “Antifona”, both 1970, unaccompanied vocal music somewhat crude in its appropriation of plainsong); and his final work, the Fifth String Quartet of 1984. Almost a postscript to Scelsi’s oeuvre (having been written eight years after its immediate predecessor), this quartet consists of 43 sound-units in each of which a harsh scraping subsides in a different way to reveal different pitch-configurations around the single central note F. There was no stepping-up of production in response to belated acclaim (of which Scelsi took virtually no notice); the music had reached a final repose in its own time.”

Composer Richard Barrett for WIRE Magazine

Recommended Music recordings:

· QUATTRO PEZZI PER ORCHESTRA

ANAHIT & UAXUCTUM ACCORD 200612

· HURQUALIA, HYMNOS & CHUKRUM ACCORD 201112

· ELEGIA PER TY, DIVERTIMENTO No 3,

L’AME AILEE, L’AME OUVERTE’ COELOCANTH

& TRIO A CORDES ACCORD 200622

· TRILOGIA & KO-THA

Frances-Marie Uitti (1992) ETCETERA KTC 1136

. INTEGRALE DE LA MUSIQUE DE CHAMBRE POUR ORCHESTRE A CORDES Forlane UCD16800

· Les cinq Quatuors a Cordes, Trio a Cordes & Khoon Salabert SCD 8904-5

Amazon.com carry a range of CDs by Scelsi. Visit their site and click on Music, then Classical and then Giacinto Scelsi for a list of currently available titles (regrettably, many of the above may no longer be available). Click on the link here: Amazon.com

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Harry Partch Giacinto Scelsi Alan Hovhaness