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GIACINTO SCELSI (1905 - 1988)
Mr. Scelsi was practically unknown up to a few years ago, and his name did not even figure in most works of reference. But in October 1987, when the ISCM Festival in Cologne was inaugurated by a concert specially given over to his works for orchestra and chorus, the huge hall of the Philharmonic was intirely booked out not only for the concert, but for the public dress rehearsal too, and the old master was endlessly acclaimed. In the space of a few years, his main works have at last been performed, with an average delay of about a quarter of a century with regard to their composition. A whole chapter of recent musical history must be re-written : the second half of this century is now unthinkable without Scelsi.
Born on January 8th 1905 in La Spezia, Giacinto Scelsi stems from an old aristocratic family of Southern Italy, with partly Spanish ancestry on the maternal side. He has always resolutely refused to give any biographical or personal detail concerning himself, just as he will not let himself be photographed. After a good academic training in Rome, he studied for some time with a pupil of Schonberg's in Vienna, and thus became the first Italian (as early as 1936, long before Dellapiccola) to write 12-tone music. But this hardly satisfied him, and he broke away from serialism, which he considered a dead end, many years before the post-war serialist wave. He got more out of studying with a disciple of Scriabin's in Geneva, as much on the harmonic or sound level as on the metaphysical and spiritual : he too felt drawn to the East, India, China, and to Zen Buddhism.
Scelsi had already composed about thirty pieces, when, towards the end of the war, he underwent a serious crisis, calling for years of hospitalisation. Whilst in the nursing home, he found his own therapy : he would spend hours at the keyboard, endlessly playing the same note and immersed in concentrated and intense listening, thus renewing experiences going back to early childhood. This saved him, and from 1952 onwards he started composing again, but in the entirely new and different language which allowed him to create about a hundred works within thirty years. In direct contradiction with the then prevailing serial combinatory way of thinking, his music explored the very center of sound, in order to liberate the infinite energy within. He himself explains this : "He who does not penetrate to the interior, to the heart of sound, even though a perfect craftsman, a great technician, will never be a true artist, a true musician." And he never fails to insist that he is not at all a "composer" in the usual sense (a "combiner") but only an intermediary, a messenger between two worlds, a "postman"! In fact, he has inaugurated a completely new way of making music, hitherto unknown in the West.
In the early fifties, there were few alternatives to serialism's strait-jacket that did not lead back to the past. Then, towards 1960/61, came the shock of the discovery of Ligeti's Apparitions and Atmospheres. There were few people at the time who knew that Friedrich Cerha, in his orchestral cycle Spiegel, had already reached rather similar results, and nobody knew that there was a composer who had followed the same path even years before, and in a far more radical way : Giacinto Scelsi himself.
We know more about the most distant galaxies than what is happening only a few miles below us. For we tend to forget that we can also travel inwards. In music, this means exploring the inside of sound. It too frees infinite energy. Since Debussy at the latest, we know that this road establishes contact with non-European musical cultures which have always been centered on sound. No composer has marked the passage from the conception on note, hetherto dominating Western music, to the conception of sound, in a more radical way than Scelsi. To him, each note is a sound that is to say not simply a dot, but a sphere endowed with dimensions of depth and volume. It can and must be the object of a disintegration in its constituent parts. A sound is a living organism, blessed with an infinitely subtle and complex organic life. A living organism, filled above all with movement. And Scelsi likes to say : "Sound is immobility's first motion", adding : "There is the beginning of Creation!".
Sound lives and moves : it oscillates in space, it vibrates and quivers like plasma, it is filled with depth and breadth. This inner vibration of spheric sound is made audible by clusters, trills, tremolos, glissandos, by various articulations, by contrasts in the "grain" such as rough or smooth, but above all by that rapid and broad vibrato widening the pitch's trail from a linear ray into a large beam. Frontiers between the different pitches therefore no longer exist, not even between micro-intervals. The Dutch musicologist Henk de Velde, alluding to Adorno speaking of Alban Berg, has called Scelsi the Master of the yet smaller transition : in fact, his music is only transition!
Scelsi's first explorations into this new musical continent took place on the level of monady, instrumental as well as vocal. The piano, which up till then had been essential to his work, had soon to be abandoned, because of its impossibility to produce micro-intervals. On the other hand, Scelsi extended his conquests to the orchestra towards the end of the fifties. A fundamental step in this pioneering work was that of the famous Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959), four pieces for chamber orchestra each working on a one and only pitch, elaborated in all its tonal and temporal parameters.
This music moves beyond tonality and equal temperament, yet in never sounds aggressive or discordant, for it spreads out in the whole sound spectrum, which encompasses and integrates all the overtones. In the endless gliding of his sound nebulae, he may happen to create encounters, ephemeral states, where we perceive consonances, and even perfect chords. This music is generally qualified as static, but its dynamics reside in the sound matter itself, and are an incessant display of energy. It is much less music describing a state or of being, than it is of becoming. Its exploration into the infinitely small reaches the infinity of time suspended. Infinity and Eternity : Scelsi's music brings us closer to the origin of all energy and all life : it brings us closer to God.
One now understand why Scelsi's day could not occur sooner. The problems raised by his music were irrelevant for decades, he was simply too far ahead of his time. His large output has been made almost entirely accessible through publishing during the past few years, even though many works have not yet been publicly performed. With the exception of opera and stage in general, it embraces every genre. But it is undeniably his pieces for large orchestra, some with chorus, which most perfectly reveal his great genius, and which make him into one of the supreme creators of this century. Six of these date from the height of his creative maturity, the first three for orchestra alone: Hurqualia (1960), Aion (1961) and Hymnos (1963), and the other three for chorus and orchestra: Uaxuctum (1966), Konx-Om-Pax (1968-69) and Pfhat (1974). They were all belatedly premiered between 1985 and 1987.
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