Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

Author(s): Robin Freeman and Giacinto Scelsi

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 176 (Mar., 1991), pp. 8-18
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/944639
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RobinFreeman
Tanmatras:The Life and Work
ofGiacinto Scelsi

Giacinto Scelsi, last Count of Dayala Valva and

one of the most extraordinarycomposers of this
century,'died in Rome on 9 August I988 at the
age of 85 in the Policlinico Gemelli after an
attack brought on by the sweltering Roman
summer: he who never went to the mountains
to avoid it, thinking that warmth could do him
only good. After the Naples earthquakeof I980,
which flattenedthe mediaevalhill town of Valva
and with it the family castle and its library,
Scelsi said: crollail castello,crollail padrone.The
castle falls to bits and so does its master. Those
of us who knew him in his last years remember
above all the frailfigure sitting on a couch below
the two portraitsthat Dali had given the Eluards
for a wedding present, doing ironic and at times
testy battle with the world and old age, there in
his overheated house across from the Roman
Forum. With such a view, he used to say, what
one does must be quite splendid or else a very
bad joke. During his lifetime Scelsi refused to
be photographed, did his best to avoid programme notes, and gave information about his
life only when he chose to forget himself in
conversation. Few of us cared to violate these
rules, knowing that for a man who had dictated
the memoiresof his future life they representeda
kind of defence against a finality imposed from
without. He sought something like this in his
music as well, hoping it would seem only a
snatch of what had been going on long before,
of what would be going on long after.
In the only snippet of officialbiography Scelsi
says that he passed his childhood in the castle of
Valva where he studiedLatin,fencing and chess.
What he doesn't tell us is that from a very early
age he spent much of the day improvising at the
piano. To Heinz-Klaus Metzger, the German
musicologist, he explainedthatit was only when
thus self-absorbed that his mother could comb
his hair. His father, an airforcepilot, pioneer of
aviationin a country that took it seriously, didn't
understandhis strange son, pioneer, adventurer
of another kind - his father, always in the air or
at sea, rarely at home and then always with a

different lady friend... One day they went

walking on Via Nazionale in Ronmewhen the
street was cordoned off for an official visit.
Scelsi's father walked up to the soldiers, told
them he was crossing the street to buy a packet
of cigarettesand did so, holding the little boy by
the hand - a little boy who, grown up, would
walk into the Rome opera house without a
ticket and have an usher take him to a seat.
Scelsi's formal training was scanty. He frequented the house ofOttorino Respighi, where
he was entranced by the conversation of
Respighi's wife, Elsa San Giacomo, herself a
pianist and composer. He attended the futurist
concerts organized by Russolo and his circle in
Rome, saying later they had an excitement and
novelty about them he never rediscovered.
There are traces of this early enthusiasm in his
ballet Rotative(= printing presses) for 3 pianos,
wind instruments and percussion, first
performed under Pierre Monteux in Paris in
I93 I. But Scelsi's interest in musical radicalism
did not stop with the Futurists. He went on to
study briefly in Vienna with Walter Klein, an
obscure follower of Schoenberg1 - composing,
as a result, the first I2-tone piece by an Italian.
But an abstractapproachto composition, based
as it was on the tempered scale and veering
already towards neo-classicism, could not
interest him long..
'In view of the fact that there seems no proof that Walter Stein
(activein Vienna from I9oo) actuallystudied with Schoenberg,
the Editor of Tempohas suggested to me that the Stein in
question might be Fritz Heinrich, a student of both Schoenberg and Berg and the man who prepared the vocal score of
Wozzeck.I have a recollection of Scelsi's having said 'Walter',
independent of Claudio Annibaldi's New Grove Scelsi article
(naming 'W. Stein') - which I hadn't read at that time.
Nevertheless, while awaiting further information on Walter
Stein, the idea is worth entertaining. First because Scelsi was
much more interested in the music of Berg than that of
Schoenberg: in fact one of his few pieces with a dedication is
an elegy on the death of Berg. And second because a man
who consented to do the vocal score of Wozzeck, however
privileged the task, might well have had time for an eccentric
foreign student who lacked formal preparation.

Tanmatras:The Life and Workof GiacintoScelsi

CasaScelsi- Viadi San Teodoro8, showingthebalconyof Scelsi'sprivateapartmentfrom

whichhewouldshowfriendsandguestshis view of
theRomanForumacrosstheway. (photo:RobinFreeman)

Scelsi then went to Paris and London where

he led a brilliant, worldly life and pursued his
interestin surrealismand the esoteric. Musically
he continued to develop under the double
influence of Scriabin and Berg, writing mostly
for his own instrument, the piano; and in 1937
he organized a series of concerts of contemporary music in Rome, in collaboration with
Petrassi.He also began to traveloutside Europe,
above all in India and Tibet. Of this period I
know little since Scelsi seldom spoke of it in
detail. It is there for the biographer to reconstruct, and that reconstruction will not be
easy since the handful of people who were close
to him then - Igor Markevitch, Pierre-Jean
Jouve, Henri Michaux - are no longer here to
ask about him.
For me, apart from the childhood anecdotes
and the music itself, Scelsi's story begins in the
I940s, since that is where he chose to begin it. I
had been sent to visit him one chilly winter
evening with an electric fire he needed because
the heating had broken down. At the tablewhere
he took his meals, next to the piano with a
carved Sicilian angel on it, he spoke to me about
his life with an openess that was not to recur.
How he had taken refuge in Lausanneduring the
war; how he had helpedJouve escapethere from
a Nazi-occupied Paris through the ruse that
Jouve's wife needed psychoanalytic treatment
that only the wife of the Chinese ambassadorin
Geneva could provide; how as the war dragged
on his British wife grew to detest life abroad -

particularly with an Italian who, according to

her, could not help but be the accomplice of an
enemy regime, and how she took the first train
for the channel after the ceasefire never to see,
hear or write to him again.2 His life would have
been different if that hadn't happened. He
wouldn't have been alone. He didn't know if
things would have been better for him or if he
would have written his music in the same way.
As it was he had had years of solitude in which
to meditate and work.
Not that it came easily, however. In I950,
Roger Desormiere performed Scelsi's last ecole
de Paris work, La naissancedu verbe,for chorus
and orchestra, in Paris. Scelsi lay on the floor of
the men's loo during the performance, imperiously ordering out the theatre personnel who
had found him there, and only came out into
the hall once more when the applause had
begun. A performance scheduled a week later
in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra
was cancelled when Desormiere unexpectedly
died; and the piece, in spite of my own efforts
and those of others, was never to be performed
again during the composer's lifetime. La
naissancedu verbe(1948) has a wordless phonetic
text set to melodic lines of an impassive austerity
which look forward to Scelsi's music of the
2Scelsi'swife's name was Dorothy. His pet name for her was
Ty. He wrote two pieces for her, a Suite for piano (No.6)
from 1938-9, called I capriccidi Ty, when they were together
and a duo for viola and 'cello from I966, Elegiaper Ty, after
they were separatedbut as far as I know before her death.

10 Tanmatras:The Lifeand Workof GiacintoScelsi

I950s,

and with it something

that will not

reoccur in the later music: passages of bleak

relentless counterpoint. I have heard the primitive recording Scelsi made by placing whatever
was then availablenext to a table radio. Salabert
have in the meantime prepared a performing
score. There is little doubt that this piece, a sort
of surrealistSymphoniedespsaumes,will surprise
whatever audience has the first chance to hearit
after the premiere over 40 years ago.
Presumably it will also be possible one day to
discoverjust when Scelsi spent a period in a rest
home after a sort of breakdown, as a result of
which his, improvisations were reduced to the
constant repetition of a single note - a date of
crucialimportance, when one thinks that Scelsi
deliberatelyfalsifiedthe dates of composition of
at least some of his scores in the usual attempt to
efface anything like a normal biography. He
knew, of course, about Rudolf Steiner's idea
that music could be written on a single note.
Steiner was not a musician, and indeed the
composers who called themselves his followers
never got beyond a greeting cardidea of cosmic
harmony. For all I know such music, based on
the negation of conflict, might have been more
pleasing to Steiner himself than Scelsi's, where
serenity is achieved by the balancingof tensions;'
where the angelic voice, if there is meant to be
any, sounds as Rilke thought to hear it: Ein
jeder Engel ist schrecklich.Goethe, after all,
preferredZelter's bland settings of his lyrics to
Beethoven's. But there was more than Steiner
at work in Scelsi's imagination.
In Paris in 1924 a press conference was held
by the Russian traveller and exile Fernand
Ossendowsky together with the esotericistRene
Guenon and Jacques Maritain, the neothomist
philosopher. Ossendowsky had escaped from
the Bolshevik regime not throughcentralEurope
but through Indiaand, on the way, he had spent
time in Tibet. There he had 'discovered' tantric
Buddhism and arrived in Paris full of accounts
of the survival of ancient religious teachings
going back to the origins of mankind. It was his
book Betes, hommes,Dieu that was discussed at
the press conference, Guenon insisting that the
traditions Ossendowsky wrote of could be
reconciledwith catholicmysticism to the benefit
of European spiritual renewal, whilst Maritain
warned that however fascinatingand venerable
these traditions might be, the Church should
keep Her distance from them and not attempt a
synthesis. The young Scelsi took the side of
Guenon (and that of his Italian disciple Julius
Evola, author of a book on tantrism),eventually

going to Nepal and India (if not Tibet) to see

and hear for himself. Hence the importance
for him of ritual prayers and dances with their
element of hypnotic repetition. Even when most
esotericists had given up their ideas about the
Dalai Lama and his monks in the aftermath of
the Chinese invasion Scelsi was able to say: 'Of
course the Tibetan monks had the power to
repelor even destroy the Chinese invaders. They
must have had some deep spiritual reason for
failing to do so.' Not so different, perhaps,
from Christ binding himself over to his accusers
of his own free will. Or from 'the Mlayan city'
of Scelsi's choral-orchestral piece Uaxuctum
which destroyed itself'for religious reasons'.
Of even greaterimportance was Scelsi's own
idea about the three-dimensionality of sound,
unveiled in I953 in Lausanne at what one
imagines as a musical equivalent to
Mr. Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock', and finally
published under the title Son et musiquein Rome
has
in 1981. This is the Scelsi whom L' Itine'raire
taken as fairy godfather, seeing in him a precursor of the spectral analysis of sound. Of
course Scelsi's music, like that of all important
composers, is witness primarily to its own
uniqueness and not a step along the way to what
somebody else had in mind - a fact insisted on
by PascalDusapin after Tristan Murail's lecture
at the 1987Royaumont Scelsi congress. Even so
there is a major difference in aesthetic outlook
between Scelsi and the high-tech world of
musique spectrale. Scelsi had little use for
machinery - once ordering quantities of it out of
a studio where he had gone to supervise a
recording of his music. The simpler the better,
he always said, and the more honest. His quest
for the hidden aspects of sound lay as it were
with the naked ear, that ear which Schoenberg
called 'ein Musikers ganzer Verstand', his
laboratory equipped only with the mechanism
of the single piano key he kept playing, and the
air around him which caused it to resonate.
Finally, if I am not mistaken, there is the
suggestive power of Russian futurist thought
about art - called to Scelsi's attention by
Markevitch or by one of his surrealist friends,
pervaded doubtless as well by oriental speculative mysticism. There is an extraordinary
passageat the end ofAlexandr Blok's lecture on
the 84th anniversaryof the death of Pushkin:
Intheinfinitedepthsof thespiritwheremanis manno
longer,in those depthsinaccessibleto the state and
society, thereare sound waves similarto the ether
waveswhichsurroundtheuniverse.There,rhythmic
vibrationspulsatelike those that shapemountains,

Tanmatras:The Life and Workof GiacintoScelsi 11

winds, marinecurrents,the animaland vegetable
worlds.

The first of these developments can already

be seen in the music for piano, even if the
eventual point of arrival lies far beyond it, in
It is the duty of the poet to commune with this
Scelsi'sinstrumentaland vocal writing. Morton
primeval chaos and to draw from it a harmony
Feldman, adding to his endless series of
that can be vouchsafed to other men.
wisecracks, said after a recital of Scelsi's piano
The moreveils arestrippedaway,the morecharged music at the Darmstadt Ferienkiirse in 1986:
the communionwith chaos, the more painfulthe 'How on earth did he
get from all thosenotes to
birthof sound,the moreprolongedandharmonious
onenote?' Dear Morty, I would like to have
just
will be thatwhichcomesforth,theclearertheformit
will take, the more insistentlyit will speakto the been able to say, since at the time I didn't know
either, it happened something like this...
humanear.
In the Ninth Suite, Ttai (1953), which seems
These words apply more to the music of Scelsi
to me the jumping-off point (however much
than to any other, more even than to that great
single notes come unstuck in the earlierpieces explosion, proximate to them in time: Le Sacre v. Zeller's analysis of the 1939 Second Piano
duprintemps.
Sonata),3therearethreemain types of repetition.
such as the still Scriabinesque
(1) Repeatedpatterns
*
*
*
one at the beginning of the first movement,
It is easy to see that Scelsiwas more a visionary which no matter how much and how quickly
than a theorist. Theory meant literally nothing
they decay still have something of the ostinato
to him. His work, reborn from the spiritual about them. (2) Repeated notessuch as that at
conflagration that followed La naissanceduverbe the beginning of the second movement, soon
(if my chronology is right), took two directions, doubled and extended downwards. Here the
which are in reality one and the same direction writing, taken apart from what we know of
Scelsi's theory,resembles that of Elliott Carter's
the simplification of the melodic line until it
one-note etude for wind quartet - while its
became the manifold projectionof a single note,
structuraleffect, in spite of the octave doubling,
and the gradual introduction of microtonal
inflections as the principal means to that is close to that of the opening two bars of
Gerhard's Second String Quartet. Both pieces
projection. I use the word 'inflection' since
Scelsi'smicrotonalityalways has a linearmelodic
go on to other notes and other textures. (3)
identity which generates, if you like, what there Repeated chords, of which there is a good
is of harmony, of intervallic structure in his
example in the third movement. The bell drone
effect is made 'anecdotal'by the peal of smaller
music. This explains as well Scelsi's place in the
'bells' above it. We are on our way to Eastern
evolution of musical style, for he was the firstto
ritual gongs, have got as far perhaps as a
see that in order to unleashthe expressive power
ofmicrotones the other musical parametershad Byzantine church in European Turkey.
to be simplified.
By the first movement of the Tenth Suite, Ka
That is what distinguishes his work from all
(1954), this process is complete in its earliest
the tampering that went on in the margins of
stage - the stage that produced the seven solos
for wind instruments and the piece for solo
chromatic atonality, where microtones were
introduced into a musical language already viola Coelacanth.Here (Ex.I) all notes other
chargedto the point of saturation.Such strategic than middle C are a kind of ornamental efflorescene or - to use words that Scelsi would
simplifications have occurred before in the
doubtless
of
music.
The
bold
have preferred - are an aura or
harmonic
history
progressions of the early baroque, introduced by
emanation of it. Within the ambitus of an
Monteverdi and his contemporaries, replaced octave (plus an all important B below middle C)
the polyphonic structures of Palestrina and Scelsi disposes the total (keyboard) chromatic
Victoria with something altogether simpler and in a figuration that looks deceptively neomore homophonic. Scelsi, like the Italian classical. In fact the layout, which shows every
madrigalists,was attractedby a vision of ancient sign of having been arrived at intuitively,
Greek music.With him it was the aulodia, a amounts to a deconstructing of the harmonic
potentialof intervalrelationships.All secondary
melody played on the aulos, an antique flute.
This perhaps explains why the first pieces on
polarities are contradicted before they have the
the new path are for wind instruments, even
chance to establish themselves. In this way the
microtones
are
much
harder
to
intone
though
3HaIns Rudolf Zcllcr, 'D)as Enscimble der Soli', in Musikon winds than on strings.
Konzepte31: GiacintoScelsi(edition tcxt+kritik, 1983).

12 Tanmatras:The Lifeand Workof GiacintoScelsi

Ex.I
J =08

r;t. molto --.-I

poco r1oeverc?o

ciA^

..a

rempo, ma uan poo

ca ,- ^-

sostenufo
-

-.-

AHLo~~r~
cn^]
rt1rr

108

po

pr r4r)

(el1r

Note: "KA" has several different meanings; the principal one is "Essence."

individual notes all refer the ear directly to that

middle C, the upper octave being no exception.
The B which occurs first between C(E) and
C S, and is later 'frozen' on to the C in the
passage's only 'simultaneity', is a downward
extension of the C, of its band of sound, and as
such is different from the intervals above it
precisely because the context (together with our
knowledge of later developments) suggests that
it is no intervalat all.
A parallel example from Messiaen's Canteyodjayashould help make this clear (Ex.2).

dealing with a four-note series (D,E,D # ,A),

unmanipulated and untransposed in the right
hand, untransposed in the left hand as well
though 'free' in order and rhythm. Messiaen
remedies the greyness of much post-Viennese
I2-tone writing by choosing shorter series with
an ear to their colour: he who early (in Preludes
of 1929) took the path of modalism never mind
how complex, rejecting that of total chromaticism. All the same, the outer interval here
is a major seventh with a persistent tritone
inside its frame (D# ,A) - those two standbys of

Vif

mf staccato

Ex.2

(inter- fmarcato _
versions) 8 ......... .......................................

^^^

tr,rr trr

rT?

8 ............................................................................................................................................................

The spontaneous impression of the high-speed

rhythmic patterning veils the fact that we are

antitonality that project a multivectored

geometry of sound in which the note as note is

Tanmatras:The Life and Workof GiacintoScelsi 13

strainstowards the B6 of its upper tritone rather
than nestling close to the preceding F. Quite a
different situation from the B below middle C
in the first movement of Ka.
The end of Ka's second movement brings a

scarcely to be heard.
Another, more elaborate, piece of melodic
writing which Scelsi would have known is the
long monody at the beginning ofJolivet's 'La
vache' from the piano suite Mana:
Ex.3

J= 52

<
p estprssivo

- ),

-,

,
Jolivet, under the influence of Varese, had
sought a non-serial (=organic) atonality rather
as Messiaen, the follower of Emmanuel, had
briefly sought a serial modality. Once again in
the passage quoted it is the major seventh and
tritone that one feels behind every note as it
passes by. The E for instance in the second bar
Ex.4

Y.

, _

passage that is the pianistic equivalent of Scelsi's

later device of tonal fluctuation within a band of
sound: Ex.4. Once more we have a chromatic
aggregate contained within an octave. This
time the contents could be described as clusters,
making one wonder if the four-note groups of
movement I should not be considered as

prx
Comre
;maJ /=})

>

r,x

--y^ff
-f

-----

T or

-r

jena

3 /I-

t :
/3

3:

X
t

.y

73' t

L)~,,m

c Fempo

^*nf.

'

-peol

_/ ., .

r~~

~- p-

'

>--

,pp

3
Y~

ut

f
/P

'

3II7~~~~ez

?ed.

r
i

poowf

e
II

ienzma ped.

14 Tanmatras:The Lifeand Workof GiacintoScelsi

horizontal clusters. The 'chordal'motion has in
fact taken the music from the E below middle C
to the octave above, reinforced in the bass by
furtheroctave doubling, with, characteristically,
the semi-tone F clinging above the E's. At this
point the E comes forward in its own right
(comeprima).There is more than a suggestion of
liturgical chant here, with the C( seeming
merely to support the E. But when at last the E
dies away, the C S falls to C - the C that began
the piece, now with its band extended upwards
by that same C , become Df.
Movement IV brings a bell-likepassage,given
shape by irregular rhythmic pulsations and
vibrato pedalling which provoke tonal and
microtonal over-lapping (Ex.5). The Bb, when
it arrives, seems almost like a figure in a
landscape- it gives the measureof the band EF,
ratherthan framing it harmonically.

(Ex.6). Pedalling, touch and layout result in

resonant thuds: microclusters, one could well
call them, since in all but a single instance where the 'band' is widened to encompass a
whole tone (D J ,E,F) - we are dealing with
minor-second dyads.
Jolivet achieves something similar in another
piece from Mana, 'La princesse de Bali': Ex.7.
In spite of the sevenths (here associated with
perfect fourths and fifths rather than tritones),
this is the sort of experimental music from the
world before Darmstadt that helped Scelsi on
his way, music which had gone out of fashion
before the recognition of CharlesIves once more
called attention to it.
The last page of Ka ushers in its terminal F$
(here Scelsi too has succumbed to the magic of
the tritone) via a distant E.: (Ex.8). Pedal
(introduced gradually, like a gathering mist),

Ex.5 MOLrorMlRATro(J =54)

(jempre /csciando vb6rcre colped.)

If

^r

m- 1

r.

r.

-"

Is~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'v~
V

The last movement has a percussivefiguration

that Scelsi marksto be played 'like sabreblows':

Ex.7
/ .i

( 9I

Rude - Plus lent

alourdr'
o^

*--rD,-

-'7
Sp. "K7

."J

'S."

\SM-~

83.

(.-

-..

'

13=
-- sL-

LL

7-

I ---

alternation of hands (like stopped and unstopped string, v. the second violin in the

L, -

,3

I
I

f
L

_
-.

!))

c
--

.71

h'A._

~~-_
i#m

l *6

Tanmatras:The Life and Workof GiacintoScelsi 15

Ex.8
r:fen.--

-f

9----

6-

PT(Pj -E
'

--a*-f -6 ------v

F--6

19:

1I

(sempre ,senzq ped.)

"t--- 1- 6
,[

G
6

poco

IO

cre'se.

- - - - -

con ped.jrino al/a fine

7-O'j

- -

----

(.

the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, and have an

importance for the history of musical composition comparable to that of the first serial scores
of Schoenberg and of the Modes et valeurs of
Messiaen. In all three cases, what happened later
on may be more interesting, more spontaneous *
*
*
but everything is alreadythere. A door has been
In I959 Scelsi wrote the QuattroPezzi chiascuno opened. As Harry Halbreich likes to point out,
su unanotasola (FourPieces, each one on a single it had become possible to tell a conservatoire
note) for small orchestra.They were performed student: 'And now, my lad, I want you to
under Maurice Leroux on 4 December I9614 at compose a G'. Though as usual with Scelsi,
things are not so simple as that.
The QuattroPezzi are in no way a loosely
4Thus the 1959 date given for the first performance in the
connected
series, a sort of experimental suite.
Musik-Konzepte volume on Scelsi, and cited by Harry
Halbreich in his notes to the recording of the QuattroPezzi They have as much right to be calleda symphony
('c'est l'une des tres raresoeuvres de Scelsi qui furent crees t6t as Webern's op.2I. In fact it is a near-constant
apres leur achevement'), is incorrect. The programme tells us with Scelsi that he retains the classic division
'les quatrePieces pour orchestresont recentespuisqu'ellesont
into movements, usually three or four of them.
ete composees en 1960'. Though it is still possible that they
were writtenin 1959 since Henri Michaux in a letter from I9 In the light of the many radical simplifications
October 1961 remarks: 'Enfin on va entrendre cette oeuvre in his music this decision could only have been
unique'. In any case, whether Scelsi heard the first perform- structural,a
recognition that a singlepiece could
ances of Ligeti's Atmospheresand Lontano (I960-I) before
be based on a one note. It was
finishing the QuattroPezzi is of little importance. Their lines only exceptionally
of research at that time were utterly different. Ligeti was better to devise a convincing succession of
useful to Scelsi later on, when he was expanding the micro- movements based on a convincing succession
tonal counterpoint of works like the Second String Quartet of
single notes. The succession in the Quattro
into the spacious microtonal polyphony of his later style.
Pezzi is as follows: F, B, A;b,A. Scelsi's String
Traces of Ligeti's influence are to be found here and there
which resembles the QuattroPezzi in a
throughout Aion for orchestra (I96I), though the mighty Trio,
outburst in the first movement that suggests (to me, at least) number of important aspects, has this succesVishnu dancing on a mountain of skulls is there to show us sion: Bb, Ff, B, C - which, on examination,
the limits of that influence. There is something of Ligeti as turns out to be a
transposition and re-ordering
well in the first movement of Konx-Om-Pax (I969), but in
of the Quattro Pezzi's one. In fact both
to
mind
the
in
Scelsi's
Pjhat(1974)
my
high point
production
for large means - he is utterly himself again in yet another successions - and this becomes clearer if
region of his own discovery.
representedgraphically:
opening bars of Brahms's G major String
Sextet), and the final morendosustain what can
only be described as hypnotic fixation on a
single pitch. One-note composition is just a
step away.

16 Tanmatras:The Lifeand Workof GiacintoScelsi

Scelsi had already done all he could with the
piano
using clusters, overtones and special
B
C
pedallingto approximatemicrotonalharmonies.
F B
F-B
He was now moving towards the opposite pole,
- Bb
- Ab
the human voice, very likely under the influence
- reproduce on an architectonic level a recurrent of yoga and the great importance it gives to
situation in Ka and other Scelsi scores of the the discipline of breathing.
There is perhaps another reason why Scelsi
time: a 'band' of a major second distanced by a
tritone (-fourth-major third). However, even if abandoned the piano. It had become the
the correct date for the String Trio is 1958 (as instrument of his solitude, a solitude that
given in the Musik-Konzepte catalogue), the weighed on him; and so he sought, in working
QuattroPezzi are not an outgrowth of the Trio with others, that complicity in the face of
in the ordinary sense.
existence his privatelife no longer affordedhim.
Here we are in the presence of a problem Thus the man who seemed so isolated from his
central to the study of Scelsi's music - that of colleagues - who, after his failure to establish
improvised matrices. It is clear that from the himself in the I930s and 40s, quite literallyrefuslate I950s he worked out skeletal patternson the ed the profession of composer - also refused, as
ondulina (with its microtonal possibilities), no classical composer had done for centuries,
recording and later using them for more than the isolation of the creative act. Almost everyone composition. This is evident in the case of thing that Scelsi wrote in the I960s and 70s was
Aitsi (1974) for piano with electronic transform- bor directly or indirectly from a close working
ation and the Fifth String Quartet (1984) - relationshipwith a performer. In this Scelsi was
possibly because Scelsi, who broke the certainly a musical researcher,but the research
compositional silence of his last years to write he carriedout was as much on the player as on
the Quartet as a memorial to his friend Henri the instrument. He insisted on a yoga of
Michaux, had not the physical strength to work meditation that made it possible to play without
the long hours necessary for a thoroughgoing a conscious act of will. He did so with an eye to
re-elaboration of the original improvised the liberation of personality rather than to the
structure. It is not so easily seen in earlierpairs suppressionof it. He was looking, as well, for a
or groups of pieces. It is to be hoped that one music based on the breath and heartbeat that
day soon musicologists will be given access to would move the soul and not just the emotions the wealth of recorded material in the Scelsi something, in spirit at least, like the ritual
Nachlass, and with it the possibility to recon- prayers of Tibetan monks. None of this, of
struct what, for Scelsi, are the equivalent of his course, would have happened had Scelsi not
musical notebooks.
possessed a high degree of musical fancy and
After the QuattroPezzi, two paths now lay invention. But the interesting thing is that he
open to the composer: that of full-textured chose to exercise it on materialsdrawn from the
scores ranging from the string quartetsto large- hidden resourcesof performers,resourcesfor the
scale pieces for chorus and orchestra,and that of most partunknown to the performersthemselves
solo pieces of a greater length and intensity than before working with him. In this way the Canti
anything he had yet achieved. H. R. Zeller del capricomo(1962-72) written with Michiko
remarks in his essay, the most important yet to Hirayama, and the cello Trilogia (The Three
be published on Scelsi's music, that the two are Ages of Man, 1957-65), given its final shape
not so different, the orchestral scores being with Frances-MarieUitti, arevirtuallyportraits.
reducible to a plurality of individual lines and The chamber works, even the most exotic of
the solo scores dividing, as it were, into multiple them, were worked up from these individual
layers projected by a single instrument. One experiences. The London critic who wrote that
thing, however, is certain. With Action Music Scelsi's pieces for string orchestra were simply
(I955), Scelsi said farewell to his own instru- the quartetswith a few more instrumentswas in
ment, the piano, not least because of its lack of a sense right, though he missed the point. The
microtonal possibilities. The solution of ricercarfrom the Musical Offering could be
Wyshnegradsky - to build differently tuned described as a two-part invention with some
pianos so that two or three of them together voices added by one who had recently discould provide microtonal textures - was not covered counterpoint and found it tedious.
A more serious objection has to do with the
acceptable to him. Intonation remained fixed in
for
or
need
two
and
the
of
the
finer
way Scelsi'smusic was written. Zeller trustingly
tuning,
spite
more pianistscompromised rhythmicflexibility. refersto the fact that we have only copies of the
Pezzi
Quattro

StringTrio

Tanmatras:The Life and Workof GiacintoScelsi 17

manuscripts, not the manuscripts themselves such a thing exists from the musical point of
(something true, curiously enough, of another view. I do believe it helped him in his quest for
great Italianeccentric, Domenico Scarlatti).The whatJean Leymarie calls lapuretedesorigines.
What interested him was an ancient Indotruth of the matter is that there are no 'manuscripts' since Scelsi, at least in the later, more European music which preceded the division
experimental phase of his career, prepared his into East and West, of which Indian music was
scores with the help of other people. Some of one, and perhaps the best-preserved branch.
these people happened to be composers in their The crucial thing that Scelsi's music has in
own right, which has inevitably led to accusa- common with Indian and all traditional musics
tions that they, not Scelsi, actually wrote the is its character as frozen improvisation. Scelsi
music.5 As it is, none of the composers known was a fluent and highly skilled improviser. It
to have worked with Scelsi were capable of was from improvisations worked up to nearthat. Their own music has nothing to do with definitive form that Scelsi's aides prepared the
his. Nor does the characterof what is written scores, with the composer (though he detested
change according to who wrote it down. But the word) there to supervise and edit.6 The
the fact does make a difference.
truth is that Scelsi was neither a sublime
Scelsi himself may have thought of it from visionary, who had no need of anything so
the point of view of an aristocrat whose mean as notation, nor a bungling amateur who
ancestorsdid well enough for themselves before paid others to write his music. He was somewriting was invented, and who employed thing much more like an inspired naif, as in
scribes for long afterwards. Nevertheless there certain respects Charles Ives had been before
is little doubt that he could not have written him. Naifs have not been infrequent in the
down the more complex pieces, no matter the history of painting and poetry, though few
degree of mental control he had over them. musicians who had sacrificed years of their life
What this means is that Scelsi's music was in formal study to become competent profesconceived without the set of habits and pre- sionals would know what to make of such a
dispositions that come from a mastery of claim. And even so, we should be careful in our
notation. I refuse to believe this brought him judgments of a man who used to say with great
any closer to the physical nature of sound, if satisfactionof his breakdown afterWorld War II:
'I forgot everything I ever knew about music.'
SThemost important collaboratorof Scelsi was Vieru Tosatti
Towards 1975 Scelsi almost ceased to comwho seems to have worked with him on and off from the late
An exception is the Fifth String Quartet
pose.
1940s until he went blind some 30 years later. Tosatti began
which,
however, as noted above, derives from
letters
to
various
in
after
Scelsi's
writing
musicjournals Italy
death to say that he had written all the music himself, but that the same compositional matrix, or better, the
in any case it didn't matter since it was utter rubbish. Tosatti's same improvisation, as Aitsi, for amplified
music is in favour with one of the directors of ItalianRadio
piano. That Scelsi felt impelled to write it at all
(an institution that has done everything possible to hold up
shows the sorrow he felt at the death of his
Scelsi's acceptance in Italy), so I am not unfamiliar with it.
The fact is that Tosatti's early neoclassic scores have nothing friend, the poet, Henri Michaux, who sent him
to do with Scelsi's music, but that his Requiem,composed all his new books with a personal dedication.
yearsafterLa naissanceduverbe,betraysthe influence, however He did revise what he had already written and
watered down and conventionalized, of the earlier work.
it for publication (first with Schirmer's
Tosatti's lack of scruples is reflected in the use he made of prepare
when
that venture proved a cul-de-sac,
and,
some poems of Scelsi's (written in French)in the preparation
of the text of his own Gedichtkonzert.
But what surely decides with Salabert);and he worked with musicians
the cas Scelsi, if there is such a thing, is the opinion of three who wanted to perform his music.
Gradually,
composers who are among the most meticulouslyprofessional thanks to Gerard
Tristan Murail and
Grisey,
of our time.
Horatiu Radulescu- and, in England, to Adrian
York H6ller, discussing the 1987ISCM Festivalin Cologne
over a beer when it was all over: 'By far the most interesting Jack (who was the one to put me on to his
event for me was the Scelsi evening. There's something really music) - Scelsi's name began to be known. I
new there. That man is a wizard!'.
remember the day when I had scores of the
FrancoDonatoni at lunch with his composition students in
sent to Irvine Arditti. Shortly thereafter
Trastevere in I988: 'I don't know what the problem is. It's quartets
he
me up to tell me: 'It appears rather a
rang
Italian
really quite simple. You see, there were three

great
composers born in the early years of this century'. [The other
two being Petrassi and Dallapiccola.] 'Scelsi's music was
unknown till recently, and so everyone'smaking a fuss over it'.
Gyorgy Kurtag, on his way to an evening at Ada Gentile's
after being collected at his hotel: 'Do you know Scelsi's music
at all?' (say I). 'Only the Fourth Quartet. But it's enough to
consider myself an adept of that man.'

6Frances-MarieUitti leaves no room for doubt on this point:

'It was always interesting to work with Giacinto, even on a
transcription' [they had prepared the score of Sauh (1973)
together] 'the choice of dynamics, the workir.g out of an idea he always knew exactly what he wanted'. (Interview with
StefaniaGianni.)

18 Tanmatras:The Lfe and WorkofGiacintoScelsi

A paejC
fom tihcJourtlih
ofScelsi'sQuattro Pezzi su una Nota Sola. (
courtesyof UnitedMusicPublisiersLtd.

large fish has got through our nets'. Though it

was Heinz-Klaus Metzger who took Scelsi's
casein hand and brought out the Musik-Konzepte
volume of essays on him. Then Wolfgang
Becker and Ernst Albrecht Stiebler were won
over and so Scelsi began travelling again - to
London for a two concert evening of his
chamber music, to Cologne and Frankfurtfor
his orchestralpieces.
Life at Via di San Teodoro 8 went on as ever,
except perhaps that Scelsi saw more people,
heard more music than before. There were the
vegetarian dinners with a little ham for the rest
of us served by Bruna his cook, the birthday
parties, and after-concertreceptions with a fleet
of servants that lasted well after midnight; and
the occasional concert where he was taken by
his driver Salvatore. About the funeral and the
mass which preceded it the less said the better.7
Both were marked by utter lack of preparation

1983by EditionsSalabert,

and the absence of all but a handful of musical

friends. August is the cruellest month in Rome
and he who can avoid it does so. The house
overlooking the Forum is now the IsabellaScelsi
Foundation, though Bruna and Salvatore have
been allowed to live there for the rest of their
days. The foundation has already organized its
first concert: MusicheRitualidi GiacintoScelsi, at
the Villa Medicis, seat of the French Academy
in Rome. Thus the work of making known
some of the most original music of our time,
most of it unperformed for years after it was
written, goes steadily on.
7The hearse first carriedthe body to the wrong vault, that of
his father, when the will clearly provided for his burial in the
vault of his mother and sister in another part entirely of
Verano cemetery. When this mistake was rectified it was
found that there was not enough room for the remains of
what had been a tiny slip of a man in the space allotted to him.
The projecting part of the coffin was masked by flowers and
work to be done left for another day.