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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 Accessed: 18/08/2009 07:58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tempo. http://www.jstor.org
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Robin Freeman - Tanmatras-The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

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Page 1: Robin Freeman - Tanmatras-The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto ScelsiAuthor(s): Robin Freeman and Giacinto ScelsiSource: Tempo, New Series, No. 176 (Mar., 1991), pp. 8-18Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/944639Accessed: 18/08/2009 07:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tempo.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Robin Freeman - Tanmatras-The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

Robin Freeman

Tanmatras: The Life and Work ofGiacinto Scelsi

Giacinto Scelsi, last Count of Dayala Valva and one of the most extraordinary composers 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 earthquake of I980, which flattened the mediaeval hill town of Valva and with it the family castle and its library, Scelsi said: crolla il castello, crolla il 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 frail figure sitting on a couch below the two portraits that 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 pro- gramme 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 memoires of his future life they represented a 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 official biography Scelsi

says that he passed his childhood in the castle of Valva where he studied Latin, 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 explained that it was only when thus self-absorbed that his mother could comb his hair. His father, an airforce pilot, pioneer of aviation in a country that took it seriously, didn't understand his 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 Ronme when 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 cigarettes and 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 fre-

quented 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 abstract approach to 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 (active in Vienna from I9oo) actually studied with Schoenberg, the Editor of Tempo has suggested to me that the Stein in

question might be Fritz Heinrich, a student of both Schoen-

berg 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.

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Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi 9

Casa Scelsi - Via di San Teodoro 8, showing the balcony of Scelsi'sprivate apartmentfrom which he wouldshowfriends andguests his view of the Roman Forum across the way. (photo: Robin Freeman)

Scelsi then went to Paris and London where he led a brilliant, worldly life and pursued his interest in surrealism and 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 contemp- orary music in Rome, in collaboration with Petrassi. He also began to travel outside 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 re- construct, 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 table where 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 Lausanne during the war; how he had helpedJouve escape there from a Nazi-occupied Paris through the ruse that Jouve's wife needed psychoanalytic treatment that only the wife of the Chinese ambassador in 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 naissance du verbe, for chorus and orchestra, in Paris. Scelsi lay on the floor of the men's loo during the performance, imperi- ously 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 naissance du 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's wife'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 capricci di Ty, when they were together and a duo for viola and 'cello from I966, Elegia per Ty, after

they were separated but as far as I know before her death.

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10 Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

I950s, and with it something that will not reoccur in the later music: passages of bleak relentless counterpoint. I have heard the primi- tive recording Scelsi made by placing whatever was then available next to a table radio. Salabert have in the meantime prepared a performing score. There is little doubt that this piece, a sort of surrealist Symphonie despsaumes, will surprise whatever audience has the first chance to hear it after the premiere over 40 years ago.

Presumably it will also be possible one day to discover just 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 crucial importance, when one thinks that Scelsi

deliberately falsified the 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 card idea 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 balancing of 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, preferred Zelter'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 esotericist Rene Guenon and Jacques Maritain, the neothomist

philosopher. Ossendowsky had escaped from the Bolshevik regime not through central Europe but through India and, 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 reconciled with catholic mysticism to the benefit of European spiritual renewal, whilst Maritain warned that however fascinating and 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

repel or 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 greater importance 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 musique in Rome in 1981. This is the Scelsi whom L' Itine'raire has taken as fairy godfather, seeing in him a pre- cursor 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 Pascal Dusapin after Tristan Murail's lecture at the 1987 Royaumont 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 specula- tive mysticism. There is an extraordinary passage at the end ofAlexandr Blok's lecture on the 84th anniversary of the death of Pushkin:

In the infinite depths of the spirit where man is man no longer, in those depths inaccessible to the state and society, there are sound waves similar to the ether waves which surround the universe. There, rhythmic vibrations pulsate like those that shape mountains,

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Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi 11

winds, marine currents, the animal and vegetable worlds.

It is the duty of the poet to commune with this

primeval chaos and to draw from it a harmony that can be vouchsafed to other men.

The more veils are stripped away, the more charged the communion with chaos, the more painful the birth of sound, the more prolonged and harmonious will be that which comes forth, the clearer the form it will take, the more insistently it will speak to the human ear.

These words apply more to the music of Scelsi than to any other, more even than to that great explosion, proximate to them in time: Le Sacre du printemps.

* * *

It is easy to see that Scelsi was more a visionary than a theorist. Theory meant literally nothing to him. His work, reborn from the spiritual conflagration that followed La naissance du verbe (if my chronology is right), took two directions, which are in reality one and the same direction - the simplification of the melodic line until it became the manifold projection of a single note, and the gradual introduction of microtonal inflections as the principal means to that

projection. I use the word 'inflection' since Scelsi's microtonality always has a linear melodic

identity which generates, if you like, what there is of harmony, of intervallic structure in his music. This explains as well Scelsi's place in the evolution of musical style, for he was the first to see that in order to unleash the expressive power ofmicrotones the other musical parameters had to be simplified.

That is what distinguishes his work from all the tampering that went on in the margins of chromatic atonality, where microtones were introduced into a musical language already charged to the point of saturation. Such strategic simplifications have occurred before in the history of music. The bold harmonic progress- ions of the early baroque, introduced by Monteverdi and his contemporaries, replaced the polyphonic structures of Palestrina and Victoria with something altogether simpler and more homophonic. Scelsi, like the Italian

madrigalists, was attracted by a vision of ancient Greek music.With him it was the aulodia, a melody played on the aulos, an antique flute. This perhaps explains why the first pieces on the new path are for wind instruments, even though microtones are much harder to intone on winds than on strings.

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 Scelsi's instrumental and vocal writing. Morton Feldman, adding to his endless series of wisecracks, said after a recital of Scelsi's piano music at the Darmstadt Ferienkiirse in 1986: 'How on earth did he get from all those notes to just one note?' Dear Morty, I would like to have been able to say, since at the time I didn't know either, it happened something like this...

In the Ninth Suite, Ttai (1953), which seems to me the jumping-off point (however much single notes come unstuck in the earlier pieces - v. Zeller's analysis of the 1939 Second Piano Sonata),3 there are three main types of repetition. (1) Repeatedpatterns such as the still Scriabinesque one at the beginning of the first movement, which no matter how much and how quickly they decay still have something of the ostinato about them. (2) Repeated notes such as that at the beginning of the second movement, soon doubled and extended downwards. Here the writing, taken apart from what we know of Scelsi's theory, resembles that of Elliott Carter's one-note etude for wind quartet - while its structural effect, in spite of the octave doubling, is close to that of the opening two bars of Gerhard's Second String Quartet. Both pieces go on to other notes and other textures. (3) Repeated chords, of which there is a good example in the third movement. The bell drone effect is made 'anecdotal' by the peal of smaller 'bells' above it. We are on our way to Eastern ritual gongs, have got as far perhaps as a Byzantine church in European Turkey.

By the first movement of the Tenth Suite, Ka (1954), this process is complete in its earliest

stage - the stage that produced the seven solos for wind instruments and the piece for solo viola Coelacanth. Here (Ex.I) all notes other than middle C are a kind of ornamental efflor- escene or - to use words that Scelsi would doubtless have preferred - are an aura or emanation of it. Within the ambitus of an octave (plus an all important B below middle C) Scelsi disposes the total (keyboard) chromatic in a figuration that looks deceptively neo- classical. In fact the layout, which shows every sign of having been arrived at intuitively, amounts to a deconstructing of the harmonic potential of interval relationships. All secondary polarities are contradicted before they have the chance to establish themselves. In this way the 3HaIns Rudolf Zcllcr, 'D)as Enscimble der Soli', in Musik- Konzepte 31: Giacinto Scelsi (edition tcxt+kritik, 1983).

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12 Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

Ex.I

J =08 r;t. molto --.-- ..a rempo, ma uan poo sostenufo I ,

-

poco r1oeverc?o ca ,- -.- po ^- - 108 )

ciA^ AHLo~~r~ rt1rr (el1r cn^] pr r4r)

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 interval at all.

A parallel example from Messiaen's Cante- yodjaya should help make this clear (Ex.2).

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 chro- maticism. 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

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

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

^^^ trr tr,rr r rT?

The spontaneous impression of the high-speed antitonality that project a multivectored rhythmic patterning veils the fact that we are geometry of sound in which the note as note is

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Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi 13

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

strains towards 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

J= 52

< p estprssivo

), ,

- -, - !

, , _

Jolivet, under the influence of Varese, had passage that is the pianistic equivalent of Scelsi's sought a non-serial (=organic) atonality rather later device of tonal fluctuation within a band of as Messiaen, the follower of Emmanuel, had sound: Ex.4. Once more we have a chromatic briefly sought a serial modality. Once again in aggregate contained within an octave. This the passage quoted it is the major seventh and time the contents could be described as clusters, tritone that one feels behind every note as it making one wonder if the four-note groups of passes by. The E for instance in the second bar movement I should not be considered as

Ex.4 > Comre prx ;maJ /=}) , 4 r,x

Y. ^ff --y -f -----

or T r - r jena -peol

J ^*nf. c Fempo

/ '

/ 3 I- 3 \ p 3

/3 : t 7 t 3' '

_/ ., : . 3

X 3 t F 3 ,pp /P

L) m .y r ~,, r ut f 3

>--

~- r ' p- 3II7~~~~ez ?ed. r

3: ~ ~~ \ ~ Y~

poowf e

\ I ienzma ped. I

i

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14 Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

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 further octave 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-like passage, 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 measure of the band EF, rather than 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 Charles Ives 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 MOLro rMlRATro (J =54) (jempre /csciando vb6rcre colped.)

If J ^r

I

_ . . r. r. m- 1 I -"

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

The last movement has a percussive figuration that Scelsi marks to be played 'like sabre blows':

Ex.7 alourdr' Rude - Plus lent * --rD,-

13= -- sL- LL - 3 ' 'S."

f ff ~~- -

alternation of hands (like stopped and un-

stopped string, v. the second violin in the

/ .i "K7 Sp. o^ -'7 ."J -.. - (.- h'A._ 1 .7

( 9- 7 - L !) \SM-~ I - - L - _ -. c ) i#m _ l o *6 - l

83. --- - ,

,3 = I - -

5 I 1 5 1

I

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Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi 15

Ex.8

r:fen.-- 9---- -f m 6-

PT (Pj -E

--a*-- - ' (sempre ,senzq ped.)

f -6 ------v F-- 6 " 1- 6 ,[ \ t--- G 6 ~

poco cre'se. - - - - - - -

con ped.jrino al/a fine

7-- - - --- - 6 - - - t 6 X 1

p I

O'j (.

opening bars of Brahms's G major String Sextet), and the final morendo sustain what can

only be described as hypnotic fixation on a

single pitch. One-note composition is just a

step away. * * *

In I959 Scelsi wrote the Quattro Pezzi chiascuno su una nota sola (Four Pieces, each one on a single note) for small orchestra. They were performed under Maurice Leroux on 4 December I9614 at

4Thus the 1959 date given for the first performance in the

Musik-Konzepte volume on Scelsi, and cited by Harry Halbreich in his notes to the recording of the Quattro Pezzi

('c'est l'une des tres rares oeuvres de Scelsi qui furent crees t6t

apres leur achevement'), is incorrect. The programme tells us 'les quatre Pieces pour orchestre sont recentes puisqu'elles ont ete composees en 1960'. Though it is still possible that they were written in 1959 since Henri Michaux in a letter from I9

October 1961 remarks: 'Enfin on va entrendre cette oeuvre

unique'. In any case, whether Scelsi heard the first perform- ances of Ligeti's Atmospheres and Lontano (I960-I) before

finishing the Quattro Pezzi is of little importance. Their lines of research at that time were utterly different. Ligeti was useful to Scelsi later on, when he was expanding the micro- tonal counterpoint of works like the Second String Quartet into the spacious microtonal polyphony of his later style. Traces of Ligeti's influence are to be found here and there

throughout Aion for orchestra (I96I), though the mighty outburst in the first movement that suggests (to me, at least) Vishnu dancing on a mountain of skulls is there to show us the limits of that influence. There is something of Ligeti as well in the first movement of Konx-Om-Pax (I969), but in

Pjhat (1974) - to my mind the high point in Scelsi's production for large means - he is utterly himself again in yet another region of his own discovery.

the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, and have an importance for the history of musical composi- tion 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 already there. A door has been opened. As Harry Halbreich likes to point out, it had become possible to tell a conservatoire student: 'And now, my lad, I want you to compose a G'. Though as usual with Scelsi, things are not so simple as that.

The Quattro Pezzi are in no way a loosely connected series, a sort of experimental suite. They have as much right to be called a symphony as Webern's op.2I. In fact it is a near-constant with Scelsi that he retains the classic division into movements, usually three or four of them. In the light of the many radical simplifications in his music this decision could only have been structural, a recognition that a singlepiece could only exceptionally be based on a one note. It was better to devise a convincing succession of movements based on a convincing succession of single notes. The succession in the Quattro Pezzi is as follows: F, B, A;b, A. Scelsi's String Trio, which resembles the Quattro Pezzi in a number of important aspects, has this succes- sion: Bb, Ff, B, C - which, on examination, turns out to be a transposition and re-ordering of the Quattro Pezzi's one. In fact both successions - and this becomes clearer if represented graphically:

19: _

I

I

O * 1

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16 Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi

Quattro Pezzi

B F - B

- Ab

String Trio

C F-- B

- Bb

- reproduce on an architectonic level a recurrent situation in Ka and other Scelsi scores of the time: a 'band' of a major second distanced by a tritone (-fourth-major third). However, even if the correct date for the String Trio is 1958 (as given in the Musik-Konzepte catalogue), the Quattro Pezzi are not an outgrowth of the Trio in the ordinary sense.

Here we are in the presence of a problem central to the study of Scelsi's music - that of

improvised matrices. It is clear that from the late I950s he worked out skeletal patterns on the ondulina (with its microtonal possibilities), recording and later using them for more than one composition. This is evident in the case of Aitsi (1974) for piano with electronic transform- ation and the Fifth String Quartet (1984) -

possibly because Scelsi, who broke the

compositional silence of his last years to write the Quartet as a memorial to his friend Henri Michaux, had not the physical strength to work the long hours necessary for a thoroughgoing re-elaboration of the original improvised structure. It is not so easily seen in earlier pairs or groups of pieces. It is to be hoped that one

day soon musicologists will be given access to the wealth of recorded material in the Scelsi Nachlass, and with it the possibility to recon- struct what, for Scelsi, are the equivalent of his musical notebooks.

After the Quattro Pezzi, two paths now lay open to the composer: that of full-textured scores ranging from the string quartets to large- scale pieces for chorus and orchestra, and that of solo pieces of a greater length and intensity than

anything he had yet achieved. H. R. Zeller remarks in his essay, the most important yet to be published on Scelsi's music, that the two are not so different, the orchestral scores being reducible to a plurality of individual lines and the solo scores dividing, as it were, into multiple layers projected by a single instrument. One

thing, however, is certain. With Action Music (I955), Scelsi said farewell to his own instru- ment, the piano, not least because of its lack of microtonal possibilities. The solution of

Wyshnegradsky - to build differently tuned

pianos so that two or three of them together could provide microtonal textures - was not

acceptable to him. Intonation remained fixed in

spite of the finer tuning, and the need for two or more pianists compromised rhythmic flexibility.

Scelsi had already done all he could with the piano using clusters, overtones and special pedalling to approximate microtonal harmonies. He was now moving towards the opposite pole, the human voice, very likely under the influence of yoga and the great importance it gives to the discipline of breathing.

There is perhaps another reason why Scelsi abandoned the piano. It had become the instrument of his solitude, a solitude that weighed on him; and so he sought, in working with others, that complicity in the face of existence his private life no longer afforded him. Thus the man who seemed so isolated from his

colleagues - who, after his failure to establish himself in the I930s and 40s, quite literally refus- ed the profession of composer - also refused, as no classical composer had done for centuries, the isolation of the creative act. Almost every- thing that Scelsi wrote in the I960s and 70s was bor directly or indirectly from a close working relationship with a performer. In this Scelsi was certainly a musical researcher, but the research he carried out was as much on the player as on the instrument. He insisted on a yoga of meditation that made it possible to play without a conscious act of will. He did so with an eye to the liberation of personality rather than to the suppression of it. He was looking, as well, for a music based on the breath and heartbeat that would move the soul and not just the emotions -

something, in spirit at least, like the ritual

prayers of Tibetan monks. None of this, of course, would have happened had Scelsi not

possessed a high degree of musical fancy and invention. But the interesting thing is that he chose to exercise it on materials drawn from the hidden resources of performers, resources for the most part unknown to the performers themselves before working with him. In this way the Canti del capricomo (1962-72) written with Michiko

Hirayama, and the cello Trilogia (The Three

Ages of Man, 1957-65), given its final shape with Frances-Marie Uitti, are virtually portraits. The chamber works, even the most exotic of them, were worked up from these individual

experiences. The London critic who wrote that Scelsi's pieces for string orchestra were simply the quartets with a few more instruments was in a sense right, though he missed the point. The ricercar from the Musical Offering could be described as a two-part invention with some voices added by one who had recently dis- covered counterpoint and found it tedious.

A more serious objection has to do with the

way Scelsi's music was written. Zeller trustingly refers to the fact that we have only copies of the

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Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi 17

manuscripts, not the manuscripts themselves

(something true, curiously enough, of another

great Italian eccentric, Domenico Scarlatti). The truth of the matter is that there are no 'manu-

scripts' since Scelsi, at least in the later, more experimental phase of his career, prepared his scores with the help of other people. Some of these people happened to be composers in their own right, which has inevitably led to accusa- tions that they, not Scelsi, actually wrote the music.5 As it is, none of the composers known to have worked with Scelsi were capable of that. Their own music has nothing to do with his. Nor does the character of what is written change according to who wrote it down. But the fact does make a difference.

Scelsi himself may have thought of it from the point of view of an aristocrat whose ancestors did well enough for themselves before writing was invented, and who employed scribes for long afterwards. Nevertheless there is little doubt that he could not have written down the more complex pieces, no matter the

degree of mental control he had over them. What this means is that Scelsi's music was conceived without the set of habits and pre- dispositions that come from a mastery of notation. I refuse to believe this brought him any closer to the physical nature of sound, if

SThe most important collaborator of Scelsi was Vieru Tosatti who seems to have worked with him on and off from the late 1940s until he went blind some 30 years later. Tosatti began writing letters to various musicjournals in Italy after Scelsi's death to say that he had written all the music himself, but that in any case it didn't matter since it was utter rubbish. Tosatti's music is in favour with one of the directors of Italian Radio (an institution that has done everything possible to hold up Scelsi's acceptance in Italy), so I am not unfamiliar with it. The fact is that Tosatti's early neoclassic scores have nothing to do with Scelsi's music, but that his Requiem, composed years after La naissance du verbe, betrays the influence, however watered down and conventionalized, of the earlier work. Tosatti's lack of scruples is reflected in the use he made of some poems of Scelsi's (written in French) in the preparation of the text of his own Gedichtkonzert. But what surely decides the cas Scelsi, if there is such a thing, is the opinion of three composers who are among the most meticulously professional of our time.

York H6ller, discussing the 1987 ISCM Festival in Cologne over a beer when it was all over: 'By far the most interesting event for me was the Scelsi evening. There's something really new there. That man is a wizard!'.

Franco Donatoni at lunch with his composition students in Trastevere in I988: 'I don't know what the problem is. It's really quite simple. You see, there were three great Italian 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's making 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.'

such a thing exists from the musical point of view. I do believe it helped him in his quest for whatJean Leymarie calls la purete des origines.

What interested him was an ancient Indo- European music which preceded the division into East and West, of which Indian music was one, and perhaps the best-preserved branch. The crucial thing that Scelsi's music has in common with Indian and all traditional musics is its character as frozen improvisation. Scelsi was a fluent and highly skilled improviser. It was from improvisations worked up to near- definitive form that Scelsi's aides prepared the scores, with the composer (though he detested the word) there to supervise and edit.6 The truth is that Scelsi was neither a sublime visionary, who had no need of anything so mean as notation, nor a bungling amateur who paid others to write his music. He was some- thing much more like an inspired naif, as in certain respects Charles Ives had been before him. Naifs have not been infrequent in the history of painting and poetry, though few musicians who had sacrificed years of their life in formal study to become competent profes- sionals would know what to make of such a claim. And even so, we should be careful in our judgments of a man who used to say with great satisfaction of his breakdown after World War II: 'I forgot everything I ever knew about music.'

Towards 1975 Scelsi almost ceased to com- pose. An exception is the Fifth String Quartet which, however, as noted above, derives from the same compositional matrix, or better, the same improvisation, as Aitsi, for amplified piano. That Scelsi felt impelled to write it at all shows the sorrow he felt at the death of his friend, the poet, Henri Michaux, who sent him all his new books with a personal dedication. He did revise what he had already written and prepare it for publication (first with Schirmer's and, when that venture proved a cul-de-sac, with Salabert); and he worked with musicians who wanted to perform his music. Gradually, thanks to Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Horatiu Radulescu - and, in England, to Adrian Jack (who was the one to put me on to his music) - Scelsi's name began to be known. I remember the day when I had scores of the quartets sent to Irvine Arditti. Shortly thereafter he rang me up to tell me: 'It appears rather a

6Frances-Marie Uitti 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 Stefania Gianni.)

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18 Tanmatras: The Lfe and Work ofGiacinto Scelsi

A paejC fom tihcJourtlih ofScelsi's Quattro Pezzi su una Nota Sola. ( 1983 by Editions Salabert,

courtesy of United Music Publisiers Ltd.

large fish has got through our nets'. Though it was Heinz-Klaus Metzger who took Scelsi's case in 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 Frankfurt for his orchestral pieces.

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-concert receptions 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

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 Isabella Scelsi 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: Musiche Rituali di Giacinto Scelsi, 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 carried the 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.