Scelsi the Sculptor

Scelsi the Sculptor

Osman Eren Gümrükçüoğlu

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December 8, 2014

Gümrükçüoğlu 2

1. Introduction

Many composers have been drawn to the primordial tone for inspiration; a drone which in

its simplicity, evokes a sense of the inner sound of cosmos. It carries with it a certain musical

mysticism when the music is presented in its simplest terms – as the sound object. Openings of

pieces like Der Ring des Nibelungen by Wagner with its held Eb’s, or Beethoven’s 9th Symphony

or even Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung are all good examples of a composerly interest in the

primordial tone – a singularity that from within the music flourishes. Other composers also have

shown a similar interest in the singularity of a simple sound object and implemented a single note

or a single chord as the pillar for their compositional structures, such as Purcell with his Fantasy

upon One Note or Stockhausen with his Stimmung. While composers were drawing from this

inspiration for many years, “sound” itself has not been the central feature of Western art music

tradition. Only in the last 40 to 50 years, along with the Spectralist movement, we started to observe

a rising interest in timbre and the accompanying extra-harmonic musical properties such as

transients, formants, sustain and release. Tristan Murail calls it “the exploration of the interior of

sounds1”. According to Murail, “this exploration is a very important development for music at the

end of the century, and Scelsi was the pioneer2”.

2. Scelsi and Eastern Thought

Giacinto Scelsi was born into an old southern Italian noble family, inheriting the title Count

d’Ayala Valva from his mother. He grew up in the family castle where he studied Latin, chess and

fencing3. He found his way through European aristocratic circles and had his wedding party at the

1 Tristan Murail, "Scelsi and L'Itinéraire: The Exploration of Sound," Contemporary Music Review 24:2/3, (2005), 183. 2 Ibid. 3 Julian Anderson, "La Note Juste. Julian Anderson Appraises the Work of the Enigmatic Giacinto Scelsi," The Musical Times 136, (1995), 22.

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Buckingham Palace while marrying the cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. As both a musician and a

poet he was always involved in the avant-garde circles in Italy. He went through several musical

phases ranging from attending Russoli’s “noise” concerts at a very young age, to rigorously

applying twelve-tone rows in his compositional process. In the middle of the 20th century, the

Western world was becoming more and more familiar with Eastern art and philosophy. Scelsi’s

fascination with Eastern philosophy led him to travel to India and Nepal, learning yoga and

meditation4. Perhaps, owing to the resources of having a place in nobility and the chance to travel,

Scelsi managed to see through the Orientalism of the West and genuinely tried to internalize the

conceptual aspects of Eastern thought. He believed in the potential of music as a vehicle for

personal spiritual development. Scelsi writes in his Son et musique5:

I will say only that in general, western classical music has devoted practically all of

its attention to the musical framework, which it calls the musical form. It has neglected

to study the laws of sonorous energy, to think of music in terms of energy, which is

life. Thus it has produced thousands of magnificent frameworks which are often rather

empty… I will give you an example. Throughout Europe we have quite beautiful

church bells, though many of them were melted to make cannons or shells. The rest

of them, however, whether ancient or modern, are treated in the same manner, that is,

mistreated by sacristans who pull the rope however they wish, without rhythm, in any

manner, and the heaviest ones are made to work by an electric motor6.

Eric Drott finds a hidden text in this quote suggesting that Scelsi offers technology as the

culprit that is to blame for the degradation of the European ethos7. I don’t believe that this is true

because much of Scelsi’s late output was due to his acquaintance with technology through the use

of the ondiola (an early and primitive version of a synthesizer) and tape recorders. However, Drott

4 Anderson, La Note Juste, 22. 5 Translated into English by Gregory Reish as “Sound and Music”. 6 Gregory N. Reish, The Transformation of Giacinto Scelsi's Musical Style and Aesthetic, (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 2002), 289-90. 7 Eric Drott, "Class, Ideology, and il caso Scelsi.", The Musical Quarterly 89(1), (2006), 97.

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adds that Scelsi is also alluding to the sense of respect one observes in Asian cultures8. In Gregory

Reish’s book on his transformation, Scelsi postulates that: “in the Orient, in India, Japan, China or

Tibet, gongs – which have the same role in temples [as bells have in churches] – are struck with

the greatest respect9”.

3. Una nota sola

After the Second World War, Scelsi suffered a breakdown and stopped composing for a

few years. He spent day after day playing a single note on the piano. This was when Scelsi

apparently had his revolution of musical thought. Scelsi explained the exercise in an interview he

gave in 1987, a year before his death: “reiterating a note for a long time, it grows large, so large

that you even hear harmony growing inside it …. When you enter into a sound, the sound envelops

you and you become part of the sound. Gradually, you are consumed by it and you need no other

sound …. All possible sounds are contained in it10”. As Reich suggests, by “rejecting the aesthetic

premise that sounds must progress to other sounds in order to have any significance, he essentially

renounced such conventional techniques as thematic development, melodic variation, contrapuntal

elaboration, harmonic progression, and cadential resolution11”. In order to fill the gap within

western art music which is a “framework devoid of sonorous energy12”, Scelsi began

experimenting with compositions that are based on a single-note. His Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra

aptly subtitled “una nota sola” (one note) was the revolutionary outcome of this experimentation

in 1959.

8 Drott, il Caso Scelsi, 97. 9 Reish, The Transformation, 290. 10 Reish, “Una Nota Sola: Giacinto Scelsi and the Genesis of Music on a Single Note,” Journal of Musicological Research 25, (2006), 150. 11 Reish, Una Nota Sola, 157. 12 Ibid., 153.

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Scelsi has long been one of the hardest composers to be analyzed by theorists and

musicologists in traditional terms. One has to consider at times whether there is any value in

examining Scelsi’s music in terms of narratology or not. Trying to find a foundation in which to

assert a syntax to Scelsi’s musical grammar, we have to realize that much of his musical output is

based on his improvisations on the piano and the ondiola. Looking at the process in which he

procured the final version of a score to be published, we see that Scelsi occupied uncommon

methods to make decisions. After his breakdown, Scelsi believed that he made himself sick by

over-thinking, so he decided to create music “without thinking”13. This meant meditating first, and

then improvising while the tape recorder is rolling. The improvisations which Scelsi deemed

successful then would become the sketches for the composition. His assistants who worked as

scribes would transcribe the recordings and bring the findings to Scelsi. In the end, Scelsi would

make modifications to the score and decide which scores would be worthy of being officially under

his collection of compositions. This unorthodox methodology stirred even more controversy when

one of his assistants, Vieri Tosatti (who was also a composer), published an article titled “Giacinto

Scelsi, c’est moi” after Scelsi’s death, suggesting that almost all the music was created by him and

not Scelsi14. This created a huge dispute but it is commonly disregarded nowadays, since Tosatti’s

own music sounds nothing like Scelsi and the fact that this article was realized after Scelsi’s death

seems like poor judgment and morals on Tosatti’s behalf. Scelsi’s method of composing meant

that his music was conceived without the set of habits and predispositions that come from a mastery

of notation. According to Robin Freeman: “What interested [Scelsi] 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

13 Ian Dickson, “Towards a Grammatical Analysis of Scelsi's Late Music,” Music Analysis 31:ii, (2012), 216. 14 Drott, il Caso Scelsi, 81.

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traditional musics is its character as frozen improvisation15”.

4. Agency of Sound

Scelsi’s revolution of musical thought may be based on an influence of the East – not in a

cultural neo-colonial fashion, but by adopting the mentality and not specific components as clichés.

While embracing the Eastern thought, he never ceased to be a part of the Western tradition. Scelsi

is quoted to have said while living in Rome that “Rome is at the border between the East and the

West16”. According to Murail, this means that the Western tradition is for him at least as important

as the influence of the East. Scelsi is seen by Murail as a true revolutionary that changes the

viewpoint of composition radically while “such ‘cultural revolutions’ are typically Western

phenomena- they make sense only in the context of Western culture17”. In this sense, notation

merely represents various moments in the evolution of “the sound” through the parameters of

attack, duration and timbre.

Listening to Scelsi’s music, we hear a new attitude towards musical discourse. One in

which the sonic material becomes the form of the piece. It creates a chicken and egg problem, in

which neither form nor the material follows one or the other. It is a departure from traditional

composition, whether tonal, atonal or serial, which are based on superimposing and stacking

structures on top of each other. The title of the paper comes from the brilliant symbolism that

Murail makes about composers like Scelsi: “A composer like a sculptor disengages a form from a

single mass, rather than constructing a form with a number of bricks like a mason18”. However,

there is an aspect to Scelsi’s and the spectralists’ musics – their similarities being on the

15 Robin Freeman and Giacinto Scelsi, "Tanmatras: The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi," Tempo 176, (1991), 17. 16 Tristan Murail, “Scelsi, De-composer,” Contemporary Music Review 24:2-3, (2005), 174. 17 Ibid. 18 Murail, Scelsi and L'Itinéraire, 183.

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methodological level and not on the aesthetic level – both display that synthesis of timbre is

essential to their compositional processes. Therefore, there is still a notion of structuring through

additive synthesis during the creative process. If put into perspective through the tripartition of

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, in Scelsi’s music, the trace would be the source that Scelsi additively

synthesizes during his improvisations which is then realized through transcription, in the meantime

adding another layer to the poietic process. The poietic and the esthesic processes are drawn closer

together in this method which leaves the trace on the outer ends of the spectrum of tripartition. The

arrows which would be facing inwards from the poietic and the esthesic processes, now face

outwards from the trace (see fig. 1). This also effects the narrative that is conveyed in the music

where there is no story but rather the teleology of time. In other words, what Scelsi’s music narrates

most of the time is “time” itself through the agency of sound.

Sound as an agency effect behaves differently than the common agents such as a composer,

an instrument, a player on stage or a musical line on a score. Its evolution is documented on the

score as a means of recreating a certain flow of time. The movement comes from within the sound

itself and rhythms are not thought of as means of a subdivisive forward push but rather the inner

fluctuations of the sound. In Murail’s words: “Scelsi subsumes the idea of rhythm into the more

global concept of duration, anticipating the spectral composers’ conception of time. Rhythm is a

manifestation of duration that connects the personal and relative time of the creative artist to

cosmic duration, absolute time19”. The piece in focus for analysis is Okanagon which was

composed in 1968 by Scelsi. It is subtitled: “to be performed like a rite, or if you will, like grasping

the heartbeat of the Earth”.

19 Murail, De-composer, 179.

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5. Okanagon (1968)

The piece is for harp, double bass and tam-tams (which are a type of Chinese gongs, namely

the large Chau Gong). The source for the title of the piece is unknown, but “Okanagan” with an

“a” instead of an “o” in the last syllable, is the name of native people from British Columbia.

Perhaps Scelsi’s imagined East went so far that it reached the Americas. In the performance notes,

Scelsi demands that the harp and double bass must be amplified with microphones while avoiding

any stereophonic effect. He also demands that all equipment, instruments and performers be hidden

behind a large screen, “adding in this way to the mystery of the ritualistic character of this music.”

The fact that there are no visuals for the audience to grab onto during the performance, creates a

purely aural experience where the timbral synthesis of instruments distorts the audience perception

of the source of the sound. This manifests itself in a diversion of the listener’s focus on the inner

action of the sound per any given moment, rather than more apparent parameters of orchestration

such as pitch, rhythm and instrumentation. However, pitch content of the piece does have an

important role in the meditative and incantatory nature of the way that time flows.

The entire piece is based on three notes Eb, Ab and Db. However, Eb seems to be the focal

pitch of the entire piece while Ab and Db act as refractions of this pitch. The double bass is tuned

scordatura with the three low strings tuned to Eb, Ab, and Db while the harp tunes the lower D, G

and C strings a quarter tone higher. This is not a single-note piece and it is unlike many of Scelsi’s

compositions in terms of its nature of time. In most of Scelsi’s works, time unfolds in continuous

motion, without a break which Murail calls “smooth time20”. This piece has more abrupt rhythms

and short segments which is a type of “angular time”. In fact, the piece is comprised of short

20 Murail, Scelsi and L'Itinéraire, 183.

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segments which then within themselves occupy a kind of smooth time. Scelsi uses quarter tones

to distort the harmonic perception and to give an expressive nuance to the sound. And unlike in

Western tradition, Scelsi’s idea of beauty does not base itself on the purity of sound but on a sound

that is enriched and charged with many interfering resonances. This is achieved by placing metal

resonators on the tam-tam and the harp, therefore distorting the purity of the instrument’s sound

and adding to the expanding timbral variety. Buddhist monks in Korea have a similar approach to

playing their barrel drums called the Beopge. The barrel drum would usually be hung on a metal

frame or stand on a tall platform and the monk would play it with heavy and thick drumsticks. The

similarity is that the monk will occasionally hold one of the drumsticks parallel to the membrane

of the drum with one hand while hitting it with the other. The vibration on the membrane transfers

to the drumstick that is held parallel onto the drumhead creating an extraneous buzz which enriches

the timbre of the sound. It is unknown if Scelsi knew about these traditions but considering his

travels, it is highly likely.

Scelsi tries to create a ‘global sound21’ with the fusion of instrumental timbres through

extended techniques. However, “Okanagon” is unusual in Scelsi’s oeuvre that it has two seemingly

opposing sound worlds within the same piece. Nevertheless, the second sound world is only a

refraction of the first sound world presented from another perspective.

6. The First Sound World

The first section of the piece represents a sort of “entropic” narrative where a simple sound

object gets elaborated moving towards disorder. Although Scelsi disrupts the flow sometimes to

remind the listener of the singularity of the sound, the structures that make up the section are


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following this entropic discourse. This is not achieved by traditional compositional techniques but

by manipulating the sense of time through utterances of the sound object in an incantatory style

(frequent returns to the same pitch, the repetition and variation of utterances). One can argue that

there is a sense of directionality because of an ever expanding singularity. It starts with a sound

object that Scelsi chose for evoking the “heartbeat” of the Earth. From then on, it goes through

modifications in the parameters of dynamics, densities, registers, internal dynamism, timbral

variations and micro-variations of each instrument: such as attacks, types of sustain, spectral

modifications and alterations of pitch and intensity22. The variation of the utterances inevitably

creates structures within the composition, even if Scelsi’s perspective to constructing the piece

might not have been to achieve that. This entails formal separations in the piece when carefully

analyzing it (see fig. 2). It also happens to effect the time of the piece by setting precedents that in

turn create expectations which lead to stretching and compressing the flow of time.

Scelsi has a collection of sound sources with which he synthesizes the global sound. Harp

is used throughout the piece to establish the “pitch center of the moment” by having the lowest

pitch as the foundation on which the additive synthesis starts adding to. The first timbral variant

that Scelsi uses is the quarter tone which distorts the pitch definition and plays with the listener’s

sense of the critical bandwidth. Whenever there is an Eb on the harp, it is always accompanied by

a D quarter-sharp on the adjacent string. The same pairing is applicable to Db and Ab with their

respective quarter tone accompanists C quarter-sharp and G quarter-sharp. The other timbral

variant on the harp is the use of the resonator which creates internal rhythmic fluctuations as well

as an immediate departure from traditional sonic expectations from a harp. The third timbral

22 Murail, De-composer, 176. – Murail considers these parameters as the primary concern of a composer trying to achieve a ‘global sound’.


variant on the harp is the pizzicato technique (plucked with fingernails or a metallic plectrum)

which adds to the complexity of the micro-fluctuations of the global sound.

The tam-tam has three distinct timbral variations in the piece. The first is the use of normal

sticks which creates a lush, low and full-bodied sound that blends well with the double bass. The

second is the use of hard sticks that permits the emission of more complex overtones. Finally, the

third variant is the use of the resonator vibrating and scraping against the surface of the tam-tam

which is a very similar sound to the resonator of the harp. Moreover, when both resonators are in

operation, due to the difference in the fundamental resonance frequency of the two instruments, it

creates an effect of increased depth in the spatial image of the sound.

The double bass is facilitated as the intermediary between the harp and the tam-tam by

having timbral qualities which can be mistaken for either instrument while intensifying the final

result of the fusion of timbres. Natural harmonics, col legno tratto, sul ponticello, tremolo,

pizzicato, quarter tones, registral jumps and trills are the techniques that Scelsi utilize to create the

timbral variations. The main difference between the usage of quarter tones on the harp and the

double bass is that the quarter tones on the double bass are tools for moving in and out of the pitch

center in time by glissandi rather than playing the quarter sharp and the regular flat at the same

time (see fig. 3). While the pizzicato notes serving as the support for the tam-tam’s attacks makes

the perception of the tam-tam’s pitch slightly less ambiguous, the sul ponticello technique –

especially when mixed with a tremolo – adds to the overtones generated by the resonators (see fig.

4). Also, the double bass has a technical advantage which permits two notes to be played via

different techniques at the same time, such as in mm.13 (see fig. 5) where the low Eb is a pizzicato

note while the Db is played col legno tratto. The Eb serves as the pitch support for the tam-tam

attack while the Db represents the refractions of the pitch moving to and sustaining the Ab


eventually to help carry on the ringing of the harp.

In the first 13 measures of the piece, Scelsi presents an incantatory phrase, then

compressing it while elaborating the timbres. It is basically a move from Ab to Eb in simplest

terms. However, starting from the first measure, the pitch content is distorted through the G quarter

sharp against the Ab, while the resonator is touched on the string which in the meantime distorts

also the timbral domain. In the same attack, the double bass is playing an Ab with natural

harmonics creating sustain for the sound object. While the harp attacks, the double bass acts as the

glue, sustaining the notes. At the end of mm.5, both instruments have a quarter note rest which

acts as a breath. Even though the piece has Eb as the focal pitch that the utterances of the sound

object eventually return to, it does not start with Eb as the first note. This may seem problematic

at first when trying to elucidate the way in which the piece unfolds from singularity to disorder. It

has to be viewed from a more universal point where Eb is the core of the sound object around

which everything revolves. The pitch class Eb represents the oneness while Ab and Db are just

surface phenomena that represent different points of view on the same object. In this sense, the

piece is indeed structured with utterances of the sound object which are presented from a different

point of view with each iteration.

Mm.6 is structured in the same fashion as mm.1 where this time the pitch is shifted from

Ab to Eb and the phrase length is only 8 beats. This seemingly “antecedent-consequent”

relationship represents the change of viewpoint in looking at the same sound object. The same

structure is repeated through mm.8-13 in a more compressed fashion and new timbral variations

are introduced with the double bass playing col legno tratto in mm.10 and sul ponticello tremolo

in mm.11. In mm.13 the tam-tam joins as the timbral thickener creating a denser texture (see fig.

5). This kind of process goes on until the end of the first sound world section which is mm. 88.


Between mm.1-13 it is achieved by means of compressing time and having minute

fluctuations in the timbral domain. Between mm.13 and mm.29, the process manifests itself by

further thickening of the texture while gradually compressing the duration of utterances. In mm.16

the double bass introduces another timbre by playing notes with left hand pizzicato against softly

bowed notes. Without giving away the sustained quality of the sound, the timbre of the tam-tam is

given a new parameter which sharpens the sense of pitch. The cycle of process starts once more in

mm.30 until mm. 54 and this time the increased detail of inner rhythmic fluctuations and the play

on the critical width by sustaining intervals of fourth over quarter-tone dissonances in the harp

generates an excitement almost like the speed of the heartbeat of the Earth rising.

Whenever a composer chooses a significant motive that can be identified as being

disruptive to the repetition and contrasting in quality to what precedes it, the narrativity of the

piece is effected by that moment. In Okanagon and many of Scelsi’s other pieces, it is rare to find

markers such as these to suggest a dramatic turn of events. A very un-Scelsi-esque gesture is found

in mm.53 where the double bass and the harp play a falling triplet figure in unison to mark the end

of another cycle of the process (see fig. 6). These kinds of formal separations are atypical in

Scelsi’s oeuvre and especially hard to define. Even though Scelsi thinks of himself as the vessel

through the spirits of music speak23, I believe moments like this in his music uncover the human

side of him which likes to exert drama. What comes afterwards in mm.55 is now even more

dramatic since it is the only time in the piece where the harp alone is uttering the second part of

the incantatory phrase – the simplest form of the sound object. This moment supports the argument

that Eb is the representation of the oneness that all inner movement eventually returns to. This

section that starts with mm.55 and ends in mm.87 is an elaboration of the Eb pitch center through

23 Dickson, Grammatical Analysis, 217.


widening and narrowing of the critical band, rapid changes in timbre through the use of different

techniques and registral jumps on the double bass, and more elaborate rhythmic micro-fluctuations

on the tam-tam part.

7. The Second Sound World

The second sound world in the piece is different in almost every way from the first. The

concealed periodicity of Scelsi’s rhythms in the first section give way to a certain improvisatory

nature in the second section. This is a purely percussive sound world reminiscent of a couple of

Indian tabla players improvising in a ‘tabla circle’. There are no musical markers to suggest that

there are separations within the section. There are tempo changes and accompanying double bar

lines but these do not account for a shift in paradigm. The harp and the double bass become

idiophones instead of chordophones and they are played with hits on the soundboard with the

fingers and knuckles. However, occasional pitch material from the harp helps to orientate the

listener and reminds the initial sonic gesture. This second sound world is such a dramatic departure

from the first sound world that it is hard to categorize it in musical terms. As Murail points out that

even though Scelsi is known to write the occasional piece with more abrupt rhythms and short

segments it is difficult to understand how these pieces are related to the ‘smooth’ pieces24. In the

case of Okanagon, both “smooth time” and “angular time” worlds exist in the same piece. While

it is hard to point towards musical reasons for having such a contrast within the piece, when looked

at from the perspective of narrative, one can find reasons for this choice. Firstly, as the subtitle

suggests this piece is perceived by the composer as a “rite” or the representation of the “heartbeat”

of the Earth. As discussed in the previous section, the piece has a way of moving forwards by



changing the perspective on the sound object. Refraction of pitches act like light waves breaking

their angles while passing through glass or water. Such phenomena, while being a topic for particle

physicists, are understood to be interactions in the minutest physical manifestations of existence.

In other words, in order to observe such phenomena, one would have to zoom into an object far

enough. The exegesis of this second sound world can be thought of the sound object zooming in

on itself so far that the listener no longer can hear sustained sounds. This kind of process is also

common in electronic music through the use of granular synthesizers. Granular synthesis is based

on the idea of sampling but the samples are not played back in a regular fashion. They are split

into small pieces that are comprised of milliseconds of material which are called grains.

Afterwards those grains are manipulated by stretching them out in time and playing with

parameters such as volume and frequency. In a similar fashion, this second section has occasional

pitch material that is reminiscent of the previous section but it is too far “inside” the sound object

to be seen as a whole. Naturally, it is unlikely for Scelsi to be inspired by granular synthesis since

it was not conceptualized until late 1970’s. Whether these were Scelsi’s inspirations for this section

or not, the perspective of magnification supports the entropic reading of the narrative of the piece

because it deals with the increasing disorder that is found in the universe not only as time unfolds

but also as one observes it under magnification.

8. Meeting of the two sound worlds and coming back to the initial perspective

A momentary change of perspective happens in mm.144 where the first sound world is re-

introduced only to be magnified back again to its percussive elements. Yet this time over the

percussive playing of the instruments, more pitches are played on the harp and let ring. This is the

meeting of the two sound worlds where sustaining and percussive elements coexist. It is as if the

magnifying glass has been pulled back slightly to let the audience perceive both realities. In


mm.190 the primordial drone is “recapitulated” and the perspective is shifted to the primary

presentation of the sonic gesture at the beginning of the piece.

9. Conclusion

Okanagon is one of the pieces in Scelsi’s collection of compositions that come in a time

between his third (1960’s) and fourth (1970’s) period. Although he composed his famous Quattro

Pezzi per Orchestra in 1959, he had not yet devoted himself solely to composing single note pieces.

His fourth period is generally considered as the period which he only composed pieces based on a

single note. The mysticism evoked by Okanagon and its drone like sound followed by the Konx-

Om-Pax (1969) for mixed choir and orchestra serve as his stepping stones going into the fourth

period. Konx-Om-Pax was subtitled: “three aspects of sound: as the first motion of the immovable,

as creative force, as the syllable 'om'”. Quoting from Murail: “minute sonic fluctuations (vibrato,

glissandi, spectral changes, tremolos) become not mere ornaments to a text, but the text itself25”.

Scelsi presents the piece by simply offering the “sonic material” to the listener’s hearing – the

primordial sonic gesture, the “om” of the yogi26. To have a better understanding of Scelsi’s

ideology, we can look at his longtime collaborator Frances-Marie Uitti’s words:

Since the 1940s, Giacinto Scelsi had been deeply involved with Eastern religions. He

practised yoga as well as other religious disciplines and studied the works of, for example,

Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, but he was particularly influenced by the teachings of Sri

Aurobindo and La Mere. He believed that various meditation techniques, such as intoning

the "OM", enabled him to enter into a different vibratory realm. For him, sound in its purest

vibration was a potent force that has an extremely powerful influence on people. He was

convinced that, through meditation and improvisation, he could become a channel for higher

25 Murail, De-composer, 176. 26 Ibid., 174.


forces which would enable the creation of works that were otherwise impossible through

ordinary composition27.

A deep involvement in Eastern thought, coupled with a classical training from Walter

Klein, one of Schoenberg’s students, makes Scelsi one of the most innovative voices of the 20th

century. On the other hand, implying a notion of “East meets West” in his music would be a crass

approach to the inner workings of his art. Since he was a part of European culture not just as

nobility but as a part of an artistic tradition, he chose to put down his works into writing. The

creative process of his which depended heavily on improvisations has an oral nature to it. When

putting the ideas down to writing, one confines them into a certain form that is visual28. Listening

to a piece of music while looking at the score can be a very different experience than simply

listening to it without a score or even with eyes closed. As much as Scelsi was trying leave a legacy

behind him in the form of written scores, the influence of oral tradition in the creation of his art is

undismissible. The performance notes for Okanagon with its direction of hiding everything behind

a large screen suggests that Scelsi is trying to preserve the orality of his art by letting the audience

experience it purely aurally without dwelling in other meanings which distract the mind from

focusing on the “sound” itself. His musical discourse goes against much of the traditional concept

of art music because it lacks a syntax that bases itself on pitch and harmony. The music does not

narrate a story but simply presents the “sound” while bringing its inner workings into the

foreground by playing with its parameters.

27 Frances- Marie Uitti, "Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations," Tempo 194, (1995), 12. 28 Ian Dickson, "Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music.", twentieth-century music 6:01, (2009), 29. – Dickson quotes Walter Ong in his article : “writing is a pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things [. . .]. Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever”.


Bibliography

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Dickson, Ian. 2009. "Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music." twentieth-century music 6 (01): 23-41. Accessed 10 28, 2014. doi:10.1017/S1478572210000046.

Dickson, Ian. 2012. "Towards a Grammatical Analysis of Scelsi's Late Music." Music Analysis, (Blackwell Publishing Ltd.) 31 (ii): 217-241. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2249.2012.00336.x.

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Appendix

Figure 1


Figure 2

Incantatory Segments Both Worlds Rhythmic Segments Pitch Center

mm.1-5 Ab mm. 6-7 Eb mm. 8-10 Ab mm. 11-12 Eb mm. 13-15 Eb mm.16-22 Ab mm. 23-29 Eb mm. 30-31 Ab mm. 32-54 Eb mm. 55-56

(simplest form of the sound object) Eb

mm. 57-88 Eb

mm. 89-143 - mm. 144-145 Eb

mm.146-147 Ab mm. 148-150 Eb mm. 151-152 Eb

mm. 153-154 - mm. 155-160 Eb

mm. 161-162 Ab mm. 163-170 Eb

mm. 170-171 - mm. 173-189 Ab

mm. 190-192 Eb mm. 193-194 Ab mm. 195-200 Eb


Figure 3

Tam-tam

Bass

Harp

Figure 4


Figure 5


Figure 6

Scelsi the Sculptor

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Transcript of Scelsi the Sculptor