Giacinto Scelsi | Artist
Giacinto Francesco Maria Scelsi was an Italian modernist composer and surrealist poet born 1905 in La Spezia, Italy. He is best known for having composed music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics. For that reason he is thought to be one of the earliest "drone" exponents in modern music. Scelsi collaborated with American composers including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Alvin Curran. His work was a source of inspiration to Ennio Morricone's Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza. Born in the village of Pitelli near La Spezia in his aristocratic mother's old castle, Scelsi received education from a private tutor who taught him Latin, chess and fencing. Later, his family moved to Rome and he received private lessons with Giacinto Sallustio. In Vienna, he studied with Walther Klein, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. He became the first exponent of dodecaphony in Italy, although he did not continue to use this system. In the 1920s, Scelsi made friends with intellectuals like Jean Cocteau and Virginia Woolf, and traveled abroad extensively. He first came into contact with non-European music in Egypt in 1927. In 1937 he organised a series of concerts of contemporary works, introducing the music of Paul Hindemith, Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sergei Prokofiev to an Italian audience for the first time. Due to the racial laws under Mussolini's fascist regime, which prevented the performance of works by Jewish composers, these concerts were banned. Scelsi refused to comply, and gradually distanced himself from Italy. In 1940, when Italy entered the war, Scelsi was in Switzerland, where he remained until the end of the conflict, composing and honing his conception of music. Back in Rome after the war he underwent a profound psychological crisis that led him to discover Eastern spirituality, also to a radical transformation of his view of music. In this so-called second period, he rejected the notions of composition and authorship in favour of sheer improvisation. His improvisations were recorded on tape and later transcribed by collaborators under his guidance. They were then orchestrated and given meticulous performance instructions. Scelsi viewed artistic creation as a means of communicating a higher, transcendent reality to the listener, where the artist is merely an intermediary. For this reason, Scelsi never allowed his image to be shown in connection with his music; he preferred instead to identify himself by a line under a circle, as a symbol of Eastern provenance. The composition "Four Pieces on a single note" remains his most famous work and one of the few performed during his lifetime. Today, some of his music has gained popularity in certain postmodern composition circles, with pieces like "Anahit" and his String Quartets gaining prominence. As for recordings of Scelsi's work, there are surprisingly few available considering the growing recognition of his importance to modern music. One champion of the composer's work however is Swiss composer and conductor Jurg Wyttenbach, Director of the Polish Orchestre et Choeur de la Radio-Television de Cracovie. Wyttenbach made a series of chamber, orchestral and choral recordings, which are highly recommended: Aion; Pfhat; Konx-Om-Pax (1988), Quattro pezzi per orchestra; Anahit; Uaxuctum (1989), Hurqualia; Hymnos; Chukrum (1990), and a compilation volume Œuvre intégrale pour chœur et orchestre symphonique (1990). The music of Scelsi was heard by millions in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, in which excerpts of his two works Quattro pezzi su una nota sola and Uaxuctum were featured alongside the music of his contemporaries.
Artist Website: wikipedia/Giacinto_Scelsi
Featured Albums: Giacinto Scelsi
Related Artists: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown
