SCELSI: Hymnos for Organ and Two Orchestras
Giacinto Scelsi was born in Pitelli, in the province of La Spezia (Liguria), Italy on January 8, 1905, and died in Rome on August 9, 1988. He composed Hymnos in 1963, and it was premiered in 1984 at the Festival d’Angers (France). The music is divided among three performing units: two orchestras (arrayed independently on the right and left sides of the stage) and organ (which, with the percussion section—timpani, gong, suspended cymbal, low and high tam-tams, snare drum—occupies the rear center of the stage). “Orchestra A” consists of flute (doubling piccolo), two oboes, bass clarinet, bassoon, three horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, eight first violins, seven second violins, five violas, four cellos, and three double basses; “Orchestra B” of flute, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, eight first violins, seven second violins, five violas, four cellos, and three double basses.
In the late 1970s word began to circulate concerning a peculiar Italian nobleman who made music, wrote poetry, and lived a reclusive existence in a house on Via San Teodoro at the edge of the Roman Forum, a man with an indistinct past whose compositions—many of them written years earlier—had begun to garner intense interest from a coterie of respected performers devoted to experimental strands of contemporary music. A few music-lovers might have recalled the name of Giacinto Scelsi from the 1930s, when his music was promoted by the conductor Pierre Monteux in Paris (though not in San Francisco, where Monteux served as music director from 1936 to 1952) and when Scelsi facilitated the Italian premieres of works by a raft of notable modern composers, including Schoenberg, Kodály, Janá…ek, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev, who were scarcely known in prewar Italy.
In the years between he had disappeared from the musical radar, but he had traveled a path of musical inquiry that resulted in a considerable production of works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles (sometimes in combination with voice), chorus, and, especially during the 1960s, orchestra. Most of these had never been performed, but in the 1980s the surge of interest in Scelsi led to a spate of belated premieres and recordings. Within a few years he was accorded “featured composer” status at the Holland Festival in 1986 and the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) World Music Days in Cologne in 1987. Then in 1988 he died, leaving a good deal of mystery in his wake.
The principal publisher of his works, the French firm of Durand-Salabert-Eschig (an amalgamation of three firms of historic importance), opens its catalogue on the composer with an unsigned poem, given in French, English, and Italian. I have seen it attributed elsewhere to Scelsi himself, although obviously he did not pen the final line:
GIACINTO SCELSI
8 january 1905
a naval officer declares the birth
of a son
fencing chess Latin
a medieval education
an old castle in southern Italy
Vienna
works on dodecaphony
London, marriage
reception at Buckingham Palace
India
(Yoga
Nepal
Paris
concerts
(works that have left traces in the cracks)
bridges
(conversations with tramps, borne down-stream)
incombustible poems survive
at Rome sounds
solitary life sounds
negation of that which makes man opaque
something forgotten?
9 August 1988
Let us expand on this a bit, to the extent that Scelsi’s diligent obfuscation of his life-story allows. He was born in a village in Liguria, just outside La Spezia, known to tourists as the jumping-off point to the Cinque Terre. His family was, however, of Sicilian aristocracy and he inherited the title Count d’Alaya Valva. He and his younger sister, Isabella, were raised in a castle in Campania where they received a “medieval education” that apparently did not include music, at least until his family later moved to Rome. He was encouraged (and perhaps took some lessons from) Respighi and Casella, and he quite certainly studied for a while with Walter Klein, who had been a pupil of Schoenberg’s in Vienna, and with Egon Köhler, who was a Scriabin enthusiast. During the 1920s he fell in with such literary luminaries as Jean Cocteau and Virginia Woolf, and he produced some poetry that reflected an interest in Surrealism. He married an Englishwoman who was distantly related to the House of Windsor—thus the wedding reception at Buckingham Palace. At the end of WWII, which they spent in Switzerland, the couple separated and had no further contact. Scelsi returned to Rome.
Something bad happened around 1950, maybe as early as 1948. It has been variously described as a metaphysical crisis, a mental collapse, and a nervous breakdown, but, whatever the particulars, it was severe and led to a period (weeks? months?) in a mental institution. He later said that during his rehabilitation he spent entire days seated at a piano playing a single note over and over. “If you play one note for a very long time, it grows large,” he observed. “It grows so large that you hear many more harmonies, and it becomes larger inside. The note envelops you. In the note you discover an entire universe with overtones that you never hear otherwise. The note fills the space you are in, surrounds you; you swim in it.”
He became deeply involved in the study of pantheism, Theosophy, and Eastern philosophy—particularly Zen—and he embarked on the practice of yoga. He undertook visits to India and Nepal. He began to describe his own compositions as a nexus of Eastern and Western sensibilities. “Rome,” he explained from his home, “is the boundary between East and West. South of Rome the East begins, and north of Rome the West begins. The borderline runs exactly over the Forum Romanum. It runs right here, through my drawing-room.”
His post-crisis friends would include the painter Salvador Dalí and the poets Paul Éluard, Pierre Jean Jouve, and especially Henri Michaux. Between 1949 and 1962 a small Parisian publisher would issue three volumes of Scelsi’s poetry, in French; three others appeared from small presses elsewhere. A rare photograph of Scelsi, reproduced in the score of his Quartetto per archi of 1944 (published in 1948 by Edizioni De Santis), shows him to be handsome, slender, and high of cheekbone and hairline, with penetrating eyes that remind one of Bartok’s. We don’t know what he looked like in later life; following his crisis he refused to be photographed.
For a while he continued composing in a “traditional” way, but he increasingly devoted himself to improvising while in a trance, usually playing the Ondiola, a three-octave electronic keyboard instrument capable of realizing microtonal intervals. Tapes of his improvisations were transcribed by employees with perfect pitch, and the improvisations judged to be the best were turned into performable scores for whatever instrumental or vocal complement was deemed most appropriate. Usually the scores used more-or-less traditional notation, but sometimes they employed imaginative forms of notation devised for the piece in question. Frequently he tailored details of his compositions to the technique of the performer who would introduce the piece. On other occasions he required the performers to master unanticipated technical feats, even to the extent of adapting their instruments by attaching odd devices he had engineered.
The details of the eventual scores would be greatly refined beyond the basic transcribing of the improvisation. His most frequent collaborator, Vieri Tosatti (1920-99, a composer in his own right), insisted after Scelsi’s death that he had played a major role in creating these compositions since 1947. He was not bashful about his assertion, which he published in a 1989 article in Il giornale della musica titled “Giacinto Scelsi c’est moi.” The claim is supported, at least in a general sense, by persons who came within Scelsi’s orbit. In 2001 the Musical Times published a fascinating memoir by the violinist Franco Sciannameo, who, as a member of the Quartetto di Nuova Musica, had many occasions to work personally with Scelsi when preparing performances of his compositions. Wrote Sciannameo:
Scelsi did not work alone; he needed collaborators. Many times he said that he was not a composer at all, but only a messenger—un postino. He was inspired from an Elsewhere; he himself taped sound sequences executed on small electronic apparati, but someone had to take care of the rest. That someone was Vieri Tosatti. The scores of the great orchestral compositions and the string quartets were probably set by Tosatti. I am certain that Quartetto no.4 and Anagamin were. Theirs was a collaboration that lasted some thirty years—a lifetime, really—and it was a rare musical intercourse between two highly sensitive human beings. Theirs was perhaps a Faustian bargain, whose details can be known only to them.
The chamber works he cites—the Quartet No. 4 and Anagamin—were composed respectively in 1964 and 1965, which is to say in the two years immediately following Hymnos, and from Sciannameo’s description it would seem as if he likely had at least some participation in the creation of this score. Some critics expressed outrage at the collaborative aspect of Scelsi’s work. But even Sciannameo’s account manages to add confusion, since he reports that the Scelsi-Tosatti collaboration ended by 1968. If the collaboration between Scelsi and Tosatti lasted “some thirty years,” it’s hard to square that with the immodest Tosatti’s own claim that they had begun working together in 1947. With most things Scelsi, certainty is elusive.
Scelsi’s interest in the acoustical variety encapsulated within a single note struck a particularly sympathetic chord with the composers who were emerging in the 1980s under the banner of Musique spectrale (Spectral music), figures like Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Jonathan Harvey. They shared Scelsi’s fascination with the teachings of the Theosophist, Anthroposophist, and educational philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who had written “the future development of music will . . . involve a recognition of the special character of the individual note.” But where the Spectralists approached the question through the scientific techniques of electro-acoustic analysis, Scelsi hewed to a strictly intuitive attitude, guided by mind and ear—by “deep listening,” one might say—rather than by mathematical analysis.
True to its title, Hymnos does indeed convey a “hymnic,” potentially ecstatic quality of sustained meditation. For kindred sounds one might well look at the repertoire of Tibetan sacred chants rather than to other composers of the European tradition. The large orchestra is disposed antiphonally into two halves that are roughly equivalent if not identically composed. The organ serves as a mediating entity, both sonically and spatially, but it is used sparsely, as is the percussion section (which at least displays restraint by Scelsian standards). The work is cast as a single movement of eleven or twelve minutes duration, yet within this span three sections are clearly discernable: a loud opening section in 4/4 meter (though beats in this piece are always indistinct) that ruminates on the note D; a quiet, still center in 3/4 time that moves the pitch center to E; and a closing section (back in 4/4 meter and especially rich in brass tones) that meditates on B-flat. But let us be clear: the pitches are not confined to just these notes. The rumination on the note D, for example, not only investigates diverse instrumental combinations to show off D in different ways but also extends to other pitches inherent in the make-up of the note D (the notes of its overtone series, for example) or to the “gravitational” bending of the note as other pitches pry it microtonally away from its moorings.
The music does not proceed as a narrative, neither in the plot-driven sense of program music nor as a logical succession of purely musical syntax. Its procedure might be better described as prismatic, since it examines how individual notes change when viewed from a constantly shifting perspective. Scelsi has noticed that music’s molecules contain universes—or, as he put it, “Art is very simple, or it isn’t.”
—James M. Keller
More About the Music
Recordings: Tito Ceccherini conducting the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, in volume three of the “Giacinto Scelsi Collection” (Stradivarius) | Hans Zender conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a live recording (Neos)
Reading: Three volumes of Scelsi’s writings are available in recent French editions: L’homme du son (his collected poetry, published by Actes Sud) | Les anges sont ailleurs . . . (various writings, plus an audio CD of a 1985 interview with the composer, Actes Sud) | Il sogno 101 (the composer’s two autobiographies, one a non-linear account of his recent terrestrial life, the other “of his next reincarnation,” Actes Sud; also published in Italian by Quodlibet, 2008). | In book format, Scelsi scholarship exists in Italian, French, and German, but not yet in English. Giacinto Scelsi aujourd’hui, by Pierre-Albert Castanet (Centre de documentation de la musique contemporaine) | Giacinto Scelsi, Second Edition, edited by Adriano Cremonese (Nuova Consonanza/le parole gelate) | Giacinto Scelsi: Viaggio al centro del suono, edited by Pierre-Albert Castanet and Nicola Cistemino (Luna Editore) | Giacinto Scelsi: Im Innern des Tons: Symposion Giacinto Scelsi, Hamburg, 1992, edited by Klaus Angermann (Verlag Wolke, Symposionsberichte des Musikfestes Hamburg) | A Scelsi Web site is maintained by the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, which was founded by the composer in 1987 and named after his sister. Among its offerings are pdf files of the complete run (21 issues) of the ongoing Rivista della Fondazione Isabella Scelsi: http://www.scelsi.it/