GIACINTO SCELSI
(La Spezia 1905 - Roma 1988)
L'uomo di una sola nota

in occasione del centenario della sua nascita

 

LE PAROLE
Interventi di
Marco Maria Tosolini (musicologo, Conservatorio di Udine)
Luciano Martinis (artista, editore Le Parole Gelate)
Nicola Cisternino (compositore, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia)

 

I SUONI
Marianne Schroeder: pianoforte
Suite n.10 Ka

 

“...Despite the fact that the Italian academic musical world has left the music of Giacinto Scelsi in the dark, the thoughts and actions of this singular musician and thinker, after whom “the entire history of music from the end of the war to the present day should be re-written” (Harry Halbreich), found an enormous affinity with many vibrant thinkers in the 1980's, when his music began to be played more often (see the spectral experience of the French Itineraire), as well as the historical and renewed human and linguistic similarities already widely noted between Scelsi and Evangelisti, Ligeti, Xenakis, Cage and Feldman, and less noted, but with extraordinary stylistic coincidences, despite the different presuppositions, between Scelsi and the Nono of the last years.
Giacinto Maria Scelsi, the count of Ayala Valva was born on the 8th of January, 1905 in La Spezia. After a long time living in various parts of Europe, in the early 1950's he settled in Rome, in front of the Palatino, a place he himself described as privileged because “…Rome is the borderline between east and west, the east starts in the south of Rome, and the west starts in the north. This borderline runs exactly along the Foro Romano. That is where my house is, and that explains my life and my music”. He undertook initial academic training at the Giacinto Sallustio school in Rome (he was in the same class as Goffredo Petrassi), in the 1930's, in the same period as his journey to the east, he became initiated into the esoteric music of Skriabin by Egon Koehler in Geneva, and subsequently to Schoenberg's atonalism by Walter Klein in Vienna (and above all to the lyric expressionism of Alban Berg for whom Scelsi had a natural affinity). In the post-war period, after having created numerous works, mainly for piano (Sonata n. 2 and 3, 1939; Variations and Fuge, 1941; Sonata n. 4, 1942;) he fell into a profound state of psycho-physical crisis.
This illness led to a long period in a Swiss clinic, where the doctors, unable to find a cause for his malady, gave him up for lost. However, according to Scelsi, it was this very illness which generated and liberated a new music. A particular passion, which turned out to be therapeutic, brought him to rediscover a game he played in his childhood, where he would play the same sound on the piano for hours over a long period… thus began the second and more innovative period of Scelsi's work. From numerous compositions for one instrument in the 1950's (Divertimento n. 2, 1951 and Divertimento n. 3, 1955 for violin, Suite n. 8 Bot-Ba, 1952 , Quattro illustrazioni sulle metamorfosi di Visnù , 1953 for piano, a Triphon e Dithome, 1956-57 for viola), to his famous Quattro pezzi (on just one note) for orchestra in 1958, to Aiôn (1961) and Konx Om Pax (1969) for choir and orchestra, to his famous quartets for strings n. 2, 3, 4 (1961-64). The form of these works characterise, in an evermore unequivocally way, his journey towards the centre of the Klang-sound. “Sound is spherical, it is round, however we always listen to it as duration and height. This is not right. Every spherical thing has a centre: you can show it scientifically. We must reach the heart of sound: only then are we musicians, otherwise we are just craftsmen. A craftsman of music deserves respect, but he is not a true musician nor a true artist” (G.S.).
Giacinto Scelsi died in Rome at dawn on the morning of 9th August 1988, having previously told his closest friends that the crossing of the eights in this year would see him leave this life.