Giacinto Scelsi

"The Messenger"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Nov. 21, 2005.

In the beginning was the Tone. Throughout musical history, composers have
commenced major works with a primordial hum, as if to suggest that the universe
was audible before it became visible. Monteverdis Orfeo, the first masterpiece of
opera, begins with an open fifth, notes like twin pillars, over which a high trumpet
plays skirling fanfares. Haydns Creation begins with monumental octave Cs,
which have the weight of the word of God. Beethovens Ninth Symphony starts
softly, almost imperceptibly, with A and E gleaming in the horns and shimmering
in the strings: we tune in to an eternity-in-progress. Wagners four-day Ring cycle
is set in motion by a similar cosmogenic drone: an E-flat rumbles deep in the
mystic abyss, as the orchestra pit in Bayreuth is called, and wave upon wave of
consonant harmony emanates from it.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, majestic natural visions fell
out of fashion. Strausss Thus Spake Zarathustra, in imitation of the Ring,
begins with mighty triads over a fundamental, but in the next section a thick
harmonic fog descends and the glory is never seen again. In early, radical works by
Ravel, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, repeated tones are alarms of obsession, signals
of frenzy. By the time of Alban Bergs Wozzeck, which was initially sketched
during the First World War, the single note had become an instrument of terror:
toward the climax of the opera, two enormous Bs are drilled into the listeners
brain. In the tragic symphonic narratives of Shostakovichs Fourth and Vaughan
Williamss Sixth, monotone patterns seem to represent the world dying with a
whimper: entropy in action.
At the end of the nineteen-fifties, Giacinto Scelsi, a self-taught Italian composer
and erstwhile playboy count who had dabbled in Eastern religions and Theosophy,
had the extraordinary idea of writing an entire workthe Four Pieces for
chamber orchestrathat consisted of only single tones, one for each movement.
Scelsi was not the first to hit on this concept: Elliott Carter had ventured it in his
Eight tudes and a Fantasy, in 1950. Nor is the scheme followed literally: the
instruments often bend away from the parent note, shifting by microtones,
semitones, or larger intervals. But, by the end of the work, a paradigm shift has
taken place: the Tone is all-powerful once more. Music returns to its primitive
origins, when melody formed from noise. In each of Scelsis subsequent works, the
phenomenon is repeated. Small wonder that this obscure Roman eccentric, who
considered himself a messenger or medium, has become a cult figure among
younger composers: he makes the eternal new.

Scelsi would have been a hundred this year. Given his mystical propensities, it
might be better to say that he is a hundred, although he was observed to have died
in 1988. To mark the occasion, Miller Theatre, at Columbia University, invited the
Flux Quartet to play Scelsis five string quartets earlier this month. Live
performances of this composers works remain rare; Michael Tilson Thomas, in San
Francisco, is the only American conductor who programs them. It is far easier to
get to know the music on recordings, by way of the Accord, CPO, Kairos, and Mode
labels. Many of the disks are decorated with the Zen-like symbol that the composer
made his signature: a circle above a line, like a note floating free of its staff.
Scelsi was born into an old southern Italian noble family, inheriting the title Count
dAyala Valva from his mother. He was, of course, the end of the line. At the family
castle, he was schooled in fencing, chess, and Latin, or so he said. He flitted
through European aristocratic circles and had his wedding party at Buckingham
Palace. But music was his chief obsession. He quickly tilted toward the avant-garde,
and when he was very young he attended Luigi Russolos Futurist noise concerts;
his first major work was called Printing Presses. Later, he became interested in
Schoenbergs twelve-tone method, although he did not adopt it. He fell in love with
Eastern philosophy and made trips to India and Nepal. After the Second World
War, he suffered a breakdown and stopped composing for a few years. He spent
day after day playing a single note on the piano. The casual observer might have
thought that he had gone mad. He was, in fact, finding his path.
The chanting of Tibetan monks generally consists of deviations around a central
tone, with bells and brass creating an ambient halo. Scelsi enacted similar rituals
on the piano, then moved to the ondiola, an electronic keyboard whose dials
allowed him to vary pitch and tone quality. He wasnt sure how to write it all down,
and employed a fellow-composer, Vieri Tosatti, to devise suitable notation. After
Scelsis death, Tosatti published an article with the incendiary title Giacinto Scelsi
CEst Moi, asserting not only that he was the true author of the music but that it
was all rubbish. Controversy ensued, and some high-minded European types
dismissed Scelsi as a fraud. Robin Freeman, in an essay in the
magazine Tempo, suggested the opposite: that Scelsi was able to make his
imaginative leaps precisely because he was not bound by academic training. Its
something for university composition departments to ponder.
Scelsis methods were strange, but he had a command of narrative which no
ghostwriter could have provided. Otherwise, we would be talking about the genius
of Tosatti. The music is anything but monotonous; it seethes with change. In the
quartets, the players use every trick in the book to transform those long tones,
varying the degree of vibrato, bowing over the fingerboard or close to the bridge,
adding steel mutes, scraping with maximum pressure. As the tones shift, split
apart, and fan out, surprising shapes emerge. In the last part of the Fourth Quartet,
a cluster of pitches creeps ever upward, and, in the process, major and minor triads

materialize out of nowhere. (The spellbinding Rain Over the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains sequence, in John Adamss Doctor Atomic, uses a similar process.)
Orchestral works such as the Four Pieces, Aion, and Anahit build to cryptoRomantic climaxes worthy of Bruckner: horns leap up an octave, winds trill on
high, timpani bang out thirds, and the heavens open. In Konx-Om-Pax, which
Mode has recorded, a chorus is added to the mix, chanting an apocalyptic Om.

Connoisseurs of extreme chamber music may remember that in 1999 the Flux
Quartet gave the world premire of the complete version of Morton Feldmans sixhour-long Second Quartet. Scelsis quartets, relatively brief in span, dont pose the
same challenge of endurance, but they are taxing nevertheless, taking a toll on the
bowing arm and on the emotions. Every note counts, each new one more than the
last. During the performance at Miller Theatre, I sometimes wished for greater
tonal purity, especially in the Fourth Quartet: the chords were hard to hear amid
the haze of special effects. But I doubt that any other ensemble could have played
with equal ferocity and passion. Scelsi demands imaginative collaborators, and the
members of Flux Tom Chiu and Conrad Harris, violinists; Max Mandel, violist;
and Dave Eggar, cellist did nothing by rote.
What most struck me, in my first live encounter with this music, was that the cycle
becomes one towering superquartet, in arch form. The First Quartet is the rough
foundation: it is couched in a largely atonal idiom, midway between Berg and
Bartk. In its final movement, the First suddenly takes off into a world of eerie
purity, drawing principally on the white notes of the C-major scale. In the Second
Quartet, the one-note method arrives, to harsh, assaultive effect. But sonorous
thirds appear in the last movement, marking Scelsis reassertion of consonance.
The Third brings some rich, glowing major triads, ghosts of the Romantic century.
The Fourth Quartet, with its searing chorale, is the zenith. The Fifth Quartet
plunges back down to the world of the single note. It is F, the same on which the
revolutionary Four Pieces began, and it comes and goes in gasping breaths,
interspersed with silences.
The Fifth, transcribed in 1984, was Scelsis last workat least that we know of.
Scientific researchers have recently observed a musical event that employs a
curiously familiar style: a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies is emitting a
B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C.