Reflections on Giacinto Scelsi

​Rome, July 19, 2023—The graceful poem pictured here (note incidentally its iambic underpinning), likely quoting a song by Eddie Vedder, could not have been a more perfect encounter on a blazing morning in Rome on my way to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi for a breathtaking—and apperceptive—day of work in preparation for my concert presentation “Re-Improvising Scelsi, Part 2” (I presented Part 1 at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in 2019), the centerpiece of which is his Piano Suite No. 8, “Bot-Ba.” Uncannily the poem is not dissimilar from Scelsi’s own, often aphoristic, poetry.

But more deeply resonant is how aptly it contextualizes my intimate, privileged encounter with the solitary, radical force of nature that Scelsi is. My convictions concerning a performance practice of his œuvre were only corroborated in hearing archival audio of his piano and ondiola improvisations. Most of what I took in is non-verbal. But in advance of what I will communicate directly in performance, I will share some observations here—none of which care for any pretense of academic expertise.

Firstly, the kinship of his work process with my own is extremely apparent to me. The problems he endured regarding engagement with musical notation to convey—and legitimize—his creative existence, and the ambivalence he certainly had therewith, are even more so.

There is a riveting urgency and a fire in Scelsi’s execution, a delicateness yet savageness, a gentle refinement yet roughness, all rendered with unflinching, crystalline technique that is born from a total, almost erotic engagement with sound. There is no distinction whatsoever between improvisation and composition.

Notable in the recordings is his utterly conscious sensitivity to the interactivity of overtones, absolutely magical and intoxicating. Their audible life is often more the object of his preoccupation than the fundamental notes he is obsessively sounding. Obviously none of this secret interplay is reflected anywhere in the notations otherwise so meticulously carried out by his amanuenses. Yet it reveals everything concerning the temporal unfolding and evolution of what I would call his ‘sound concern.’

Also notable, initially, is an always identifiable, primordial pulse—his performances surge with dance—though this eventually proves to have less to do with such; there is no grammar, no obligatory syntax, no context even to his sound concern; it is a reality that simply, phallically asserts its existence in the moment, having no beginning and no end. All notions of movement, repetition, and agitation are but perceptual functions of the developing self-declared “am” of the sound, fanning the fire of its resonance, augmenting its dimension. I thought: what greater exhilaration and freedom is there than in such a spontaneous, godly creative experience?

I began to register moments that could be heard, classically speaking, as formal contrasts quite otherwise. Rather the unrelenting, sensual engagement with the living resonance of what came before—his singular, unwavering sound concern, maintained with searing aural precision—is what gives rise to each new sound formation that emerges, each but literally a way to love the same resonance from a new vantage point.

It became more obvious to me than ever that his written scores, though so diligently executed, ultimately do something of an injustice and obscure access to the primal essence of his creative enterprise. Therefore any representations of his music that are obtained from an academically faithful rendering of these notations—however dutifully done—are irrelevant. As Hafez beautifully declares, “Burn the book if you’re one of us.”

During these several unforgettable hours of immersive listening I surrendered my heart wholly to Scelsi’s world, an experience entirely unique and enthralling: as with any iconoclast whose commitment and vision are so total and so thoroughly carried out, for a moment theirs supersedes all other approaches…
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In such a state of wonder I emerged again into the unsettling, ferocious heat of our burning planet.

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