“How on earth did he get from all those notes to just one note?” This was composer Morton Feldman’s quip after attending a 1986 performance of piano works by Italian polymath Giacinto Scelsi. It’s a typical Feldman line in that its humour and counterfeit astonishment covers for a perceptive recognition of the way Scelsi’s music changed over time – Scelsi stopped making work for piano in the mid-fifties, after all, though he would continue to write for other instruments until his passing in the late 1980s. But it also tells us much about the aesthetic of this quixotic artist, and his fixation on ‘music of one note’; his desire to tease out the myriad microtonal and miniscule inflections found within that one note. Few have been quite so dedicated to quite such a focused zone of creation.
Scelsi’s biography is as impressive as it is idiosyncratic. Born into Italian aristocracy in 1905, he lived on his mother’s estate and studied music, chess, and fencing. His artistic proclivities confused and disappointed his father. By the mid-twenties, Scelsi was travelling in intellectual and artistic circles, something he’d do for much of his early life; he was present at futurist performances and knew the surrealists. He was also an itinerant soul, travelling to Egypt in his early twenties, a precursor to wider travels in subsequent decades. He married, though his wife left him and returned to England after a decade’s marriage; he would subsequently dedicate several pieces to her.
1948 is one of several pivotal moments in Scelsi’s life. In this instance, for negative reasons – he fell into deep psychological crisis, had a nervous breakdown, and ended up in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Two things happened, parallel to this development, that fundamentally changed the tenor of Scelsi’s music. Firstly, he immersed himself in Eastern philosophy, developing an interest in what Gregory N. Reisch pithily summarised as “theosophy, anthroposophy, Hindu metaphysics, and the meditative practice of yoga,” out of which Scelsi developed an interest in the metaphysical properties of sound.
Secondly, and most importantly, during his convalescence, he entered a phase of deep listening; as he told the story, Scelsi would sit at a piano at the sanatorium and play only one note, focusing intently on its sonorous properties. He would later explain this experience as follows: “Reiterating a note for a long time, it grows large, so large that you even hear harmony growing inside it… When you enter into a sound, the sound envelops you and you become part of the sound. Gradually, you are consumed by it and you need no other sound.” Here we find the seeds of the radical development soon to come within Scelsi’s music-making.
His interest in ‘music on a single note’, as Reisch describes it, may well also have emerged from two other sources: the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and the composer Dane Rudhyar. Scelsi was certainly familiar with their work. Out of this, he cobbled together a worldview that embraced the potential of sound as totality of music-making practice. When he returned to music in the early to mid 1950s, after a few formative pieces for piano, he walked away from the instrument – it didn’t allow for the intricacies and microtonal resonances he was looking for – and moved towards wind, brass, strings and percussion.
In 1959, Scelsi wrote Quattro pezzi (ciascuno sa una nota sola), seen by many as the pivot point in his music. For Reisch, it is where he fully discovers his ‘sonorist’ style. Scelsi himself felt it was one of his most important compositions. From here, he developed an approach to music that, as Reisch continues when writing of Quattro pezzi, applies “techniques for animating a focused sound in a timbrally diverse context.” This seems to me to eloquently capture what makes Scelsi’s music so compelling and so unique, particularly in that its approach, while perhaps intellectually reading as though it would have analogies with the minimalism of the likes of La Monte Young, sounds nothing like it, and sits in many ways at cross purposes to such schools of music.
Much of Scelsi’s composition from here onwards would develop out of his improvisations on the Ondiola, a monophonic keyboard that allowed for timbral shifts, vibrato, quarter-tones, and glissandi. (Note that this is a different instrument to the better-known Ondioline.) He recorded his improvisations to a Revox tape recorder and subsequently had them transcribed to musical notation, often by composer Vieri Tosatti, who would write an article after Scelsi’s death claiming that Tosatti was key to much of his work, entitled “Giacinto Scelsi, Ç’est Moi!” It doesn’t hold up to evidence, particularly given observations from the musician-improvisors who Scelsi would work alongside to realise the specificities of his work, incredible artists like singer Michiko Hirayama, cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, and double bassist Joëlle Léandre.
Scelsi’s work was rarely performed until his rediscovery in the 1980s. While it’s heartening to realise that Scelsi at least began to experience some recognition of his unique approach to music shortly before his death in 1988, one wonders at what effect he might have had on twentieth-century composition if his work had achieved greater recognition earlier. A divisive figure in his time – Pierre Boulez once called his music “transcribed atmosphere” – he seems to have found his place somewhere in the musical firmament, though Scelsi’s music still feels elusive, oneiric, confusing; utterly sui generis, really.