“Future development of music will move towards spiritualization and implies recognizing the special character of individual sound. If we immerse ourselves in sound, it reveals three, five sounds or more; a single sound unfurls into melody and harmony leading directly to the spiritual world. One aspires to the understanding of sound in its spiritual depth and one wishes to go from the natural to the spiritual element.”
– Rudolph Steiner
The second half of the 20th Century is unthinkable without Giacinto Scelsi. A composer who was many years ahead of his time, Scelsi did not receive widespread recognition until the late 1980’s when the ISCM Festival in Cologne presented his works to endless acclaim, though he had been composing prolifically since the 1930s. Scelsi’s contribution to music of the 20th Century is comparable to that of Cage, Xenakis and Rudhyar, but his importance as a mystical visionary, or “messenger between two worlds” can only be compared to the likes of fellow modern Pythagoreans R. Buckminster Fuller, G. I. Gurdjieff, Timothy Leary, Nikola Tesla, William Burroughs, Wilhelm Reich, William Butler Yeats, and Arthur Machen.
Scelsi was an intensely private person whose life was shrouded in mystery. Although he apparently dictated an autobiography on tape, it is as of now unavailable. The few facts known about him are primarily from interviews with people that he worked with, and the threads of this scant data reveal a fascinating person of immense spiritual power and charm, a modern-day shaman who achieved illumination after years of yogic meditation and a consciousness altering near-death illness. Scelsi applied his “supramental” talents towards the task of transmediating a vast body of etheric knowledge from a higher plane into a “growling, sliding, writhing, meditative, formless, melodyless, harmonyless music”1 and was able to create something “unlike anything else in European history.”2
ACCIDENTAL SHAMAN
Giacinto Scelsi was born January 8th, 1905 to an Aristocratic family living on a large estate in La Spezia, near Naples in southern Italy. Not much is known of his formative years except that he had a classical education, and little formal music training. In his 20’s, he studied composition with Walter Klein, a student of Berg’s and with Egon Koehler in Geneva. During World War II, Scelsi moved to Switzerland, and published several articles on music aesthetics. The works now classified as his First Period (1929-1948) were influenced by Scriabin and Berg and are defined by a marked use of counterpoint and dodecaphony. The majority of the music in this period is for piano, on which Scelsi was a self-taught virtuoso.
Beginning in the early 1940’s, Scelsi became involved with Eastern religions, and took up yoga and meditation. It is also rumored that Scelsi traveled widely in the Middle East, and throughout Tibet.
“Since the 1940’s G.S. had been deeply involved with Eastern religions. He practiced yoga as well as other religious disciplines and studied the works of Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, but he was particularly influenced by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and La Mere. He believed that various meditation techniques, such as intoning the OM, enabled him to enter a different vibratory realm. For him, sound in its purest vibration was a potent force that has an extremely powerful influence on people. He was convinced that through meditation and improvisation, he could become a channel for higher forces which would enable the creation of works that were otherwise impossible through ordinary composition.”3
Scelsi abruptly ceased composing in 1948 due to the onset of a mysterious illness, and from1948 to 1952 withdrew into a chrysalis state, during which he experienced a profound psychological metamorphosis. No one currently knows what Scelsi suffered from, but he spent several years in a hospital only to recover through his own therapy of meditating on a repeated piano note. One composer who knew Scelsi, Dary John Mizelle, has opined that Scelsi’s illness was brought on by the composing of too much serial music, and although this could be the case it should be noted that Scelsi’s wife had left him around this time. I would conjecture that Scelsi’s mysterious illness was in fact not specifically caused by his wife leaving him or by his serial compositions, but as the result of a mutational process that occurred during a shamanic illness-rebirth transition. This shamanic process, according to Robert Anton Wilson, occurs in three stages and can be either accidental (in the case of Scelsi) or part of a ritual.
1. In every tribe there are occasional shamans who are prone to visions and illuminations.
2. These shamans usually begin having their visions during or right after a prolonged illness.
3. After recovery, the shaman has odd psychic abilities––“wild talents” as Charles Fort said.
The whole process can be condensed to the formula, near-death plus rebirth on a higher level.4 (emphasis added)
Scelsi’s shamanic transition was eerily similar to that of Nikola Tesla's, who was described by Robert Anton Wilson as a “secular shaman.” Tesla was described as having visions in which he went into a trance and talked to entities that no one else could see. Like Tesla, Scelsi experienced “sound visions” during which he could channel unheard higher forces. Like Tesla, Scelsi suffered a mysterious illness. After the shamanic transition, Tesla “saw” that everything in the universe obeys the law of Octaves first suggested by Pythagoras, and could literally “see” in perfect detail any machine he thought about, right down to microscopic measurements and dimensions. Scelsi’s enlightenment led him to the conclusion that all music since Pythagoras had been in error, and that music should consist of the analysis of a single note and its fundamental overtones. Like Tesla, Scelsi exhibited an amazing talent for being literally able to conceive and improvise entire works in a fully developed and completed form:
“He would sit down, turn on the tape recorder and start, and it would build to an incredible proportion, and just stop, and be a complete form. You would never have the feeling, as you do with nearly all improvisers, that the musician is looking for material, searching.”5
It was at this point that Scelsi stopped referring to himself as a composer, and began describing himself as a “messenger between two worlds.” The quantum jump in neurological awareness that followed Scelsi’s shamanic transition led to his neo-Pythagorean epiphany, to his one-note therapy, and finally inside the vibratory universe from where he drew his inspiration. Scelsi made real Steiner’s prediction that sound could be a gateway to higher planes and went even further, transmediating energies from higher planes into sound.
SONIC TRANSMEDIATION
“He who does not penetrate to the interior, to the heart of sound, even though a perfect craftsman, a great technician, will never be a true artist, a true musician” -Giacinto Scelsi
Scelsi’s method of “sonic-transmediation” or translating messages from a higher plane into music involved meditating in such a way as to allow the Kundalini chakra, “what he considered to be the primal vibration that was the original impulse for music”6 to become a receptor for higher forces and making that energy move and manifest through an instrument. The instrument that Scelsi ultimately chose for this purpose, and used to create most of his chamber music and orchestral pieces, was the Jenny Ondioline, a vacuum tube based instrument consisting of an oscillator and a small touch sensitive keyboard. The Ondioline could produce complex waveforms via a series of filters as well as a “touch wire” which enabled the player to alter the attack with a vertical finger movement or add glissando or modulation by horizontal movement. Volume was controlled by a knee lever. (Georges Jenny invented the instrument in 1938 during a treatment for tuberculosis. Later he started the company “Les Ondes Georges Jenny”, and continued to redesign and sell the instrument until his death in 1976. See picture.)
According to Frances-Marie Uitti, Scelsi
“could make a glissando or a vibrato...and could play quarter-tones so he could have total mastery over a line in a string quartet, for example. That way he didn't labor over the page. It was a tool for radical musical thought.”7 (Emphasis added)
Scelsi had found the perfect tool for translating his vibratory universe into sound, and through the years became a master of this instrument, exploiting every nuance it was capable of through its array of dials, keys, pedals, buttons, and touch-wire.
“[He] explored the limits of extreme velocity, dynamics, range and duration. Many improvisations were centered on sudden variations in the dynamic texture, giving a sense of great power and vitality. There were also a number of monodic works, some highly ornamented around a basic melodic line. Others used extreme speeds of oscillating repeated figures, and still others incorporated dramatically pulsating dynamics in the low register. He used glissandi of various speeds as well as quartertones. Two and three equally important voices were simultaneously explored, at times using microtones and at other times glissandi in slow durations.”8
Sclesi was known to have combined two or more prerecorded Ondioline tapes, played back at various speeds or backwards, yielding works with complex overtones and highly sophisticated rhythmic accent patterns. Transcriptions of the Ondioline improvisations made in collaboration with Vieru Tostati, Frances Marie Uitti, Alvin Curran, and Sergio Caffaro would form the basis of Sclesi’s entire chamber and orchestral output.
Scelsi’s process of transmediation didn’t end at transcription. To insure the integrity of the final stage of the compositional circuit, he worked closely with the performers who were to play his music. Suzanne Fournier and Frances Marie-Uitti have described the almost religious dedication that Scelsi insisted on from his performers. Scelsi did not want his music published for this reason, instead preferring to initiate any potential interpreters of his works in the concepts of Kundalini yoga, so that his music could correctly “act on the soul”9 and “vibrate the beings that receive it.”10 It is also for this reason that it is important to choose recordings and performances of Scelsi’s work carefully. Those who worked closely with Scelsi are the most reliable interpreters, including the conductor Jürg Wyttenbach, (whose recordings of the orchestral works on Accord are sadly now out of print) cellist Frances Marie-Uitti, pianists Suzanne Fournier and Marianne Schroeder, and violinist Carmen Fournier. Werner Bärtchi’s interpretations of the solo piano works are highly acclaimed, and recommended. Hearing his music is the most profound and informative Scelsi experience one can have, and always leaves one––in the words of Frances Marie-Uitti––“wondering about the mysterious source of this overpowering music.”11
Internet Resources:
Fondazione Isabella Scelsi: http://www.scelsi.it/
Discography through 1988: http://www.medieval.org/music/modern/scelsi/discs.html
Bibliography:
Wilson, Robert Anton: Cosmic Trigger; Final Secret of the Illuminati; Falcon Press, Las Vegas 1977
Uitti, Frances-Marie: Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations; Tempo, No. 194/ October 1995 (Italian Issue)
Uitti, Frances-Marie: Giacinto Scelsi; from the liner notes to Trilogia/Ko Tha; Etcetera KTC1136
McComb, Todd: Various posts to the Internet, available at http://www.medieval.org/music/modern/scelsi.html
Gann, Kyle One Note Wonder Village Voice, February 25, 1997
Image of Jenny Ondioline from http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-13360.html
Notes:
1 Gann
2 ibid
3 Uitti/Tempo
4 Wilson, p138
5 Uitti/Tempo
6 Dary John Mizelle (interview)
7 Uitti/Tempo
8.ibid
9. Uitti/Giacinto Scelsi p.1
10. ibid
11. ibid
----------Dary John Mizelle on Scelsi
-How did you meet Scelsi?
I was in Italy in ‘74, and I had heard about S– back in the 60’s...S– had already begun using the one note concept, and to hear it described, I had really no idea what it would be like; I had heard a woodwind quartet by Elliot Carter in which one movement was all one note, and I thought maybe it would be like that; then I went there in ‘74 and I had a friend in Rome who was acquainted with S–, and we had a multiphonic vocal group called Prima Materia. We played some gigs around Italy and I went to Rome for a while and G.S. was like the godfather of this group. Michiko Hirayama, who was his close associate for many years, was in the group and when I got there, Michiko and I became really good friends, and then S– and I became good friends too. He took an interest in me and my work, he liked what I was doing in the group and we would rehearse in his apartment once in a while. His apartment was in a really interesting place because it was right in the middle of the divide between the ancient roman forum and the modern city. He would take us up on his penthouse...he was a wealthy man, I guess, evidently he was related to a Sicilian count, though it never came up in conversation. I know he had friends that were famous artists, and he had an original Salvador Dali hanging on his wall and I think he was friends with Marcel Duchamp. At one point we traded tapes and one of the things he sent me was Duchamp speaking.
-Were you familiar with Scelsi’s improvisatory method of composing at that time?
The story was that he would go up on the penthouse and sit and meditate and that he was trying to reinvent music and reinvent himself, because he had been quite ill. He told me that he had some kind of a nervous disorder, which in his opinion was caused by writing too much serial music. He was a very high-strung sort of guy. In order to cure himself–he said that he had visited 160 doctors and nobody could help him–so in order to cure himself he decided he had to reinvent himself and reinvent music so that he could compose in such a way that would not cause him such nervous harm. And he came up with this method where he would meditate up on his penthouse and then after he was through meditating, he would improvise on a small electronic keyboard instrument. He would tape these improvisations and then would transcribe those into his compositions. He had a lot of help from Michiko Hirayama and other people with the notation, especially Michiko who would interpret changes of timbre to mean changes of vowel. He offered me a job doing transcribing in ‘74 but I wasn’t able to do it. He was such a strong personality, he reminded me a bit of Stockhausen in the strength of his personality. I knew that if I got involved as an assistant I would probably lose something of my own personality towards working on my own work, at least temporarily and it wasn’t really a practical concern anyway. There was a whole circle of people around him many of who were quite creative including Michiko, Alvin Curran who was living in Rome at the time and the performers Giancarlo Scaffini, the trombonist, and Frances Marie-Uitti, the cellist.
-Scelsi’s improvisation method seemed to involve putting himself in an altered state; especially one arrived at by Yogic meditation. Did he ever talk to you about that?
S-– had a way of getting back to what he considered to be the primal vibration that was the original impulse for music. He practiced yogic meditation and he had ideas about the Kundalini chakra, which starts at the base of the spine and then unfolds through the body via the sushumna nadi, or central nervous system. His ideas about performance involved making that energy move and manifesting through an instrument. I remember him saying one day in passing that a new way to learn how to play the piano would be to concentrate on the base of the spine and then think of a note on the keyboard, with your eyes blindfolded, and then just go from that impulse to that note, then do that for all 88 keys so you would have a way of playing not in melodic contexts where one note is connected to another by a phrase, but they would all be connected by through this movement of energy from the base of his spine. That was actually the impulse for performing the vocal music in Prima Materia. It was originally begun as an experimental approach to finding vocal multiphonics but because of the interest in our group in yoga and meditation, it became something different in that it involved multiphonic production but it also became a sense that the music was flowing from a common primal source rather than improvised music, which is action and reaction. One of the things we would always do is after having performed we would invite an audience to sing with us and it usually went quite well because of the aura that was created by the first performances. There was quite a following for that group in Europe.
-So Scelsi’s music was alive and flourishing, even popular in Europe during the 70’s.
Absolutely.
-There are some people who think that Scelsi was a loner, and stayed aloof from the musical scene of his day, but we now know that to be a rumor. He was in fact intensely involved with the performers who played his work, and that can be attested to by his idiomatic writing style.
I remember one time speaking to Luciano Berio about Scelsi and he said something to the effect that “oh, he’s just and old man...there’s not much music happening...” I don’t think Berio was too interested in experiencing S–’s world, being a more cosmopolitan international composer.
-Scelsi can be considered an extreme non-rational composer. How would you compare his work to a rationalist such as Xenakis?
I like the hardheaded rationality of Xenakis’ music but I could also recognize that there was something going on outside of that. Xenakis’ original impulse came from ancient Greek philosophies. He talked about people like Xeno and Parmenides, and the Pre-Socratics. I think Scelsi’s original impulse for his work at least the post-serial work was from India. They say in the ancient world, 5000 years or so ago, there were three main seats of civilization, Egypt & Mesopotamia from which Greek culture evolved from, and India and China.
-Xenakis manifests the Egyptian/Mesopotamian seat, Scelsi the Indian, and perhaps John Cage the Chinese?
Yes- Cage was certainly steeped in Chinese philosophy, and applied the I Ching to his compositions.
-Composers who deny rationality always face great resistance, but Scelsi seemed to wholeheartedly adopt the non-rationalist view, referring to himself not as a composer but a messenger.
For Scelsi, I know that it took a huge act of courage on his part to abandon rationality. European culture has such a tight control of the feelings through rationality, you look at the tradition of Beckett, Kafka, Sartre, and Kierkegaard for example, there’s like almost a glory in pain and anxiety because its so full of thought power, So for Scelsi to give all that up, all that rationality, well it was a very practical solution for him because his health had failed him. He had to find something to be able to keep alive and working. I think his solution was quite an original one at least in the context of contemporary Europe, and he lived for a long time after that.
-After you returned to the states, did you know of or hear of performances of Scelsi’s work here?
I think he was getting performed in San Diego and San Francisco, though I don’t remember who was doing it.
-Any final thoughts?
Scelsi’s biggest influence on me was how he got away from polyphony and gone back to a certain monophonic voice, even when it was full of different instruments and voices, they were all speaking with the same voice rather than contrapuntally. Harmony wouldn’t exist; instead there would be a unified expansion of sound into complex timbre and sound masses.
-Like going into the “interior of the sound”?
Exactly.