Giacinto Scelsi: Massive Interiors and Microtones

The interiority of sound: with its many rooms, and sea-caves, and dwellings in the dusk — where no light can travel, in the farthest recess of an oceanic body — philosophically the habitation for imageless phenomena, is described by Hegel as such: “the expression of [a] double negation, i.e. sound… an externality which in its coming-to-be is annihilated again by its very existence, and … vanishes of itself.” The first negation is the inherent emptiness of sound: loose, intangible, and fluid, as it passes forth from vacancy to space; the second is the necessary emptiness — or spaciousness — of the organ that receives the sound, through which sound passes forth in vibrations. The reception of music is inward, and the human ear is but another instrument in the production (i.e. intelligibility) of music, of sound-sculpture and acoustic imminence. Il Conte d’Ayala Valva, Giacinto Scelsi, born of noble blood in La Spezia in the year 1905, had intuited the double negative of sound one day while playing a single note on the piano over and over again, shortly after suffering a nervous breakdown likely prompted by the spiritual cancer which the Second World War had left behind, and the decision of Scelsi’s wife to leave him permanently.

This is perhaps the most familiar image of an extraordinary man who categorically refused that any photographs be taken of himself (those that exist are those of his youth), who at one point restricted his speech solely to the composition of french poems, and who preferred the vocational description of “messenger” or “medium” in place of the authorial-sounding “composer”: imagine if you will a middle-aged man, his thin dapper hair slightly askew, his head contemplatively bowed as closely as possible to the humming innards of the piano, his slender fingers playing over and over and over again the same note, rhythmically, tenderly, listening to it as it builds up and oscillates and decays over time. (Yes — he might have thought — the ear was the secondary but necessary supplement to music; the ear, as Charles Olson would have it, is the brain too; the tone curves in relation to our comprehension of its life and death, it migrates, it flutters, it metamorphoses.) The same note, for days and after listening carefully, is never the same note. What had begun as a moment of spontaneous audio-therapy became an obsession, and the obsession transformed into a praxis, a revelation of music’s quintessence. “In my Father’s house are many rooms…” So also in music, within the heart of Hegel’s Geist, are chambers that multiply infinitely.

Giacinto Scelsi is one of the most enigmatic composers of the 20th century (one can argue, the most staggering example of intuitive genius), a prolific composer who had never received a formal education in music beyond rote piano studies with the customary private tutors who waited on the children of nobility. Scelsi mastered the piano in much the same manner of Thelonious Monk: willfully, privately, autodidactically. But his real education occurred during his travels in the Far East, in Egypt, Nepal, and India, where he was exposed to the inherently microtonal structures of ancient musical traditions, such as those found in Indonesian gamelan music or Indian ragas. Scelsi essentially worked to eliminate any formalist divisions between “western” and “eastern” music, hybridizing the two yet ultimately creating a thoroughly original music that helped bridge the advancements western music had made (in the dodecaphony theorums of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School) with those which had already long existed in Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. Within the span of a single note, removed from the coordinates of any specific locality or nationality, Scelsi abolished the facetious and superficial antagonisms of conventional occident/orient or ancient/modern templates: