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Gigantic liquid monuments
by Jean-Noël von der Weid
Giacinto Scelsi is known to have some untiring propagandists: he dissipates our angst, plunges us into an exquisite life, leads us into God’s arms. He is also known to have some violent disparagers: he is less a “messenger” than a joker behind apocryphal scores. But since his death in 1988, and the discovery of some new scores (some 120 works are published today, leaving around 30 yet to be fully explored), plus musicological and historical developments, the mystical spasms, the foolish garbled syncretism and the contemptuous treatment of a shrewdly revivified past have all been muffled. Now remains only Scelsi’s music, which nearly everyone has avoided even mentioning. As his friend Henri
Michaux wrote : “Against noise, my noise. This noise then wards off all others — present, from
before, from all day long — assembling them through a prodigious unheardofness into a perfect nothingness, a full relief.”
Scelsi’s music appears quite remarkable, although retrospection is still not distancing us enough to know just how much it has transformed new music. We know of his analogies with Varèse’s premonitions, with Frederich Cerha’s or Per Nørgard’s intuitions, and the minimalists’ rudimentary developments. We know of the influence he had on Ligeti— who acknowledged this —or on Horatiu Radulescu, on the composers from the ineptly named “spectral” school (Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, Michaël Levinas…), then on the architects of musical informatics, or even on his innumerable sextons, who, in their pursuit of examining the inner workings of sound —“ the first movement of the immobile” (Scelsi) — attempt to perceive its “depth”, to analyze its transitions, its variations. Henceforth, according to Murail, “we shall no longer compose (juxtapose, superpose), but de-compose, or at least, quite simply, position sound.” This corresponds to a radical change of perspective in
our musical tradition.
All of Scelsi’s works, gigantic liquid monuments, are “absolute” in the sense that they are totally refractory to the outside world (and thus answer the question of what is music for me); sometimes they even oppose it. Immersing ourselves in the sound, his sound, we perceive not only pitch or timbre, for example — according to Scelsi, we hear the beating of its pulse. He envelopes this tremulous fleshy being known as sound, inhabits us with little mind to our thoughts, observations, or our “sauve - quipeut (la-vie) “— every-one-for-himself — attitudes, to the point that his resounding obviousness overpowers us. We are contained in the energy he incites within ourselves. One of Scelsi’s premier
performers and personal friend, the double bassist Joëlle Léandre, has declared that when one plays his music, perception becomes so intense that one actually becomes sound itself. This rendering the world to nothingness, this flagrant bursting of the self into sound itself (not only does one feel different from others, but different from oneself), and, the strangulation of time; this liquefying of phenomena, all
these paradoxically constitute the universality of Scelsi’s music. Again, Léandre: “You can play his music in Tibet, in Africa, in front of a jazz or rock audience, or before ordinary folks who don’t have any real relation to art — all of them will be profoundly roused.”
Lanascita del Verbo (“The birth of the Word”), a grand “cantata” in four parts for chorus and large orchestra, was written in Rome between 1946 and 1948 — therefore heralding his spiritual, mystic (influenced by the Orient), and musical (sound dissection, timbral quest) transformation. The work was premiered on November 28, 1949 in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, by the French National Orchestra, conducted by Roger Desormière and the French Radio Chorus, conducted by Yvonne Gouverné. (Scelsi: “Désormière was the ideal conductor for any contemporary composer. He was implacably lucid and had an exceptional musical acuity.” ) This majestic cantata’s style contains hints and traces of chromatic languages, like in Scriabin; some neoclassic tendencies, like Malipiero; and a dodecaphonic impression, although there is never a trace of actual serialism in Scelsi. Certainly, serialism was the most intransigent phase of western music — its force indispensable, but one that would incite a new poetics plus a new, active way of listening and hearing. It left behind a long-standing aesthetic wound that many judged not easily tamed.
The first section of La nascita del Verbo begins with an orchestral prelude leading up to the Word. In an “atmosphere of chords”, says the composer — indeed the chorus sings only syllables— we are witnessing the “formation of sonorities polarized on all the vowels spoken by the chorus, which is divided into up to eight parts. A sea of percussion supports this peroration and precedes a vibraphone pedal, held in the higher registers, and which acts like a bridge between the opening and second sections .” There, the Word is “born” and is manifest in the “sonorous explosions on the syllables of the words Deus, Amor, Lux.” The third section, Scelsi specifies, is a “vast double fugue [one of the most imposing in the history of music], exposed and frequently re-exposed by the brass whose motifs are the same as the words Deus, Amor, Lux of the second section.” In the fourth and final section (also the
longest), “the choir, in a meditative atmosphere murmurs parlando a Latin invocation to fraternity. Several voices distinguish themselves one by one and sing a very simple three-note melody that gradually builds into a vast tutti. A dodecaphonic series in the strings announces the return to complexity. The three-note melody reappears and gives way to a lofty polyphony which culminates in a forty-seven voice canon in twelve keys. Finally, a second invocation — Domine in te speravi — reintroduces a new formation of chords of vowels and syllables, in the same spirit as in the first section, but this time in relation to the three notes on which the work concludes: Amor-Lux-Domine.”
This work, “truly written in blood,” left Scelsi “in a deplorable state”. Afterwards, he stopped composing for several years. Meanwhile, in phantasmagorical public houses whose doors slam with the same resonance as a Viennese snuffbox, he gets involved with Heraldic science and Ninevehian art. Several moorings dock his ship, but enable him to become aware of — ah, prodigious unheardofness— materiality, of the depth of sounds’ shadows, of what is incalculable in sound. He first explores this at the piano, only to desert the instrument — all while constituting an essential share of his oeuvre — since micro-intervals are not possible with the piano, by definition and in all practicality. Hence, whether through provocation or necessity — it really doesn’t matter — because in any case, a radical product of his evolution and of his pioneering labors emerges with his famous Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola) (1959) (Four pieces on only one note) for chamber orchestra of 25 musicians. Each piece is limited to one pitch (f, b, a flat and a), but with micro-fluctuations of sound (vibratos, slurs, spectral changes, tremolos…), sometimes with octave transpositions. Because of the nearly total abandonment
of the harmonic dimension, the listener may concentrate on new sonorous subtleties, on the orchestra’s timbre as a whole. Timbre, formerly considered a negligible aspect of writing in relation to the notes themselves, is actually one of the main characteristics of musical perception—of aural perception. Thanks to these excavations, the music seems to crackle, to fissure, to be but scattered illuminations
springing from its own depths. In 1966 came the ferocious, tormented, complex and variegated five - movement work for ondes Martenot, seven percussionists, timpanist, chorus and twenty-three musicians — Uaxuctum, The Legend of the Mayan City which they themselves destroyed for religious
reasons. Uaxuctum indeed once existed (the exact spelling of this famous “city” in the Petén province of Guatemala is Uaxactún, meaning “Eight stones”). Among its rich and numerous vestiges is the oldest stone monument, a low pyramid covered with stucco. The Golden Age of this city began in the VIIth century, and came to an abrupt end (climatic changes, wars, epidemics?) in the middle of the IXth century. Then it was said: “The solitude and silence was heard in the Mayan cities”. And it’s is better
like that: no real Orient, no sitar accompanying a violin, no crossbreeding of shoddy goods.
More than that, this “elsewhere” is the same as Michaux’s “distant interior,” his “Voyage to Great Garabagne”.
Numerous “interior elsewheres” are studded in this Scelsi work. But after the Far East, pre-Columbian civilizations of Central America, the richness of the Mayan pantheon, his supposed myths and mysteries are but reflected in Scelsi’s compositional process: new instrumental and vocal techniques (breathing noises, nasal sounds, muted or inhaled gutturals … ) , rhythmic incantations, rhythms “rising from vital dynamism” (Scelsi), a petrified flow of time. Few woodwinds, a string section consisting of six double basses, lots of brass, as is often the case with this composer, and, in addition to a timpanist, no less than seven percussionists: in part with quite unique “tools” such as the “grande fusto da 200 litri per olio lubrificante, senza saldature (sic)” whose ribbed sides are to be stroked and rubbed, or
a large aluminum dome, vertically suspended, whose diameter must be no less than 1.50 meters.
Uaxuctum, a work of a rare difficulty, only received its premiere on October 23, 1987 in Cologne by the Cologne Symphony Orchestra and Radio Choir conducted respectively by Hans Zender and Herbert Schernus. Scelsi was able to attend the performance, and died less than a year later.
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