GIACINTO SCELSI

GIACINTO SCELSI

Giacinto Scelsi, Count of Ayala Valva (La Spezia, January 8, 1905 – Rome, August 9, 1988) was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French.
He is best known for writing music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his revolutionary Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola ["Four Pieces on a single note"] (1959). His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life, until a series of concerts in the mid to late 1980s finally premièred many of his pieces to great acclaim, notably his orchestral masterpieces in October 1987 in Cologne, about a quarter of a century after those works had been composed and less than a year before the composer's death (he was able to attend the premières and personally supervised the rehearsals). The impact caused by the late discovery of his works was described by Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich saying:
“ A whole chapter of recent musical history must be rewritten: the second half of this century is now unthinkable without Scelsi ... He has inaugurated a completely new way of making music, hitherto unknown in the West. In the early fifties, there were few alternatives to serialism's strait jacket that did not lead back to the past. Then, toward 1960–61, came the shock of the discovery of Ligeti's Apparitions and Atmosphères. There were few people at the time who knew that Friedrich Cerha, in his orchestral cycle Spiegel, had already reached rather similar results, and nobody knew that there was a composer who had followed the same path even years before, and in a far more radical way: Giacinto Scelsi himself.”
Dutch musicologist Henk de Velde, alluding to Adorno speaking of Alban Berg, called Scelsi “the Master of the yet smaller transition,” to which Harry Halbreich added that “in fact, his music is only transition.”
Here are the works for Choir and Orchestra as performed by Jürg Wyttenbach, the Radio/Television Polish Orchestra and the Choix of Krakow's Philarmonic Orchestra, ENJOY!

WORKS FOR CHOIR AND ORCHESTRA
DIRECTION JÜRG WYTTENBACH (2003)
320 KBPS
Disc One
Aion (1961)
1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IV
Pfhat (1974)
5. I
6. II
7. III
8. IV
Konx-Om-Pax (1969)
9. I
10. II
11. III

Disc Two
Quattro Pezzi Per Orchestra
(Ciascuno su una sola)
1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IV
5. Anahit (Lyrical poem dedicated to Venus)
Uaxuctum
6. I
7. II
8. III
9. IV
10. V

Disc Three
Hurqualia (1960)
1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IV
5. Hymnos (1963)
Chukrum (1963)
6. I
7. II
8. III
9. IV