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Features Disc of the day
Giacinto Scelsi
Natura Renovatur
(ECM, 2006)
The eerie, andante sound of a giant meteor approaching the earth, in slow motion.
I'm currently reading The Rest Is Noise, the multi award-winning history of twentieth century classical music from always-interesting New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross; and I'm already a teensy bit disappointed. Ross is a great writer and his ability to convey the beauty and strangeness of such modern 'difficult' works as John Adams' Death Of Klinghoffer or Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel has resulted in rather more money being spent on CDs every week than should really be decent for someone who, you know, gets everything for free anyway. So maybe I was expecting something more than a whistle-stop tour of the 20th Century's big names (Sibelius, Britten, Messiaen etc) in The Rest Is Noise. When I opened the book I looked for lesser, weirder composer guys like Toru Takemitsu, Salvatore Sciarrino and this fellow, Giacinto Scelsi. Sciarrino isn't in it and Takemitsu and Scelsi get a paragraph a piece, both of which are wiki-lite in detail. Fine if there's really nothing to say, but Ross has written at length about Scelsi in the past and why wouldn't newcomers to this troublesome classical world want to know about a castle-dwelling playboy Italian count who was friends with Schoenberg, Cocteau and Virginia Woolf, and, following a post-war crack-up, became a committed Buddhist, refusing to be interviewed or photographed, choosing instead to identify himself by a line under a circle, a symbol of eternal bliss.
The works on Natura Renovatur were assembled between 1956 and 1970, after Scelsi had rejected received notions of composition in favour of taped sessions of automatic writing and trance states, subjecting his collaborator and cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, to extended ondiola improvisations and elaborate tales of an Asian tribe who could "hunt birds by launching sound". The end result is a series of beautifully sinister one-note variations on a theme of near-stillness, the sound of something immeasurable moving towards you, very slowly, through the air, like a vast, inevitable, yet blissful catastrophe. Maybe Scelsi will make it into the book of Ross's collected New Yorker articles, a work that will doubtlessly be more idiosyncratic, personal and passionate than The Rest Is Noise, and closer in spirit to the music Ross is writing about, after all.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 09/03/2009
Further Listening
Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel (New Albion, 1992)
György Ligeti – Atmospheres (Teldec, 2002)
Toru Takemitsu – Chamber Music (Naxos, 2003)
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