Giacinto Scelsi – homo viator and his musical itinerary
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Date
2012
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Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM
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Abstract
Giacinto Scelsi was a “traveller to the East”, who tied his life inextricably to creative work.
As a composer, he sought a path for the renewal of his own musical language, shaped during his youth
under the powerful infl uence of other composers’ styles. On becoming a homo religiosus, in the Eliadean
sense, he found his own path to transcendence through art (creation), deeply inspired by those great
traditions of the Orient in which art was a refl ection of the artist’s spirituality.
The topos of the path is one of the main keys to interpreting Scelsi’s work. His works for large orchestra
and choir contain distinct traces of a Scelsian “voyage to the East”. They form one great cycle,
integrated by the motif of the path, expressed through meanings added in the content of the individual
programme-titles. The cycle’s fi nale, the eschatological Pfhat (1974), is the musical depiction of a journey
that ends with “a clear, primordial light,” symbolising man’s encounter with a higher reality and
“great liberation” as the goal of his spiritual path.
The chronotope of the path is revealed in the very musical material of his orchestral works: in their
quasi-visual soundspace. It is manifest, among other things, in the processual form – one might even
say the storyline – and the consistently applied procedure of transforming sonorities, texture and
rhythmic structures. A fundamental symbolic function is discharged by various forms of “upwards
path”, linked to the dramaturgical role of an upwards motion pattern in the melody and an upwards
movement in the tonal-harmonic plan of the orchestral works. The most crucial of all the variants of
the motif of the path is the direction “into the core”, that is, towards the “inner space” of the sound. This
carries signifi cance both in the dimension of the harmonic spectrum of a sound and also its spiritual
depth – the mystical dimension. The journey to the centre acquires the status of an emblematic topos
of the Scelsian poetic of the viaggio al centro del suono [journey to the centre of the sound].
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Keywords
Scelsi Giacinto, twentieth-century music, Italian music, homo viator, Orient, orientalism
Citation
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 12, 2012, pp. 127-147.
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ISBN
ISSN
1734-2406