Giacinto Scelsi - homo viator and his musical itinerary

• Authors: Renata Skupin
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

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 influence 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 reflection 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 finale, 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 significance 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].

Keywords

PL

Scelsi Giacinto; twentieth-century music; Italian music; homo viator; Orient; orientalism

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 12
• Pages: 127-148

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Renata Skupin

• PhD in Art, music theorist, graduated from the Department of Composition and Music Theory at the S. Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdansk. She completed her studies as a grant holder of the French Government at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Faculté de Musique et Musicologie, Groupe de recherche: Poïétique musicale contemporaine, 1998). She gained her PhD at F. Chopin Music Academy in 2003, becoming in 2004 an assistant professor at the Institute of Department of Composition and Music Theory. In 2010-2012 she was Vice Dean and since 2012 she is Dean of the Faculty of Conducting, Composition and Music Theory. Her doctoral dissertation (Poetics ofGiacinto Scelsi’s orchestral works. Composer’s oeuvre and spirituality - between Orient and Occident) was given a honourable mention in the Rev. Prof. Hieronim Feicht’s Awards Competition (2005). She lectures on musical analysis, contemporary methods of music analysis and 20th-century composition techniques. She is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Aspekty Muzyki (Aspects of Music, aspektymuzyki.amuz.gda.pl). Her research interests concentrate on cultural determinants of the 20th century musical output, especially on musical styles and techniques of composition in the context of influence of the oriental music and cultures on Western music. She has participated in several national and international conferences and published over thirty research papers. She is currently working on a monograph on the Orientalism in Polish music of the first half of the 20th century.