Description

Hymnos

Even today, almost twenty years after his death, the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi [1905 bis 1988] is still one of the most enigmatic figures in the musical life of the 20th century. When, at the end of the 1950s, after crisis-ridden breakdowns, after turning to East Asian philosophy and musical retreats, during which he spent hours playing just one note on the piano in order to familiarize himself with its overtone world, he began to write pieces of music that concentrated solely on a single note, this was tantamount to a revolution.Of course, it was a revolution in silence, because hardly anyone noticed the extraordinary nature of this act [Scelsi’s music was hardly played, the composer remained in the background anyway, shyly shutting himself off from the world].
In a conversation with Jean-Noël von der Weidt about the concept of art, Scelsi once remarked in a sentence with a strange inner tension: “Art is very simple or it is not.” And indeed, Scelsi’s music is so addicted to simplicity that the desire to satisfy this addiction must reach for the highest level of complexity: The simple and the complex, the small and the large, concentration and fanning out, ultimately the one and the whole. Scelsi once spoke about his experience of concentrating exclusively on one note: “If you play a note for a very long time, it becomes big; it becomes so big that you hear many more harmonies and it becomes bigger inside. The sound envelops you. You discover a whole universe in the sound, with overtones that you never hear otherwise.The sound fills the space you are in, it surrounds you, you swim in it.” And at another point he says: “Only those who penetrate to the core of the sound are musicians. Anyone who fails to do so is a craftsman. A musical craftsman deserves respect, but he is neither a true musician nor a true artist.”
Anyone who understands artistic activity in such an emphatic sense, who strives to go so far beyond the spheres of mere craftsmanship, must subordinate all his creative forms to this idea. Scelsi understood the task of penetrating into sound and thus into his entire universe as an absolute one. All interest belongs to it, which is thus transformed into an interest in the whole. Silence, at best, would be qualitatively equivalent to sound viewed in this way. Tone is both the inner cell of all musical events and – and Scelsi heard this more than almost any other composer – the universality of music par excellence.
A series of creative questions arise at this point – and Scelsi’s music confronts them.Again and again, he directs our attention to the contradictory unity of the individual event and the experience of the whole: since Scelsi understands the tone in its natural state, i.e. spectrally as the sum of overtones, the tone or sound turns outwards as a play of dynamics, rhythm and, in particular, of overtone relationships, i.e. of timbres. The one thus begins to shimmer as a multiplicity in contact with the outside.
The second concerns the course of time, for what unfolds spectrally in time in a piece by Scelsi does not obey a natural temporal sequence. It is more like examining an object under a microscope or illuminating a dark cellar room with a flashlight. Time has lost its power of order in before and after, the process of searching, and this is what Scelsi’s music does, is forced into the course of time by the performance, but the examiner knows that his subjectively chosen sequence is nowhere adequate to the object, which in itself appears untimely. Just as the niche in the wall illuminated by the flashlight is not there any later than the projection discovered in front of it. Scelsi’s music thus bends the temporal progression into a point, but at the same time it also views the progression as a section of an infinite process.In the point is infinity and again we encounter duality between the one and the whole.
A third duality appears: that of identity and non-identity.When we hear Scelsi’s orchestral pieces over just one tone, we by no means hear just one tone, i.e. just one frequency.The pitch fluctuates – and it can even do so very extremely. So the tone changes its frequency without giving up its identity. It’s like pushing a square through a force field that bends it into a circle: Scelsi’s sounds are like this: he succeeds in adding the parallelogram of forces, as it were, even in tones that deviate further, i.e. not only microtonally, and making them tangible, whereby the tones e flat, e or f [ja sogar die Quint a], for example, are still identified as a deformed tone d, distorted by deformation forces.This is an unthinkable, even monstrous phenomenon for the Western understanding of music up to its rationalist incarnation, serialism. Scelsi’s music thus introduces a new paradox: precisely the identity of the non-identical: the entire sound space – and Scelsi emphasizes it several times over both overtones and the aforementioned distortions – is identical with the individual tone: the one is the whole and the whole falls back on the one.
A fourth aspect should also be mentioned; it concerns the role of the composer: in the final creative consequence, Scelsi also shies away from this concept: not only because Scelsi does not see himself as a creative subject, but as a transmitting medium, but far more decisively because composing itself, i.e. composing in the sense of the word, must recoil from the truth of his intention. For Scelsi, the whole cannot be put together; composing as an act would emerge from the idea of the identity of the one with the whole. So he received sound, transmitted it – and then left it to another composer employed by him to write it down, which of course raises a final question: that of the identity of the work itself, which, like everything else in Scelsi’s work, remains open. The mediation is necessarily fractured.
The cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, who was commissioned by the executors of Scelsi’s estate to digitize the improvised tapes after his death in order to better preserve them, remarked demystifyingly: “When Scelsi had others transcribe what he played, he basically did nothing other than what any better music notation program does today. There, too, you can play a phrase, the computer puts it into writing, then you correct or refine it.” And just as a computer cannot continue to compose in his spirit after the death of the person giving the orders, neither could the musicians who translated his visions into scores. The composition Hymnos was written in 1963, just at the height of the very productive creative phase in which pieces about one tone were tested. Hymnos means song of praise or hymn of praise and this composition is also understood in this sense; although it is only perhaps twelve minutes long, it is unique in this respect, also with regard to the instrumentation. [Orgel und zwei etwa gleich besetzte Orchester] is one of the most grandiose single movements from Scelsi’s pen. The calm, compelling force of the sound developed here alone gives the listener an idea of the work’s far greater dimensions. The subjective perception of the work goes far beyond its relatively modest temporal extension, although there is also the impression that the piece is only one segment of a perpetual [unhörbaren] drone, that it fades into it and disappears behind it again.
For this is what is meant, what is sung in hymns. It is the omnipresence of sound, indeed the sounding universe itself. In this piece, we are immediately gripped by the force of the universe. Scelsi begins with the note d, which in Bruckner’s Ninth already incomparably signifies the calm of a world-embracing center of power [and Scelsi certainly gained impulses for his entire musical thinking from there, also from the subsequent Brucknerian nuclear division of d into d flat and e flat]. Then, however, the sound experiences of modernism come into play. Arnold Schönberg’s utopian assumption, expressed in his Harmonielehre of 1911, that one day a change of timbre on a note could be perceived in a similar way to a change of pitch, appears here [obwohl die Forderung wegen der verschiedenen sinnlichen Qualitäten von Farbe und Tonhöhe letztlich nicht einlösbar ist] as in no other compositional approach. what richness is possible here! The tone takes on extreme states of being, moves like a line through time, quivers, stretches and swells, shakes its frequency constriction and bursts it open microtonally, here it is pale, there it becomes glowing. Thus it becomes a primal natural event, like the appearance of a meteor, like lightning and thunder, like the prominences of the sun. In Hymnos, the sound swells in waves, as it were, it changes its harmonic direction, moving from d to e and finally to f at the end [auch hier Nähe zum Beginn von Bruckners Neunter!], yet the impression of the continuous tension of the initial state remains. The One becomes the All, an event of elementary sensual force, with philosophical or epistemological experiences behind it.

On Giacinto Scelsi’s ‘Hymnos’ [1963]
[Reinhard Schulz]

Program musica viva (03 March 2006)