Giacinto Scelsi was born 100 years ago
(La Spezia, 1905 – Rome, 1988)

A haughty yet warm aristocrat, a writer and a poet, Giacinto Scelsi remains an enigma for many people. His music is certainly some of the most spellbinding there is.

The Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie has recorded Scelsi’s complete works of chamber music for string orchestra, receiving great acclaim by “Choc” from “Le Monde de la Musique”. It invites you to celebrate the centenary of Scelsi’s birth under the aegis of his “cosmic force”.

Born of noble descent in La Spezia, Giacinto Scelsi’s extraordinary musical gifts were already apparent in his free improvisations on the piano as a child.

He then went on to study composition in Rome with Giacinto Sallustio.

In the period between the World Wars and until the early 1950s, he frequently travelled to Africa and the Far East.
Giacinto Scelsi spent many years abroad, mainly in France and Switzerland. He worked in Geneva with Egon Koehler who introduced him to Scriabine’s compositional system and studied dodecaphonism in Vienna in 1935-36 with Walter Klein, a pupil of Schoenberg.

Scelsi went through a serious and lengthy personal and spiritual crisis during the 1940s, emerging in the early 1950s excited by a renewed idea of life and music and from then on “sound” was to occupy his thoughts. Back in Rome in 1951-52, he led a solitary life dedicated to this ascetic research. At the same time he became involved in the Roman group Nuova Consonanza which brought together avant-garde composers like Franco Evangelisti. Quattro Pezzi su una nota Ga (1959, for chamber orchestra) was the conclusion of ten years of intense experimentation; from then on his works of maturity achieved a kind of internal withdrawal.

More than twenty-five years of creative activity followed in a period when Scelsi’s music was only rarely played. It was only owing to the curiosity (and admiration) of young French composers (Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey and Michaël Lévinas) in the 1970s and Darmstadt’s Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1982 that his work received true recognition.

A writer of aesthetic essays and poems, Giacinto Scelsi died on 9 August 1988.