ON THE NEW MUSIC

Part Five

Introduction

To begin this fifth article on the New Music I look back on the Om Choirs of the past four months, in Auroville, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in New Delhi. During January and February the New Music began to descend in waves of extraordinary power and sweetness. The first vast opening came in Auroville with the collective body receiving one sound with infinite reverberations as we chanted OM. Melodies within melodies, harmonies built upon harmonies, all spontaneous, unrehearsed, sung in the sacred ambience of Savitri Bhavan.

The Om Choirs in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, New Delhi, were very special experiences. We gathered at 6:00 a.m. each morning and 6:30 p.m. each evening, practiced warming exercises for the voice and then, in the Meditation Hall where we met, a sound, one can only call it heavenly, seemed to well up from the soul in answer to the force that was descending. There were overtones on overtones, produced naturally as a result of the perfect blending of voices. The sense of the small "I" thinned and one no longer felt that he or she was singing individually but understood without the intervention of the mind, the dawning realization of a great choir, a group soul of aspiration calling down the music from its heavenly abode and receiving it in its splendour and beauty into the very cells of the body.

In a recent letter after my return to Pondicherry, Tara Jauhar wrote: Every Saturday I have a meeting with the teacher trainees who are about 40 in number. Yesterday I had a meeting with them and I was five minutes late. By the time I reached, they were deep into the AUM Choir and it made me very happy. So the seed has been sowed and I hope it will flower."

The first sentence of Sri Aurobindo's book, "The Mother" has come to me often before and after the chants of the OM Choir "There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers."

In my last evening with the OM Choir in the Ashram we were given a demonstration of the Russian Flat Bells designed by Alexander Zhikarev who worked for 15 years to perfect their sound. The "Flat Bells" are a collective instrument and the more people who play them together the greater the vibration of an incredible harmony that resounds throughout a given space and within the body.

Although the voice is the purest of all receptacles as Mother has written, we can understand that the new music is descending through all channels and instruments open to its beauty and plenitude. When Alexander played the bells on a boat in the middle of a river masses of people lined the banks on both side. When he played the bells on the top of a hill he noticed that people gathered in concentric circles all the way down the hill.

Here is another article shared with me by Rich Heffern, his interview with Einojuhani Rautavaara.

Conveying the inexpressible

Rich Heffern interviewed composer Einojuhani Rautavaara by phone in his home in Helsinki, Finland.

NCR: Music reviewers talk of the sense of religious awe, wonder and enchantment in your music, which is very popular in this country because of its "spiritual" nature. Where does this spiritual influence come from?

Rautavaara: I've always been fascinated with the metaphysical and with religious texts. "Vigilia," a large choral work I wrote recently, uses texts from the Russian Orthodox church. I have used many Roman Catholic texts also, as well as shamanistic tales from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

Composers, of course, have always been interested in these kinds of subjects and religious texts, but I don't use, like my good friend Arvo PŠrt does, many Eastern meditative texts. My influences are more Western European.

Your admirers say that your music is about the heart and spirit, and that by contrast contemporary music has become so discordant and intellectual that it is hard to listen to.

Music is always in crisis. There was a crisis in the 1950s when I started to compose. The new methods of modernism -- 12-tone technique and serialism -- were advancing. I was interested in those, of course. My early symphonies used serialist techniques, but in the end this way of composing was not my way; it wasn't the road for me to follow. Though the 12 tempered tones of serialism are the vocabulary of the century just past, my solution was to seek for a synthesis of modernism and tonal harmony.

I still use the 12-tone technique. My seventh symphony, "Angel of Light," opens with a series of mostly minor chords with always a new harmony in each bar, but the root notes of those chords follow a 12-tone pattern. This kind of synthesis of two different techniques is very typical of my creation. I often read critics who say Rautavaara has been using so many different styles in his output. I have certainly used many compositional techniques, but always inside one personal style. Style and technique are different things.

You have said that music is composed organically, that it grows by its own laws and genetics. How does that work? You start with a phrase or melody and the whole work is there like a tree is there in the acorn?

It happens in three steps. First, almost always there is some kind of atmosphere or mood, which is for me the original idea or impetus behind a work. I can find it in a poem, a text or a memory. Quite often in improvising at the piano an idea comes to mind and it starts to grow. That idea dictates to me the choice of certain musical material, which corresponds to the original idea, some harmonic symmetry or certain motifs and themes. The genetic code of the piece is there from the beginning. The chosen material seems to have its own will, which I, the composer, must respect and follow.

I used to say to my composition students: "Don't ever force your music! Listen to your music, to your first ideas. Music is full of wisdom."

The second step involves environmental factors, the cultural climate of the time, the zeitgeist. For example, being Finnish influences my work, as do the things that are going on in the world. Then, third, the ability of the composer and that composer's experience in music come into play.

In the end, though, the work of art is unpredictable and creates its own laws. When it's complete, then there is nothing to add, nothing to take away. When the work is performed, I'm always full of admiration for it. I ask: How is it possible for this to be born? I am not able to make anything like that. It must have been somewhere, somehow in existence even before I found it. I'm not really mother or father but the midwife. I am just a nourishing medium for it.

Your music reminds me of the natural world, a representation in music of the way nature is -- the way a landscape or seascape or a cloudy autumn sky appears. One of my favorite works is "Autumn Gardens." It's music that is full of peace, acceptance and reconciliation, just like an autumn garden.

I am glad to hear that. For every Finn, nature is very close and there is so much of it here. Nature, of course, is an organic thing. The genesis of music reminds me of how nature works. I see in my own garden how the trees and flowers grow; my compositions grow and build in the same way. A composer is not so much an architect as a gardener.

Much of the new "spiritual" music is coming from the Baltic countries like Finland, Estonia or Latvia. Why?

This part of the world is a crossroads of religious and cultural traditions. I belong to the Lutheran church, but one of my key formative experiences as an artist happened when my parents took me to Karelia, which then still belonged to Finland. After the "Winter War" of 1939, it became part of Russia. In the middle of Lake Ladoga is an island called Valaam with an Orthodox monastery on it. We went to the island and stayed overnight in the monastery. I had never seen Orthodox churches and services before; it was strange to me. When we came to the island, I saw the onion domes and towers on the chapels, painted with bright colors. The bells started to ring for the morning matins. The universe seemed to be full of bright sounds and colors. There were monks with dark beards and dour countenances, icons with saints' faces and candles burning everywhere. The sensuous mystery of the place made a profound impression on me.

Fifteen years later in New York I was studying at Juilliard and I found a book full of Byzantine icons. I composed a suite for pianos called "Ikon." Forty years later the Orthodox church in Finland commissioned a large-scale choral work from me. I was happy to have that task, because those bells and colorful towers were with me.

Many of your popular works refer to angels. What do angels mean to you?

I have set several of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems to music. He speaks of angels as terrifying archetypes common to all civilizations. My conviction is that there are other kinds of realities, other kinds of consciousness. They are real but beyond rational approach. If you want to use words you can say "angel," for lack of a better word.

Music is a language where we can probe those other realities, without words. Besides immense pleasure, music gives to the listener information. The information is not anything you can transcribe in words.

As a young man I went with a friend to a piano concert. The pianist played very well. When we left the hall, my friend, who was a pianist also, said: "Did you notice he did everything right, with very good command of technique and style, but he didn't really understand what he was playing? He just played without understanding anything." My friend said he couldn't put it in words but he could readily sit at the piano and play what he meant. "It's this," he said É and he played it, this specific information that could not be expressed in words. That was the first time I came to this idea that there is another reality expressed in music.

A scientist once wrote, "The existence of music is a continuous intellectual scandal." He understood there is a message in music, and there are no words for that message. It's from another world.

In the newspapers recently there was a story about archeologists finding a primitive flute -- a section of bear thigh-bone pierced with holes -- in a hunter-gatherer site that was dated as 43,000 years old. Music has been with us a long time.

Yes, and why did they play that flute? Because it conveyed to them something that is inexpressible in words.

National Catholic Reporter, December 13, 2002

Searching for the Golden Sound

- From an interview by Alan

Following two highly-appreciated concerts in Auroville, renowned cellist, Michael Fitzpatrick, spoke to Auroville Today about the deeper purpose behind his music-making, and his involvement in The Compassion Project, a musical expression of inter-faith unity.

Auroville Today: You call yourself a 'musical diplomat'.
What does that mean?

Michael: The cello, I've discovered, is an extremely useful diplomatic tool. It's allowed me to go into settings like the United Nations, where the predominant activity is words, and to use the instrument to 'tune' the audience and the space. Actually, even before I play the first note, I still my mind and go into silence, and to 'presence' the space with silence is already an extraordinary transformation of energy. And then to play the music into that space, to reach the cellular level – what I call 'searching for the golden sound' – has been my quest for the past twenty years. I would have these mystical experiences on stage when it would feel like golden light coming in, I would hear it change the sound of the instrument, I could feel it fold over the audience, and then this union experience would occur: something in the room would crystallize. Another way to put it is that the diplomat's responsibility is to communicate in such a way that everybody understands. And music is the universal language of the cells; it is sound carrying the light.

How universal is music? Can Bach be understood by all cultures?

Yes, once you're in the domain of it. If you're not in that consciousness space, there is no shared field. Pablo Casals once remarked that generations of musicians have approached Bach as 'The Professor' and that, until the mind can break out of this concept, nothing is happening because the music isn't alive. That's why I think it's important to change people's perceptions of things, people get stuck in the labelling...

Is The Compassion Project which you've been so involved with intended to change perceptions?

Absolutely. The genesis of it goes back to 1968 and the historic meetings between the Dalai Lama and the Roman Catholic monk, the late Thomas Merton, in Dharamsala. Apparently when they met they had this profound sense of recognition. The Dalai Lama said, "I feel he is my spiritual brother"; Merton wrote, "There is a deep bond between us." During those meetings they made plans to extend the dialogue and work together for world peace. However, very soon after Merton died in a tragic accident in Bangkok .

When His Holiness heard he was devastated and, I believe, he dedicated himself to fulfilling Merton's wish to bring East and West together in a project for peace and compassion. In 1993, at the Parliament of World Religions conference in Chicago , there was a meeting between the Dalai Lama and the Vatican 's North American monastic Interfaith Council at which His Holiness said he felt the time was now right to have a convergence summit. It was decided to hold the summit in 1996 at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky , where Merton had lived for 27 years as a monk.

I was living in Chicago then, and about to make my way to Hollywood with my electric cello. I was putting a rock band together, but then everything went badly wrong. I was at my wit's end when somebody called me up and said the Dalai Lama was coming to spend six days at the Abbey of Gethsemani. At that moment I saw fate lines crossed and, indeed, I received an invitation to provide the sacred music for the six day encounter between 25 Buddhist and 25 Catholic monks and nuns, an encounter which turned out to be a turning point in terms of a fusion of East-West consciousness. The music was intended only to be a minor part of the meeting – I played some Bach and Ravel and also did some improvisations – but the music started binding the consciousnesses, like firing them in a kiln, and it got to a point when, for an instant, it seemed as if all the worlds and all the heavens stopped turning, and then started again in a new direction. When the meeting finished, we all felt we'd been rearranged at a cellular level.

As the participants left, I was sitting with Geshe Lobsang Tenzen and Sister Mary Margaret Funk, Head of Religious and Monastic Dialogue, and somebody came over and said, "Is there going to be a recording of the music?" Both of them thought it was a great idea, but I wasn't so sure. I'd just been offered this fabulous opportunity to be involved in a Broadway musical, and I also knew that taking on this project would be a huge responsibility. I also knew that if I did take it on, it could not be done in a recording studio. At that moment, a vision flashed through my mind of Tibetan and Trappist monks chanting together inside Mammoth Cave , the largest cave in the world, deep beneath Kentucky , with torches lit like a scene from the Bible. So I said 'I'll do it on one condition – you have to let me record it inside Mammoth Cave '. And they both said, 'Let's do it'.

What we got was the musical expression of what had happened at the Summit , and we experienced this musical cellular awakening in the core of the earth during the last summer solstice of the old millennium. We were in some other universal time zone, and the sounds that came through reflected this.

You were seeking a new kind of music?

I didn't go down to the cave with a programme, we were not simply going to recreate what happened in the Abbey. I decided we would start with an improvisation for cello; it would be an invocation for world peace. When I started playing, the music that came through my cello was like when your soul is on the line, I just poured everything in there: as I finished, I plucked one string so hard I ripped it off! Then there was a flute solo, the monks chanted, and Brother Paul delivered this extraordinary invocation: "Can there be any silence as deep as that in the heart of the earth, and out of that depth let there rise up a new hope, a new spirit of greater aspiration for peace, for justice, for compassion over the entire surface of the earth, from East to West."

All the way through we had spontaneous epiphanies like that, up to the moment when my logistics assistant gave the Tibetan monks soap bubbles, and these Buddhas were blowing these beautiful bubbles which looked like the cells, like musical harmonics, in the magical light of the cave. And the epiphanies, the magic, happened only because nothing was pre-planned, there was no safety-net: we had to keep flinging ourselves off a cliff and trust that we had the wings to carry us safely to the other side.

The subsequent studio work was very complex. I wanted the first sound on the CD to be something that nobody could recognize, something very hypnotic, and we finally settled on crystal toning bowls which have a beautiful OM-like sound. Then the Dalai Lama gives a special message, Merton gives his prophetic message at the end, and then the cave music goes through this wild weave of celestial Trappist chant plunging into primordial Tibetan chant, singing cello lines, heavenly flute, and finally ending with this one call that is the 'Golden Sound'. When I listen to it what happens is that it gradually moves through all my chakras and, when it gets to the last note, I feel the energy flow up from my base through the spine to my crown, and I go into a union state.

As soon as the CD was ready, I drove to the Abbey to present it to the Abbot, and then jumped on a plane and flew to San Francisco and presented it to His Holiness on the first anniversary of the cave recording. When he looked at the cover, which had photos of himself and Merton facing each other, I saw him journey back to 1968 and a tear came to his eye. After he'd finished listening he said, "Thank you for doing this. It will bring many people around the world the deep feeling of peace."

In fact, the response of people to the Compassion CD has been extraordinary; it became clear that not only had we had an extraordinary experience in making it but that experience was transferable to others. Now we are working on a film of the cave concert to bring it to an even larger audience. The film will be like a waking dream, beginning with gold-lit images inside the heart of this 350 million year old cave to give people a primal, ancestral memory experience.

The idea of seeking for a new music deep in a cave, in the heart of matter, is a very powerful one...

I wanted to break patterns, to take us out of our surface world. Ultimately, it was about not only going into the heart of the Earth to find the new sound, but to put it back into the Earth and so shift the morphogenetic field of the Earth into a higher vibratory rate, to allow for openings of consciousness and increasing love and compassion. That's really what was driving everything, with the larger plan of using this project as a model so we could then take it, perhaps with Mayan musicians rather than Trappist and Tibetan monks to, say, The King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid. The idea, now that we've crystallized this vibration and we know we can intentionally call it forth, is to go to all the sacred Earth sites and temple structures and send it back into those stones, and see if we can get the planet vibrating a little more harmoniously.

So my fascination with the Matrimandir is in that line. The Matrimandir is radically important because it's a massive, energetic consciousness generator that has a key birthing role in this accelerating cycle that we're in now. So I would encourage everybody who goes there to focus on the pure music in the silence and let it sing.

What is it like to play traditional concert music after your experience in the cave? Are you rediscovering it?

To be able to come back to the music now is the ultimate reward, because I'd imagine what we went through in the cave was like a near-death experience. Once you've travelled to the light and come back, you know what it is, and everything afterwards is completely changed. You realize, for example, that all those guys I played the other night – Schubert, Bach, Saint-Saens – were tapped into the same thing. It's as if you've been listening to a Beethoven Symphony in black and white for your entire life – and it's already incredible – but then suddenly it's in full colour and in 3D or 5D: you start hearing how Beethoven was hearing the totality of creation. So then, as a performer, it's not about playing it 'right' – I wasted twenty years of my cello-playing education trying to do this – but about one's capacity to hold the frequency, to tune to the consciousness and to emanate the consciousness as purely as physically possible.
And then there is a phenomenon of spirit that happens with the instrument itself when it's almost as if an invisible filament or film gets created between the string and the bow. It's like riding on a beam of light, and when that happens, everything melts, goes golden, and you're far out, and far in. Ultimately, that's what it's all for.

Michael Fitzpatrick is a recipient of the Prince Charles award for outstanding musicianship and has performed at the UN and at the opening ceremony of the Parliament of World Religions in Barcelona . More information on The Compassion Project can be found at voicesofcompassion.com

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never

be done.

Siegfried Sassoon

I found the following article on the internet at www.scelsi.it, "Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations by Frances-Marie Uitti, originally published in "Tempo", October 1995, and reprint it here with gratitude to the author.

Scelsi, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, was profoundly influenced by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and caught the significance of OM. Scelsi insisted that he was "not a composer" but "one who receives music" from outside himself.

http://www.uitti.org/scelsi.html

Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations

by Frances-Marie Uitti

"Tempo"

October 1995

Giacinto Scelsi was a master improviser. He created hundreds of hours of

music, which he originally recorded on tape and then had transcribed for

various instruments. These transcriptions were made in collaboration with

various musicians: the majority by Vieri Tosatti, but also Alvin Curran,

Sergio Caffaro and myself.

I met Scelsi in Rome in 1974, at a concert featuring music of the Second

Viennese School in which I played Webern's op.11 Pieces For cello and piano.

During the dress rehearsal I glanced up from my score to find a short,

dignified man of quite some age shuffling towards me under a mountainous fur

coat. An embroidered, mirror-encrusted cap was perched upon a barely visible

head, out of which peered two intensely vibrant eyes. A hallucination? He

stopped several inches from my music stand and queried: "Do you play well?".

Astonished, the only response I could manage was "Maestro, you will have one

minute and 30 seconds to decide for yourself".

Following' the concert he invited me to his house in Via San Teodoro 8: one

of the most beautiful streets in Rome, overlooking the Palatine Hill. He

played for me a recorded performance of his violin concerto Anahit. I was

astounded by the sheer power and radical musical conception -- for here was

a very large work completely revolving around a single pitch! The intensity

and drama were like nothing I had ever experienced before. Scelsi then

showed me the scores of three works for solo cello, of extreme difficulty,

and asked me to premiere them. Thus was initiated a close musical

collaboration and friendship which lasted until his death, 14 years later.

Over the years, rehearsing with him, we edited those scores and made

corrections. Although we discussed performance details, he was much more

concerned with musical gestures and a special sound-world; an extremely

sensitive, vibrant resonance that transcended the usual "material"

sensuality typically associated with the cello. He envisioned sound that

lost its opacity and became transparent, scintillating. It was during these

sessions that he first played one of his taped improvisations made on the

ondiola. This is a small electronic instrument with a three-octave keyboard.

Additional dials and keys were available for producing glissandi,

quarter-tones, vibrato and predetermined timbres. There were pedals to

control additional octave transpositions as well as dynamics. Most of

Scelsi's chamber music and orchestral pieces were created using this

instrument.

Since the 1940s, Giacinto Scelsi had been deeply involved with Eastern

religions. He practised yoga as well as other religious disciplines and

studied the works of, for example, Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, but he was

particularly influenced by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and La Mere. He

believed that various meditation techniques, such as intoning the "OM",

enabled him to enter into a different vibratory realm. For him, sound in its

purest vibration was a potent force that has an extremely powerful influence

on people. He was convinced that, through meditation and improvisation, he

could become a channel for higher forces which would enable the creation of

works that were otherwise impossible through ordinary composition.

Over the years I spent countless afternoons and evenings in his house,

listening to tapes of improvisations and performances of his works. Scelsi

loved to discuss art, music and religion and could tirelessly expound on

those subjects. He often claimed that he wasn't a composer ("one who puts

things together") but rather one who received music. And in order to

preserve that music, he recorded everything he played. He considered the

subsequent task of transcribing these tapes to be for the artisan, and not

for the artist, in much the same way that an architect will enlist the

services of draughtsmen to draw up his designs. Even so, Scelsi worked

closely with the musicians who transcribed and orchestrated his scores. Thus

he saved his creative energy for those spiritual Devas whom he believed

assisted his musical output.

Late in life Giacinto Scelsi had a premonition that "when the eights lined

up" he would leave this earth, and in fact on 8 August 1988 he drifted into

a coma. On the ninth of August he died. In place of his physical presence,

he left a treasuretrove of musical materials, artworks, writings, and an

enormous closet stuffed full with tapes dating all the way back to the early

1950s.

The Isabella Scelsi Foundation, named after his sister, was founded to

oversee the preservation of his work. Scelsi's entire musical oeuvre was

published by Salabert and the writings by Parole Gelati. There was a growing

concern for the conservation of the more than seven hundred tapes that had

been stored in that notoriously overheated apartment for many decades.

No-one could guess in what condition they would be found. It was decided

that, if possible, the original improvisations should be copied onto digital

format for preservation. But where should that take place?. If they were

removed from the premises, one risked loss or inadvertent damage during

transport. Yet to permit this long work to be done in the Foundation at via

San Teodoro 8 meant that one of the members would have to be ever present.

There was also the fear that a technician unfamiliar with Scelsi's work

would not be able to distinguish his original works from other recorded

pieces that Scelsi had collected. Because of my extensive knowledge of

Scelsi's music the Foundation contacted me to oversee the conservation of

these tapes. This was enormous responsibility and would demand a great deal

of time. Because of my heavy concert schedule, the Foundation agreed that

the work could be done intermittently between tours. Indeed, it cost 18

months to complete the project. Along with a highly respected restorer of

old tapes, Barry van der Sluis, I flew to Rome. We carefully examined

hundreds of tapes that had been pre-catalogued by the foundation. To our

mutual amazement, the majority of tapes were found to be in excellent

condition. I discovered over three hundred tapes containing original

material.

We rented a Studer recorder which had a delicate start-stop mechanism that

minimizes possible damage to the tapes. We decided to make two DAT copies

for each original tape, keeping one in the bank and one in the Foundation.

Next, we devised a cataloguing system to identify each tape and give

pertinent information about each work. Listed were the conditions of the

tapes, the quality of the original recording, speed and track indications,

beginnings and endings of each work, the instrument played, suitability for

future CDs, and a commentary that described the musical grammar of the

works.

The great majority of the works averaged between three to five minutes in

length and were played on the piano, ondiola, guitar, and various percussion

instruments. These short pieces were often grouped into suites or movements

of larger forms.

The piano pieces were often highly virtuosic, incorporating trills,

arpeggiated figures, clusters, and scalar fragments -- all at high speed --

often with extreme dynamics as principal material. Frequently Scelsi would

begin with short figures that would develop into majestic structures. The

early piano works used a free chromatic palette, and what he described as a

"romantic" expressivity which was underlined through the warmth of the

middle register in slow movements. He experimented with serialistic ideas in

a few of the studies and used clusters as the basis for others. The

intensely dramatic nature of much of the piano music is contrasted by a more

me'ditative simplicity found in some of the later works. Chiming chords in

the upper register reveal a stark beauty that replace the lush tones of

earlier works. In one of the last piano pieces he experimented further,

using a microphone to distort and prolong the tones of the instrument.

The ondiola, however, was a tool for far more radical musical thought. One

finds a remarkable variety of techniques. Here Scelsi explored the limits of

extreme velocity, dynamics, range, and duration. Many improvisations were

centred on sudden variations in the dynamic texture, giving a sense of great

power and vitality. There were also a number of monodic works, some highly

ornamented around a basic melodic line. Others used extreme speeds of

oscillating repeated figures, and still others incorporated dramatically

pulsating dynamics in the low register. He used glissandi of various speeds

as well as quartertones. Two and three equally important voices were

simultaneously explored, at times using microtones and at other times

glissandi in slow durations.

The ondiola works generally exhibit a unique sense of assymetry. Melodies

that seem destined to create a tone centre suddenly break free to move into

foreign registers with new harmonic implications, at times in wildly spaced

intervals and at extreme speeds. The later works were often centred around

an extended single tone with multiple voicings, in octaves. This single tone

was compositionally developed by vibrati of various speeds, pulsations,

glissandi and microtones. Comparatively speaking the later works have a

longer duration, and often explore a richer timbre. Several of these last

pieces were combined with prerecorded ondiola tapes played back normally or

even backwards, producing a very rough timbral texture filled with overtones

and subtle accents. Only the ondiola improvisations were transcribed for

other instruments. I think it is important to acknowledge Vieri Tosatti's

masterful and remarkably innovative realizations of the large ondiola

scores. The guitar works are particularly impressive. Tapping, stroking, and

strumming into a microphone transformed this too familiar instrument into a

veritable percussion section.

Formal unity marks the accomplishment of Scelsi's improvisations. One never

has the feeling that Scelsi is searching for an idea, or that he hesitates.

All of these works reveal a man who could summon his forces with great

intensity to spontaneously create powerful music in its most coherent and

final form.

Giacinto Scelsi spoke into the microphone with the same ease and clarity of

mind as he did with his music. He left several treatises on harmony and

rhythm as well as occult discourses on the nature of religion, art, and a

fantasy based on the afterlife. In addition, he dictated an autobiography

that is filled with entertaining stories and also about some of the most

interesting personalities of his time.

In these few words, I have attempted to describe the prolific activity of an

important artist whose work spans over 40 years. It is only a glimpse of the

richness found. I was fortunate to be able to immerse myself in the

real-time creations of this most compelling musician and to experience the

total creative output of this unique being.

I conclude this firth essay on the New Music with these words of the Mother:

O Sweet harmony that dwellest in all things, sweet harmony that fillest my

heart, manifest thyself in the most external forms of life, in every feeling,

every thought, every action.

The Mother