An Italian composer born in 1905 in La Spezia (Italy) who died in 1988.
Born into an aristocratic Italian family, Giacinto Scelsi, composer, poet and essayist, was improvising at the piano before studying composition with Giacinto Sallustio (in Rome), Egon Koehler (in Geneva) and Walter Klein (in Vienna). His earliest works were written in 1929 and from 1936 he was composing dodecaphonic pieces. He travelled in the Orient, India and Africa, steeped himself in Buddhist philosophy, and renewed his compositional technique from 1952 onwards. It was then he started to work on the texture of sound, resorting to static harmony with minimal fluctuations of tone-colour and microtonal inflexions (Quattro pezzi su una nota sola, 1959). Giacinto Scelsi composed for all genres except opera and incidental music. His orchestral works, with their abundance of brass and percussion, possess great aural strength, the low registers being especially cultivated. He also used new instruments such as the ondioline, capable of producing quarter- and eighth-tones. Rarely played until then, his output has achieved recognition since the 1970s and the Darmstadt ‘Ferienkurse für neue Musik’ of 1982. His output includes, notably, La nascito del verbo (1948), Wo-Ma (1960), Khoom (1962), Chukrum (1963), Anahit (1965), Konx-Om-Pax (1969), Three latin prayers (1970), Pranam (1972), In nomine lucis (1974), A adieu (1988).