RECOVERING GIACINTO SCELSI'S TAPES
Nicola Bernardini
Fondazione Isabella Scelsi
Rome, Italy
nicb @ sme-ccppd.org
ABSTRACT
This paper documents and summarizes the (still ongoing)
work concerning the digital recovery of the collection of
composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). This recovery has
a number of peculiarities which are mostly related to conditions in which the tapes were recorded originally and
to the functions these recordings covered in Scelsi's compositional work. The specific archival process and model
used are then described and future work is outlined at the
end.
1. INTRODUCTION
Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) lived a very
peculiar and interesting life and - as it is often the case -
these characteristics are indeed fully reflected in his music
[1]. He grew up during the dodecaphonic turmoil while
entertaining very close acquaintances with the buzzing intellectual world in Paris in the thirties. He was attracted
by the United States as well as the exotic Egyptian and
Japanese worlds while being strongly rooted in Rome, the
city that he elected as his permanent residence. At the beginning of the fifties, Scelsi experienced a long and deep
creative crisis which reduced him to silence for a few years.
He came out of that crisis with a renovated composing
spirit - and with the strong resolution to resolve the gap
between the "zen spontaneity" of improvisation and the
long and detailed tablework of occidental composition.
He developed a technique which consisted in recording
long piano improvisations engraving them on wax discs
first, then on magnetic tape as soon as it became widely
available. Remaining coherent with the idea of being just
a mediator (and being quite wealthy) he decided to delegate to others - usually young composers in need of a job
- the chore of transcribing these improvisation to (fairly)
standard notation, collaborating with them only in indicating the instrumental combination he had in mind at the
beginning and in the finishing touches at the end. As the
time went by, he added to its instrumental palette a couple of Ondiolines [2], one of the first electronic synthesizers, because he was interested in its microtonal capabilities (cf.Fig.1).
Of course, this compositional methodology caused huge
scandals in the academic entourages, where on the contrary the focus was entirely devoted to the abilities of composers to control their activities down to the most minute
Figure 1. One of the two Ondiolas belonging to Scelsi
detail. Particularly in Italy where he lived, Scelsi was considered a fake composer and was isolated for some thirty
years [3]. At the end of the seventies, German and french
musicologists and music critics re-discovered the modernity of his compositions - which may be placed half way
between Varese and Xenakis, so to speak - and Scelsi was
finally recognized and hailed, albeit outside of his country,
as one of the most prominent figures of the second half of
the twentieth century (cf. for ex. [4]).
Today, the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, created by Scelsi's
himself some time before his death, is actively promoting
the composer's work and recognition in Italy, organizing
and coordinating research and performance activities.
2. THE TAPE COLLECTION
Scelsi's tape collection is part of a larger corpus of items
which include also a considerable amount of paper documents, such as correspondence and administration but
also scores, parts, articles, etc. All these documents are
currently being recovered, transferred into digital format
and archived with modern archival techniques by the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in a medium-term process aimed
at making them available to scholar investigation by the
twentieth anniversary of Scelsi's death in 2008.
However, while paper documents lend themselves naturally to standard archival techniques, the archiving of
Scelsi's tape collection presents a number of difficulties
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