Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's music

Abstract

In his later music Giacinto Scelsi rejected the mediation of notation, improvising his works and viewing the scores, produced mostly by assistants, as a mere record. But to what extent did he really transcend the 'tyranny of writing' and how might one demonstrate this? Critics have tended to echo the composer in reducing the problem to an opposition between writing and sound per se. In this article I discuss the limitations of this view and propose a more structural approach, using in particular the analysis of Walter Ong. I argue that Scelsi's idiom, while novel in its extreme economy of means, uses these means in such a way as to restore a traditional sense of musical 'grammar'. I illustrate the rhetorical versatility of this grammar by contrasting the two apparently similar movements of the Duo of 1965. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.