Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music

Dickson, Ian

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.

Citation

Dickson, I. (2009). Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music. Twentieth-Century Music, 6(01), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572210000046

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jan 19, 2011
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2009
• Deposit Date: Oct 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 18, 2021
• Journal: Twentieth-Century Music
• Print ISSN: 1478-5722
• Electronic ISSN: 1478-5730
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 01
• Pages: 23-41
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572210000046
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1345911