Scelsi: Konx-Om-Pax

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Scelsi: Konx-Om-Pax
GIACINTO SCELSI was born into an old family of Italian aristocracy on 8 January 1905 in La
Spezia and died in Rome on 9 August 1988. Konx-Om-Pax, perhaps the most straight-forward of his
six mature orchestral works, was set to full score in 1968 & 1969. Scelsi's ascendance from
obscurity occurred in the mid-1980s, and was consummated in October 1987 at the SIMC
International Festival in Cologne where his symphonic music was featured to great acclaim. Like
many of his works, Konx-Om-Pax was premiered in the months leading up to the Festival, on 6
February 1986 in Frankfurt by the Hessian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jrg
Wyttenbach. [Note: It appears that this information is incorrect, and that Konx-Om-Pax was
premiered in Venice on 10 September 1970.] This is the North American premiere, and a followup to
the San Francisco Symphony's successful performance of Aion on 12 June 1997, also under Michael
Tilson Thomas. That concert was the North American debut for Scelsi's orchestral music as a whole.
Konx-Om-Pax is scored for chorus and large orchestra, including full strings, but without flutes and
including an organ part.
His personal eccentricity and the unusual route of his rise to prominence have combined to produce
wildly differing impressions of Scelsi the man and the composer. His aristocratic position and
resulting means lent a dilettantish quality to his early background, in spite of a conspicuous study of
the major musical trends of the time. In 1935-36, after he had already written several large-scale
works, Scelsi studied the Viennese style with Walter Klein, a student of Schoenberg, and went on to
declare an allegiance to Berg's version of tonal dodecaphony. He next studied Scriabin's harmonic
vocabulary with Egon Koehler in Geneva, and the resulting combination of mystical & chordal
thinking clearly marks the remainder of his career. He continued to compose, in a mostly
conventional style which attained something of a personal character apart from these influences. For
instance, although it was written prior to the "break" in his career, Scelsi's String Quartet No. 1 is a
work of considerable quality, and one of the few from this period which he continued to embrace. To
escape World War II, Scelsi abandoned his family's Neapolitan estate for the safety of Switzerland,
and wrote two articles there on music aesthetics. These are his last public remarks on the subject.
The dense French prose is sometimes insightful and sometimes contradictory, a combination which
Scelsi's later poetic aphorisms take to extremes of concision.
Scelsi's life story becomes more mysterious after this period, a situation he maintained intentionally.
He resisted any attempt to analyze his music, refused to be photographed, and generally removed
himself from public view. All of these decisions followed quickly in the wake of his mental
breakdown in the late 1940s, a crisis from which he apparently recovered only very slowly.
According to later reports, the only therapy which helped him was sitting and striking a single piano
key again & again, listening for the slight differences in each individual sound. This is also how he
reinvented himself as a composer, finally reappearing in an old house overlooking the Roman Forum
in 1951, ready to compose in a completely new idiom. Scelsi's gentility did not suffer as a result of
his ordeal, or along with his retreat from public view. He entertained regular visitors, principally
musicians, and was described uniformly as impeccably polite, yet with probing bright blue eyes.
Scelsi's working arrangements during the period of his artistic maturity were also unusual, although
not unprecedented. His music was scored in several steps, beginning with frequently improvised
performances by himself onto audio tape which were transcribed by paid assistants, and then scored
according to his instructions. His partially cataloged musical output consists of more than one
hundred items, including the six mature orchestral works, five string quartets, several works for
larger chamber ensembles, and a substantial body of solo & duo pieces. Scelsi frequently made use
of the human voice, often treated instrumentally, and published four volumes of French poetry.
Although many of his works are for solo instruments, and his chamber music is often detailed
enough in its demands that it places unusually high emphasis on individual musicianship, Konx-OmPax is perhaps Scelsi's prototypical large-scale expression and an ideal introduction to his oeuvre. It
also includes one of his most discursive subtitles: "Three aspects of Sound: as the first motion of the
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immutable; as creative force; as the syllable Om (the Buddhists' sacred syllable)." Taken together,
the title & subtitle serve to indicate most of Scelsi's principal influences, as well as the frequently
muddled way he referred to them. Fascination with ancient mythology and other cultures around the
world is often expressed in Scelsi's titles. In this case, the title is straight-forward: It consists of three
words arguably translating to "peace" in Assyrian, Sanskrit, and Latin, respectively. It also shows a
dilettantish approach to scholarship, despite what is an evident erudition, in e.g. the attribution of the
Hindu syllable "Om" to the Buddhists. Perhaps even more illustratively, Konx-Om-Pax is the title of
a 1907 neo-hermetic text by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), in this case subtitled "Essays in light."
Crowley is best known for the commandment "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and
in fact the alternative religion he founded, Thelema, continues to have a loyal following. Like
Crowley's, one can view Scelsi's use of muddled & tangled references to various & sundry historical
ideas and cultures as allusions designed to merely indicate what are more unified underlying truths.
Like Crowley, Scelsi rarely "argues" as such -- he indicates.
Scelsi adopted the non-rationalist position enthusiastically, describing himself not as a composer, but
as a messenger. The conspicuous examples of correlative & lateral thinking which abound in Scelsi's
allusions are characteristic of creativity at many levels, and consequently no indication that his actual
artistic production suffers from a similar pastiche. Indeed, Scelsi's mature music is highly unified in
gesture, direct & coherent in approach, making for perhaps its greatest contradiction. While
reasonably straight-forward on its own terms, it does demand from listeners the suspension of many
pre-conceived ideas on music, constructed as it is in a radically different manner. Although long
considered baffling & unprecedented, in retrospect, Scelsi's fundamental concerns were actually
fairly typical of the 1960s. His interest in world music, and especially Eastern mysticism, was very
much in the air and was reflected in both the classical & popular spheres. More technically, his
approach to sound and timbre are realistic answers to the questions posed by the avant-garde of that
era, specifically in such poles as Stockhausen's "timbre-music" and Cage's abdication of
compositional control. In Scelsi's case, the former is especially prominent, as timbre shifts frequently
serve as the primary dynamic around which individual movements are constructed. Inspired by the
repeated striking of the piano from his clinical recovery, Scelsi erected entire forms around single
notes, articulated in various octaves by various instruments. The timbre of the note-complex is varied
by shifts in orchestration, as well as by microtonal slurs which serve to inject a dynamism into what
might otherwise be a static sound. Scelsi's human concerns are also evident, as he rarely used any
electronic devices to break down timbre in this way, instead giving it a formal role through a kind of
organic motion which Stockhausen's superformul never seem to fully realize. Likewise, although
Scelsi's work leaves little to chance and contains little silence, his concerns regarding our connection
to a universal consciousness expressed through the always-changing sound of a single note mirror
Cage's in some ways. Scelsi's resolution of these issues appeared on the public scene only in the
1980s, lending his musical ideas an exoticism they may not have had otherwise.
A discussion of Scelsi's artistic concerns and the demands he makes on listeners overstates the actual
difficulty of his music. Although there is frequently a mental "leap" required, advanced musical
training or erudition are not prerequisites. Indeed, experience suggests that Scelsi's music may be
easier to grasp initially for someone with only modest experience in contemporary music and few
pre-conceived notions. It is not elitist music at all. Scelsi is sometimes described as a minimalist, and
in that he could be seen as a forefather of the minimalist movement, yet his music is packed with
activity. Although it may involve only one note for extended periods, that note will be restated in
parallel intervals, slurred, or varied in orchestration in a continuous way throughout the piece.
Indeed, there is a classical balance of activity in Scelsi's music which serves to give it a density of
ideas very comparable to Mozart's. What Scelsi does, however, is place that activity into directions
orthogonal to the usual course of musical argument. The fundamental motion in Scelsi's music is
interior, as one note mutates into another note through a process beginning with shifts in timbre.
Within that idiom, once grasped, the ideas are expressed succinctly and cogently.
In the case of Konx-Om-Pax, the subtitle provides a clear orientation for the music. In the first

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movement, an opening C becomes larger & larger, until it is slowly destabilized by what begin as
timbral and then quarter-tone variations, only to reassert itself. Although unified in gesture, the
movement has an unsettling quality arising from the motion driven by microtones. It is a fine
example of Scelsi's ability to let a small inflection drive a larger form. The overall sonority and
articulation style, reminiscent of a bell, are also vintage Scelsi. The brief second movement starts
slowly on a main pitch of F, only to become increasingly animated and even violent. It is a sudden
explosion of dissonance which ends just as one grasps what has happened. As in Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, the chorus enters only in the last movement. In Scelsi's case, it brings a quintessential
evocation of peace by repeatedly chanting the syllable "Om" on a main pitch of A. The chorus is
surrounded by various destabilizing musical gestures which it nonetheless succeeds in unifying. Both
of the larger outer movements have a relatively simple bipartite form, building to an initial climax
which is followed by a central calm and then a reassertion of the original musical dynamic. Despite a
relatively simple general description, the range of harmonic material swirling around the central
"Om" of the last movement resists a nave interpretation, as does the overarching tonal sequence (CF-A) of the symphony as a whole. Whereas Crowley used light as the central metaphor of his text,
Scelsi's cosmology-in-sound yields a very real, haunting sound. When it ends, the return to silence is
palpable.

To discussion of Konx-Om-Pax, part 2.

Back to Giacinto Scelsi page.
Todd M. McComb
21 January 2000

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