Towards a Grammatical Analysis of Scelsi's Late Music

AbstractGiacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is a problematic figure for musical analysis on account of his extreme anti‐rationalism and devaluing of the score. By the 1950s he was creating music through improvisation and delegating to assistants the task of transcribing the results. The idiom he evolved was novel not only in its extreme economy of means, usually consisting of subtle inflections of continuous sounds, but also in its apparent rejection of any rational organisation.Analysts of Scelsi's work have tended to concentrate on large‐scale musical architecture, neglecting the apparently redundant, non‐developmental gestures from which, nonetheless, this architecture must be built up. Many of Scelsi's advocates have encouraged this by insisting on the music's irreducibility and exceptional rapport with sound. Such an argument stems from the composer's own mysticism: he attributed the automaticity of his improvisations to the cosmic power of sound, rather than to the long hours that he spent creating them.This article explores the idea that Scelsi's music is conditioned, if not by an explicit grammar (traditional or avant‐garde), then by the ‘model’ of the original improvisations, and that his manipulation of nuance can be considered as a kind of syntax. It argues that a grammatical analysis accounts for the persuasiveness and variety of the improvisations more plausibly than statistical analysis or metaphysical formulations involving sound ‘itself’.