The only proper word for the music of the self-taught Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi is “sublime.” Not in the common sense of the word, which comes to something like “very good”—but in the sense that Moses Mendelssohn understood it, that is, something that is frightening and overwhelming and pleasing and painful and immense and transcendent all at once. Scelsi considered himself to be nothing more than a messenger, a conduit for sounds from another plane, and his music can sound otherworldly, like a kind of an ancient awakening; it derives its sublimity from the primordial. The primordiality of Scelsi’s music makes it other, terrifyingly other. (It’s no accident that one of the most common horror film tropes is the return of the ancient as a harbinger of the apocalypse). Yet it is also undeniably modern both chronologically and in method. Scelsi employed extended techniques for strings, microtonal harmonies, electronics, prepared pianos, all in service of sound. For him, the single tone was infinite—not a prison, but a universe in and of itself.
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