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Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music

Dickson, Ian

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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

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Copyright Statement
This article has been published in a revised form in Twentieth-century music at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572210000046. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © copyright holder.




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