Underskog

Lecture by Dr. Alessandra Pellegrini Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88) was a central figure in the Nuova Consonanza movement in Rome together with Franco Evangelisti and Ennio Morricone. The movement was an Italian answer to the dominant German new music scene in the 1960s/70s. Scelsi became obsessed by microtonality during rumoured travels to the Middle East and Tibet, and he adapted electronic instruments and tapes to transcribe his musical ideas. Reclusive and eccentric, his personal life was an enigma, and his posthumous legacy scandalised by the revelation that he employed a ghostwriter to notate his music.

Music historian Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini is scientific director of the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome, where she has worked since 2001. Her research explores Italian composers from the twentieth century, among others Alfredo Casella, Luigi Nono and Giacinto Scelsi and other. She is the editor for both the Italian and French publications of Scelsi’s autobiography “Il sogno 101” (Quodlibet, 2010/ Actes Sud, 2010). Her latest projects include the critical edition of Giuseppe Verdi’s Jérusalem for the University of Chicago Press.

The lecture is an introduction to Klangforum Wien’s Scelsi Revisited concert the same night at Kulturkirken Jakob.

In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Oslo.