Born in La Spezia of noble descent, Giacinto Scelsi showed extraordinary talent for improvising at the piano as a child. He studied composition in Rome with Giacinto Sallustio, but nonetheless remained detached from the musical atmosphere of his time. In the inter-war period and until the 1950s, he travelled extensively in Africa and the East. He also spent extended periods abroad, notably in France and Switzerland. While in Geneva, he worked with Egon Koehler, who introduced him to Scriabin’s compositional techniques. In 1935-36, he studied twelve-tone music with Walter Klein, a student of Schoenberg, in Vienna.

The 1940s were marked by a long and debilitating personal and spiritual crisis from which he would emerge, in the early 1950s, with a renewed outlook on life and music. From this moment on, “sound” was to be at the heart of his musical thought. The composer (a title which Scelsi rejected) believed that he had become a sort of medium through which messages from a transcendental realm could flow. Once again living in Rome in 1951-52, he led a solitary life, occupying himself with ascetic research on sound. He nonetheless became a member of Nuova Consonanza, a collective of avant-garde composers of which Franco Evangelisti was a member. Scelsi’s Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola (1959) for chamber orchestra marked the end of ten years of intense experimentation with sound. Subsequent works achieve a sort of interiorisation of non-complex sounds, which are deconstructed into their constituent parts.

Over the following 25 years, Scelsi composed numerous works but enjoyed few performances. It was not until young French composers Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, and Michaël Lévinas showed interest (and admiration) for Scelsi’s music in the 1970s, and the Darmstadt Summer Courses programmed a number of his pieces in 1982, that his work became known to a wider audience.

Also an author of essays on aesthetics and poetry (including four volumes in French), Giacinto Scelsi died on 9 August 1988. A lively polemic arose in Italy shortly after his death regarding the authenticity of his compositions. Most of his works are published by Salabert.