Extreme Chamber Music — 'Giacinto Scelsi discovered the world in one note'

You don't have to like chamber music to enjoy reading about it, just like you may never eat street food in Bangkok but can find reading stories about it in the New York Times Dining section mouth–wateringly irresistible.

Wait a minute — that's a really, really dumb, poor analogy.

Who wrote that?

Get outa here.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah — chamber music.

Alex Ross, the excellent music critic for the New Yorker magazine, wrote an interesting piece for the November 21 issue about Giacinto Scelsi (above), a self–taught Italian composer who, toward the end of the 1950s, "had the extraordinary idea of writing an entire work — the 'Four Pieces' for chamber orchestra — that consisted of only single tones, one for each movement."

Ross continued, "... This obscure Roman eccentric, who considered himself a 'messenger' or 'medium,' has become a cult figure among younger composers: he makes the eternal new."

Though I tried mightily and even had my crack research team spend about 40 hours working on it we were simply unable to access Ross's New Yorker article online.

True, I could've have the team simply type the article into bookofjoe but they have far better things to do — like looking for split ends, you know, the usual girl stuff.

So we'll just have to go without.

Ross did put addenda to his column online in his blog in a post entitled "Scelsi morning after."

That post has many useful, informative links.

Ross's blog is a music lover's delight, what with all sorts of great links and posts available.

It's funny, though: Every other New Yorker column Ross has writen this year is available on his blog on this page, all the way up through the October 24 piece.

Perhaps he and the magazine have an agreement whereby he's not allowed to put up his work until a month after the issue's come out.

That seems odd, though; most of the time I'm able to find any New Yorker article on the web.

In any event, I would bet that, if you're all that interested, checking back with Ross's website in a month or so will produce a working link to his November 21 piece on Scelsi, the first line of which was, "In the beginning was the Tone."

From that article:

He fell in love with Eastern philosophy and made trips to India and Nepal.

After the Second World War, he suffered a breakdown and stopped composing for a few years.

He spent day after day playing a single note on the piano.

The casual observer might have thought he had gone mad.

He was, in fact, was regaining his balance.