Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi - Hardcover

This unique essay collection (the first on the composer in English) documents the evolution of scholarship about the compositions of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) since his death. Sciannameo (fine arts, Carnegie Mellon U.) and Pellegrini, a musicologist and twentieth-century music specialist, assemble and translate 11 essays on his music and philosophy that were originally published in Italian, German, and French. European musicologists, performers, and composers, as well as a friend of Scelsi, analyze gestures in his piano music; his compositional process; the expressive atonality in his music; his theoretical and literary writings; the lives of his collaborators, composers Giacinto Sallustio, Walther Klein, and Richard Falk; his early work Rotativa; and the improvisations on audio tapes at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi archives. Also included is a roundtable discussion from 1989 that considers debates about the authorship of his compositions after his death, when Vieri Tosatti claimed authorship. A comprehensive and detailed discography of recordings and collections is included. * Book News, Inc. * This is doubtlessly a true of the German musicology. * Info-Netz-Musik *

Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi showcases recent scholarly criticism on the music and philosophy of the brilliantly original composer Giacinto Scelsi. In this collection, Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini select and translate into English for the first time essays that reflect the evolution of recent scholarship on Scelsi's musical compositions. Music as Dream opens with "The Scelsi Case," which erupted shortly after Scelsi's death in 1988 when composer Vieri Tosatti claimed ownership of his works. This quarrel reached its zenith in the pages of PianoTime's March 1989 issue, where musicologist Guido Zaccagnini questioned a group of noted composers, writers, and arts managers about whether a composer can claim sole authorship for a work accomplished in collaboration with others.