Appointments

Questions for Maestro Marco Angius, on the occasion of the performance of Anahit. Poème lyrique dédié à Vénus, Giacinto Scelsi, July 5, 2024. Opening concert of the tenth edition of the Chigiana International Festival & Summer Academy "Tracce" in Siena.

The interview is conducted by Gianni Trovalusci (President) and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini (Scientific Director) of the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi.

Maestro Angius, we are delighted to ask you some questions on the occasion of this important event which features Giacinto Scelsi alongside the music of Ligeti and Bartók, conducting the Orchestra Regionale Toscana with violin soloist Ilya Gringolts.
Could you illustrate the program you will be conducting and the deep connections between the pieces and their composers?

The program was developed by Nicola Sani, while I suggested pairing Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra with Ligeti and Scelsi, given the special affinity that concerns not only the first two composers. The Concerto will be presented in the recent chamber orchestra version by Roland Freisitzer. In recent years, this trend of new orchestrations has emerged, which, in my opinion, responds to a tendency towards musical restoration and rethinking that is quite present in the era we live in. A few years ago, it would have been viewed with suspicion, but it is a practice that has always existed. I would say that, besides Bartók and Ligeti, the presence of Anahit is also very significant and pertinent: Scelsi, like Bartók, is interested in exploring the depths of sound as a mysterious universe (I am thinking, for example, of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta) and in creating his own compositional system. On the other hand, Bartók and Ligeti sought a new expressiveness that drew from folk music and mathematical proportions, as music is a scientific art. It will also be a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with an extraordinary soloist like Ilya Gringolts.

You have premiered new works by many contemporary composers, conducting the most important ensembles in the world for contemporary music, and dedicating systematic effort with the Orchestra of Padua and Veneto, of which you are the Artistic and Musical Director.
For example, you can boast a long-standing collaboration with Maestro Salvatore Sciarrino, in addition to the realization of numerous projects developed in prestigious contexts with many composers, including those from younger generations.
In this broad scope of activity, how has the conductor-composer-work process taken shape?

I have dedicated myself mainly to Italian composers over three decades of activity and have acquired a clearer, yet still evolving, vision of compositional processes. Today, we are in an archaeological era of contemporary research music, and it is inevitable. There is a noticeable gap compared to the figures who animated the second half of the last century, which depends on a multitude of complex factors. It is, therefore, a long and fascinating process.

I have come to understand that a conductor must possess compositional skills when rehearsing because each conductor, in their own way, continues the work started by the composer and brings it to life in the air. The work on the score is only the project of the work itself: it is binding, decisive, but not yet music. The score is rather the gateway to the work as a living, perceptible organism, enveloped in an ineffable aura. This is why there are infinite possibilities for interpreting a score, and the conductor in front of the musicians must be like a director of sound, knowing the logic of composing and deconstructing, having precise ideas even when approaching a new piece for the first time.

In fact, the composer may be present or absent, but it is as if they are always there in the room listening to us. When a conductor performs music, they are also the composer, whereas it is usually denied this recreative activity by giving the sign an untouchable primacy as absolute and testamentary will. Nothing could be more false and misleading. But what applies to analysts on paper (forced to listen to recordings to conduct a reliable and instead flawed chronicle from the start) is far from interpretive reality: things of an ideal world. Instead, a composer first imagines the sounds and then transcribes them: then when they listen to them, they change them again (I think of Beethoven making corrections during rehearsals with his red pencil: he did not correct himself but his own writing!). The writing, through which a composer transmits their thought, on the other hand, sets limits because «the written is the funeral of the oral», as Carmelo Bene claimed, probably alluding to this dissociated dimension between sign and sound (or gesture).

In your opinion, what is the relationship between the younger generation and contemporary music?

Let's say that the audience attending a concert is curious and well-disposed from the start: they are neutral. They are not inherently attracted to this genre of music because today's world is structured in such a consumeristic and occasional sense that the richness of the content rarely reaches a broad audience and penetrates the culture of our time (mass culture, that is). They may not really be interested in understanding the reasons for such particular music, but rather in experiencing it. Music, too, is an expression of its own time, and 'modern,' after all, is a term linked to fashion. Yet, the recent Prometeo by Nono at San Lorenzo sold out every night: no one could explain the phenomenon, so widespread is the prejudice against research and experimental music. So it depends on what we mean by contemporary music. What I disagree with, however, is the way some operators think they can adapt music to audience trends to solve the problem of approval and ticket sales: it is exactly the opposite! It is not ethical to pursue an artistic dissemination intent by always following the same appetites or reducing music to a mere tourist phenomenon. One can create an intelligent and intriguing program, certainly maintaining a relationship with the audience's tastes, but without declaring the proposal for research and experimentation expired. Those who criticize or despise avant-garde experimental music to the point of denial, what alternative models do they propose? Those of approval? The audience must be respected and not treated as an inert consumer mass, like a sound-absorbing body that only serves to improve the acoustics of a hall. There must be an open and pluralistic vision that also includes antithetical positions: those at the antipodes are undoubtedly fertile. Similarly, I find it wrong for a contemporary music festival to focus on extreme foreignness as if Italian ensembles and composers were not competitive enough: we must work to raise the value of our country and not to snub both its protagonists and future generations.

Giacinto Scelsi and his sonic universe: we know about your decades-long acquaintance with the Maestro's music. What do you think about the music and the journey of such a unique author, with a distinctive profile in the history of 20th-century music?

During this period, I am studying Anahit for the first time, composed in 1965, a lyrical poem dedicated to Venus, as its subtitle suggests. We will discuss it in more detail later on. Scelsi's compositional restlessness drives him to identify a seemingly circumscribed sound world and to dig into this initial limitation, discovering instead the wonder of musical contemplation, of prolonging the life of sounds to excess, in making them infinite: these are not pieces of music but immersive listening experiences. Many composers have looked to Scelsi and continue to do so: the French spectralists, Romitelli, Haas, even Nono, in short, figures who are quite different. Like Cage and a few others of his generation, Scelsi shows us that one cannot make music with music anymore. We must start from other perspectives and aim for other dimensions of listening and composition.

The sonic horizon of events in his works appears at times compressed, at other times extremely transparent and fluctuating: the form is a declination of sound rather than the reverse. His pieces seem like hallucinations, a kind of sonic hypnosis where we fixate on a rotating object, an indecipherable prism, and forget the passage of time. In Scelsi's pieces, the sonic images decline and dissolve into each other in an apparent stillness, but in reality, the sounds are always in motion in terms of dynamics and emission oscillation. Although he never composed works of musical theater, his pieces always have a strong evocative and visionary connotation.

It is clear that neither Scelsi nor Evangelisti could rely on the narrative possibilities of a linear, discursive, or descriptive text: for them, intoned words are pure phonemes that cannot cross the threshold of the unspeakable, transubstantiating inversely from meaning to signifier (I think of the investigation between voice and instruments in Yamaon, in Canti del Capricorno, but also in Evangelisti's Spazio a 5). Anti-music appears as an animistic rite in which the Word of musical form, commonly understood, is correlated with a transfigured and highly stylized acoustic conception of composing.

Anahit is a work imbued, in our opinion, with a strong yet lyrical expressive vein; how did you approach this piece? What interpretative direction do you believe best captures the work's profound communicative power?

In this piece, rightly famous and among the most performed in his catalog, the decisive role is entrusted to the soloist who, through a short central cadenza, identifies two formal hemispheres. The violin is tuned in a special way that produces significant beats in the juxtaposition of certain intervals, accompanied by the dense orchestral vegetation that blossoms around it. The soloistic writing unfolds across multiple staves, reaching up to four simultaneous ones, as if they were multiple instruments or dispersed sound sources. The placement of instruments is crucial in this music, which draws its reasons from the surrounding space. Yet it can be heard as an absolute musical composition, albeit enigmatic, or as a piece of a world that neither begins nor ends. In this sense, the individual sound that characterizes the various sections of the piece, always without interruption, serves as both a point of origin and a collapse of the form itself. The form is essentially a meditation or mental journey translated into musical terms. A dramaturgy of hidden listening.

In Scelsi's works, the title is intended to be coherent with the image that takes shape within the piece, even though, as the Maestro himself stated, "The music speaks for itself." In this case, what has the relationship with Anahit, Poème lyrique dédié à Vénus, evoked in you?

Given that absolute music is a contradiction in terms (beyond the ingenious concepts expressed by Dahlhaus in several of his books), there is a sort of implicit naturalism in Scelsi's compositions, particularly in Anahit. If one listens to them as mere pieces of music, they can leave one perplexed because there are no events but rather eternal returns: we must change ourselves in the act of listening, as the author intended them to produce an invisible inner transformation rather than sensory annihilation (which can also be a concomitant effect in some of us). Some of his works have been used in cinema, which adds a value to consider, in addition to the fascination these works can evoke solely from viewing the scores. We notice this when a piece ends, leaving behind a kind of material trace, an indistinct echo: it seems like the dissolution of a vision, something we have heard, that has happened before our eyes: but what, exactly? Titles, like subtitles, can have various meanings, introducing listeners, arousing curiosity, being more or less appropriate. There is a need, I believe, to create relationships, allusions, synthetic perceptions between different planes of knowledge.