Edward B. Rackley
The best thing about long-distance driving is the sonic qualities of the enclosed acoustic chamber that is the car itself. On a recent pre-dawn drive through the eastern lowlands of North Carolina, two recordings kept me present and transfixed. I knew the pieces well, but the striking commonalities of the two artists had never occurred to me. Their sounds and compositional forms differ dramatically, but both share a belief that music exists to reflect basic cosmological principles—from silence comes word, from tone rhythm, from decay renewal, etc. In different ways, their compositions deliver a direct experience of what each believes to be cosmological truths.
Named after the Mayan genesis myth, Popol Vuh is a German progressive (‘prog’) band best known for its soundtracks to Werner Herzog’s early films. Led by Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh flourished for over three decades, leaving a long and varied discography. Originally a classics scholar, Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian composer often associated with the minimalist movement, despite his music being packed with activity. Scelsi studied Berg and Schoenberg but later abandoned western compositional style in favor of powerful, occasionally violent, monotonal variations.
‘All that is solid melts into air’
I used to imagine insanity in the person of ‘Mr. Madcap Laughs’, Syd Barrett himself, seated at a piano and staring vacantly out a window, repeatedly striking a single key. Such a moment must have occurred, I thought, as a healthy musical mind lost its bearings to madness. Then I learned about Scelsi, whose biography actually involved a similar episode, with one important variation. In complete breakdown after a divorce, Scelsi reportedly remained slumped at his piano playing a single note over and over again. Fully absorbing each note’s resonance and decay, he later cited the experience as therapy, claiming it triggered his compositional transformation and opened the door to his entire future oeuvre.
Trading a piano for an ondiola, a small electronic instrument with a three-octave keyboard, Scelsi developed a style in which tonal variations (microtones) not only found a place, but formed the core of his expression. He combined musical styles from around the world, incorporating them into his personal view of the mystical power of sound. Resonance and the lack of uniformity even within a single sound was Scelsi's most significant insight.
Like his American contemporary Morton Feldman, Scelsi meditated deeply on the resonance of a note or sound as it faded into silence. A single sound is not a musical point in time, but a dynamic, wavering entity shaped by a variety of textures and conditions. His switch from writing for piano, whose notes fade after being struck, to compositions for string instruments allowed sounds to be sustained indefinitely. Their volume could made to grow, diminish or remain constant, allowing Scelsi's music to draw extreme power and tension from a single note.
For Konx-Om-Pax, Scelsi explained the title as the “three aspects of Sound: as the first motion of the immutable; as creative force; as the syllable Om.” The three words arguably translate to 'peace' in Assyrian, Sanskrit and Latin, respectively. The phrase was purportedly used in the Eleusinian Mysteries; this image is taken from a 1907 Aleister Crowley text of the same name.
In retrospect, Scelsi's fundamental concerns were fairly typical of the 1960s. His interest in world music, and especially Eastern mysticism, was very much in the air and was reflected in both the classical and popular spheres. More technically, his approach to sound and timbre answers questions posed by the avant-garde of the era, particularly Stockhausen's 'timbre-music' and Cage's abdication of compositional control.
In Scelsi's case, the former is especially prominent, as timbre fluctuations serve as the primary dynamic around which individual movements are constructed. Recalling the repeated single notes of his piano epiphany, Scelsi erected entire forms around discrete tones, articulated in various octaves by various instruments. Shifts in orchestration, as well as microtonal slurs, inject a dynamism into what might otherwise be a static sound.
Late in life Scelsi had a premonition that he would leave his body “when the eights lined up”. On 8 August 1988 he drifted into a coma, and died the next day.
Melody, Daughter of Tone
Genres are the result of an originating vision, whose gravitation is felt once experienced by others, usually lesser imitators. Such is the story of Popol Vuh, credited with launching the New Age music genre, and influential for early electronica, ambient and, of course, so-called 'Krautrock'.
At their height Popol Vuh displayed an exquisite blend of spirituality, emotional power, and mystery often lacking in other works of the Krautrock genre. On Letzte Tage – Letzte Nächte, spindly guitar lines, jagged percussion, and a heightened sense of grandeur meanders and escalates as if trying to physically transport the listener out of the weighted, corporeal realm. At other times, oscillating frequencies and occasional sound fragments travel through atmospheric space.
