Events

Frances-Marie Uitti, cello
Music by Giacinto Scelsi and conversation with Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, editors of Music as Dream:

Essays on Giacinto Scelsi

The Spring 2014 concert series at Columbia Universitys Italian Academy for Advanced Studies will commence on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 at 7 PM with a recital by pioneering cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, the leading proponent of music by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). Her program will include the U.S. premiere of Scelsis Il Funerale di Carlo Magno for two-bowed cello (1978) and the World Premiere of Uittis own Homage to Giacinto Scelsi. Preceding her performance, she will speak with Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, editors of the 2013 collection Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi.

The concert is free and open to the public.
The program for the March 5 concert will be:

Ygghur(1965) Scelsi

Il Funerale di Carlo Magno, for two-bowed cello (1978) U.S. Premiere Scelsi

Homage to Giacinto Scelsi (2014) World Premiere Frances-Marie Uitti

Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato vs articulated playing. Gyrgy Kurtg, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her.

"The spectacularly gifted cellist Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, playing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who's who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression.... Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet." The Washington Post

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 Scelsis musical compositions. Music as Dream opens with The Scelsi Case, which erupted shortly after Scelsis death in 1988 when composer Vieri Tosatti claimed ownership of his works. This quarrel reached its zenith in the pages of PianoTimes 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.

The essays are wide-ranging in scope. French musicologist Michelle Biget-Mainfroy, a specialist in gestural piano writing, offers an in-depth study of Scelsis complex piano output; Gianmario Borio looks at Scelsis Sound as Compositional Process; Alessandra Montali examines and details Scelsis theoretical and literary writings; Luciano Martinis and Franco Sciannameo explore the lives and whereabouts of obscure composers Giacinto Sallustio, Walther Klein, and Richard Falk, who were Scelsis collaborators until the early 1940s when Tosatti took sole charge; Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini elaborates on Scelsis most important composition of his first period, presenting a tour-de-force that pieces together its complex story through research at the newly organized Scelsi Archive at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome; and Friedrich Jaeckers and Sandro Marrocus essays also draw on research conducted at the archive of Fondazione. Finally, an updated bibliography and disc! ography conclude the book.