Youtube Twitter Facebook
italiano print send send Skype
profiles - works

Works

Giacinto Scelsi
Le Réveil profond
(1972)
for Double bass solo


Length: 07:30

Mantram is a piece constructed entirely on melodic formulas and scales; Le Réveil profond (The profound awakening) is its pendant. The bass remains entirely bass in that it is restricted to two notes in its most vibrating range: F-G, a second, but which, as so often in Scelsi, expands to form a space in which a large number of other subtle levels have room. 
Certainly the score has its challenges, for example, that one of two strings bowed at the same time is marked with a vibrato while the other continues to be bowed pleno. (And how does one get vibrato on an open string?) Other impossibilities include one of two strings bowed simultaneously is piano while the other is supposed to swell into a powerful forte. As it progresses, the sound fans out, sympathetic overtones unfold, vibrations are called forth and sent back.
If one of the basic questions of a composer is what field he is plowing (and usually it is a dozen at once), then here the answer is relatively simple for once: Scelsi is graduating the degree of power, width, and complexity of the vibrations of immediately adjacent frictions. And to that end he uses such a rich palette of instrumental events that is impossible to escape the impression that he is formulating here in meticulous labor something that was originally heard as an improvisation. (Frank Hilberg, english translation by Steven Lindberg)