Music as Dream

Franco Sciannameo is professor and associate dean at the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of Nino Rota, Federico Fellini and the Making of an Italian Cinematic Folk Opera: Amarcord (2005); Giuseppe Mazzini’s Philosophy of Music: Envisioning a Social Opera (1836) (2005); Nino Rota’s The Godfather Trilogy (2010), and Phil Trajetta (1777–1854), Patriot, Musician, Immigrant (2010).Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, one of Italy’s foremost musicologists and twentieth-century music specialists, has written on Casella, Nono, Petrassi, and Scelsi among others. She has edited both Italian and French editions of Giacinto Scelsi’s autobiography Il sogno 101 (both published in 2010). Pellegrini is the scientific director of Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome.

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.