Giacinto Scelsi

condition (record/cover): NM / VG (sticker removal damage on front)

Gatefold sleeve.

Among the most singular works in the twentieth-century vocal repertoire, and among the most demanding: twenty songs for solo voice with occasional instrumental accompaniment, composed by Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) across a decade - 1962 to 1972 - in direct collaboration with the Japanese soprano Michiko Hirayama, who was their only conceivable interpreter. Born in Yokohama in 1923, Hirayama arrived in Rome in the early 1950s and remained, becoming both Scelsi's closest musical partner and the dedicatee of the cycle that bears the mark of her singular voice in every note.

Scelsi's compositional method was itself unusual: improvisation onto tape, transcription by trusted collaborators working under his direct guidance, the final score carrying the traces of an oral and physical process rather than abstract notation. For the Canti del Capricorno this process was inseparable from Hirayama's presence - her range, her capacity for microtonal inflection, her technique of approaching pitch as a continuously deformable material rather than a fixed point. The twenty songs - some for voice alone, others with saxophone, double bass, percussion, or gong - move through registers that are at once archaic and futuristic, the sound of a voice operating at the outer edges of what Western training allows and what the body can sustain. The recorded document is the practice itself.

Recorded at the Stadthaus Ulm in May 2006 - Hirayama then 82 years old, working from Scelsi's own hand-annotated score - this Wergo release is, as Hirayama described it, her legacy. Wergo, WER 6686 2, 2007.