The String Quartet

Scelsi’s music was barely known in the 40s and 50s. Maderna and Berio’s music was widely considered to be at the forefront of the Italian avant-garde in the 1950s, thus reaching a very small audience. In all respects, Giacinto Scelsi was what the Germans call an ‘Einzelgänger’. He wrote subdued, obsessive music, delving inward and placing phenomena like sound and tone at the forefront, even if it meant just one sound and one tone. In his String Quartet 1 from 1944, traces of this can already be observed.

In those same decades, serialist composers were aiming to eliminate human emotion from their music and instead create highly structured, mathematically organized compositions. This approach was embraced by Maderna and Berio in the mid-1950s as well. Their compositions followed strict rules. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of composers like Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen, Italian composers Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio emerged.