Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian composer of noble family, born near La Spezia on 8 January 1905 and died in Rome on 9 August 1988. He studied twelve-tone technique in Vienna in the mid-1930s, but a long personal and spiritual crisis in the 1940s led him to abandon conventional composition and to place sound itself, with its inner movement, at the centre of his thinking.
Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959), four pieces for chamber orchestra each built around one pitch, marked the end of a decade of experiment and remains his best-known work: the single note is thickened by microtonal inflections, timbre and dynamics. He often worked by recording improvisations, partly on an ondiolina, which collaborators then transcribed under his guidance, an arrangement that prompted disputes about authorship after his death. He described himself as a medium rather than a composer, avoided being photographed, and signed with a circle above a line. His music reached a wider public from the 1970s through the French spectral composers.