Imitation and Expression. Inauthenticity in music according to Giacinto Scelsi

Abstract

This article focuses on the consequences of a little-known work by Giacinto Scelsi, Rotativa (1930), for the concepts of imitation and expression in music. Critical of the mechanization of art peculiar to the Futurism of his time, the Italian composer allows us to think, against the pseudo-photographic reproduction of objects by sound forms, the limits of musical imitation by revealing, from the historicity of his own piece, the inauthenticity of a certain modernism.

Keywords

• imitation
• expression
• musical futurism
• kitsch modernism
• Scelsi