THE MESSENGER.(chamber music, works on single note)

In the beginning was the Tone. Throughout musical history, composers have commenced major works with a primordial hum, as if to suggest that the universe was audible before it became visible. Monteverdi's "Orfeo," the first masterpiece of opera, begins with an open fifth, notes like twin pillars, over which a high trumpet plays skirling fanfares. Haydn's "Creation" begins with monumental octave Cs, which have the weight of the word of God. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony starts softly, almost imperceptibly, with A and E gleaming in the horns and shimmering in the strings: we tune in to an eternity-in-progress. Wagner's four-day "Ring" cycle is set in motion by a similar cosmogenic drone: an E-flat rumbles deep in the "mystic abyss," as the orchestra pit in Bayreuth is called, and wave upon wave of consonant harmony emanates from it.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, majestic natural visions fell out of fashion. Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," in imitation of the "Ring," begins with mighty triads over a fundamental, but in the next section a thick harmonic fog descends and the glory is never seen again. In early, radical works by Ravel, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, repeated tones are alarms of obsession, signals of frenzy. By the time of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck," which was initially sketched during the First World War, the single note had become an instrument of terror: toward the climax of the opera, two enormous Bs are drilled into the listener's brain. In the tragic symphonic narratives of Shostakovich's Fourth and Vaughan Williams's Sixth, monotone patterns seem to represent the world dying with a whimper: entropy in action.

At the end of the nineteen-fifties, Giacinto Scelsi, a self-taught Italian composer and erstwhile playboy count who had dabbled in Eastern religions and Theosophy, had the extraordinary idea of writing an entire work--the "Four Pieces" for chamber orchestra--that consisted of only single tones, one for each movement. Scelsi was not the first to hit on this concept: Elliott Carter had ventured it in his "Eight Etudes and a Fantasy," in 1950. Nor is the scheme followed literally: the instruments often bend away from the parent note, shifting by microtones, semitones, or larger intervals. But, by the end of the work, a paradigm shift has taken place: the Tone is all-powerful once more. Music returns to its primitive origins, when melody formed from noise. In each of Scelsi's subsequent works, the phenomenon is repeated. Small wonder that this obscure Roman eccentric, who considered himself a "messenger" or "medium," has become a cult figure among younger composers: he makes the eternal new.

Scelsi would have been a hundred this year. Given his mystical propensities, it might be better to say that he is a hundred, although he was observed to have died in 1988. To mark the occasion, Miller Theatre, at Columbia University, invited the Flux Quartet to play Scelsi's five string quartets earlier this month. Live performances of this composer's works remain rare; Michael Tilson Thomas, in San Francisco, is the only American conductor who programs them. It is far easier to get to know the music on recordings, by way of the Accord, CPO, Kairos, and Mode labels. Many of the disks are decorated with the Zen-like symbol that the composer made his signature: a circle above a line, like a note floating free of its staff.

Scelsi was born into an old southern-Italian noble family, inheriting the title Count d'Ayala Valva from his mother. He was, of course, the end of the line. At the family castle, he was schooled in "fencing, chess, and Latin," or so he said. He flitted through European aristocratic circles and had his wedding party at Buckingham Palace. But music was his chief obsession. He quickly tilted toward the avant-garde, and when he was very young he attended Luigi Russolo's Futurist noise concerts; his first major work was called "Printing Presses." Later, he became interested in Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, although he did not adopt it. He fell in love with Eastern philosophy and made trips to India and Nepal. After the Second World War, he suffered a breakdown and stopped composing for a few years. He spent day after day playing a single note on the piano. The ...