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Under the influence of Luigi Dallapiccola and Gian Francesco Malipiero, of Bruno Maderna and Herman Scherchen, Nono set out to renew the musical traditions of his native Venice—notably Gabrieli, the theorists and madrigalists of the Renaissance—through the prism of the twelve-tone technique invented by Schoenberg. His brand of serialism, designed with Maderna as forma mentis —a serialism that Dallapiccola termed a ‘state of spirit’—positioned him on the fringes of the Darmstadt school, since he rejected all attempts to reduce his language to mathematical manipulations or arithmetic. Condemning the oversimplification of Schoenberg and Webern‘s principles to such purely morphological dimensions, Nono demonstrated conversely the impossibility of imposing technical limits on the appraisal of musical language. His aim was the essence, not the technique, of serialism—his ideological destiny. He was fond of Schoenberg’s work, especially A Survivor from Warsaw, which he considered as a sort of completion of a third act of _Moses and Aron_–as a “new moment of slavery and subjected barbarity (the narrator’s recitation, in Sprechgesang) followed by the unifying prayer Shema Israel (the spoken choir in the finale), resolving the opera less as a repeating ritual, but more in the spirit of continued research”1–but also Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose tone-row provided material for Nono’s first piece: Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg. In Schoenberg’s two manifestos, Nono discerned, along with Maderna, the moral and creative exigence of a musician in search of a historical solution—not an individual one—to the crisis of musical language and social structures.
Throughout the 1950’s, Nono’s serialism can be divided into three phases: the first, from his earliest works to Liebeslied; the second, the closest to total serialism, including Canti per 13, Incontri, and Il canto sospeso; the third, beginning with Varianti. In Epitaffio a Federico Garcia Lorca, a total division of the chromatic (following Webern’s example) delineates the four sections of Tarde, the first section of España en el corazon. Similarly, on the three sections of Liebeslied, the first two use only six pitches. This discourse is created by small cells derived from ‘magic squares.’ During Nono’s first phase, three pitches, rhythms, or dynamics labelled 1, 2, and 3 generate the following combinations which the composition must then follow: 123, 132, 213, 231, 312, and 321. Nono does not operate directly on pitch, rhythm, or dynamics, but often interpolates a hidden layer of ars combinatoria. In Nono’s second phase, Incontri uses, for the first time, a complete tone-row with a Webern-esque character (B flat - C - C# / F# - G - E / D - E flat - F / A - B - A flat), but his treatment of the series takes a further step away from Webern’s, as Nono repeats the series verbatim, without any transposition or permutation. Throughout the 1950’s, Nono uses almost exclusively a Allintervallreihe: A - B flat - A flat - B - G - C - F# - C# - F - D - E - E flat, an interpolation of two chromatic scales in contrary motion—a strict chromaticism which would lead towards, throughout the sixties, the usage of clusters and the verticalization of the tone-row, articulated rhythmically by Fibonacci sequences. In this series, when one regulating and non-thematic function would be transformed into superstructure, it would be dominated by what Nono considered to be the fundamental element of serialism: the interval. “From the outset, Nono’s compositional technique distinguished itself by the historical necessity to free himself not only from all thematic treatment, but above all from a thematic reflection that one cannot disassociate from tonal thought. The note, understood primarily as an isolated event in the fundamentally pointillistic flow of music, whose exact qualities can never be precisely reproduced, had acquired a complex relationship to its environment, robbing all sense of momentary gesture in favor of a constellation of single notes. Not only is a note reduced to only its local value, but it became part of a whole as was the case in early music.”2 By reducing the series, rendering it ambiguous, Nono eliminates every traditionally melodic dimension of the discourse. His changes elevate secondary events such as dynamics, timbre, and density to the place of essential elements. From this point on, sound, even when isolated, is a complex entity, with an internal development susceptible to associations–a sound opposed to the sounds hermetically concealed within itself. Here a third strain of serialism is born, with an electronic dimension, which beginning with Varianti, and even more in Cori di Didone and Composizione per orchestra n. 2 – Diario polacco ‘58, no longer acting exclusively on intervals, but directly on the body of sound, following the example of Varèse (whose seminars Nono attended at Darmstadt). The first measures of Varianti demonstrate this rupture: a single pitch is distributed simultaneously amongst several different instruments, rhythms, and dynamics, generating a sort of aura.
With La Victoire de Guernica after Paul Éluard, or Il canto sospeso based on fragments of letters from members of the European resistance who had been condemned to death, or with La terra e la compagna on poems by Cesare Pavese, what could be considered as humanism, if not existentialism–and above all a denunciation of Nazi and fascist crimes–would be transformed throughout the 1960s into a condemnation of a system of domination, of the violence of the colonial state, beginning with the ‘action scénique’ Intolleranza 1960: A Rebel, in the first version of the libretto, becomes an Algerian in the final version, firmly situating the piece in a historical time frame and opening the way for the incorporation of documents, tracts, graffiti, or declarations of workers and revolutionaries. Culture has a function in the class war: neither the ivory tower of “art for art’s sake” nor an exclusively aesthetic revolution, nor the condemnation of all culture as necessarily bourgeois and elitist. Protest, confrontation, contradiction, the final work would be at once for the revolution, art of the revolution, and revolutionary art itself. Nono specifies a Gramscist, if not Leninist, angle which implies the idea of an organic intellectual, rooted in the needs and the values of the working class, making these the themes of his life, his battles, and his hopes, and ensuring that his work is experienced by his class. Thus in La fabbrica illuminata for voice and magnetic tape, a part with no electronic, vocal, or choral sources), metallic sounds, borrowed from the daily experience of the working world, with the spectacular acoustic image of mills and giant furnaces recorded in the Italsider factory in Genoa–a material defined by its social context, related to labor conditions. After the man-musician of committed art in the 1950s, the composer wished, actively and consciously, to become a soldier, a “guerillero.” Theater plays a fundamental role in this change of direction: political theater, with Erwin Piscator, a theater of sensations, in the sense of Sartre, or a catharsis, a social conscience, with the outcome determined by the audience, a theater finally modifying the visual and sonic spaces of traditional representation, privileging not opera but stage action–an interdependence that ceaselessly redefines the constituent elements of the performance. Furthermore, with La fabbrica illuminata, A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida, and Contrappunto dialettico alla mente, Nono borrows the tools of the phonology studio at RAI (Milan): every ideological culture must in fact know, analyze, and use the entire range of means at his disposition on technical, linguistic, and expressive levels. Consequently, the composer grabs hold of these tools, turning them against the system and inventing new expressions: “Revolutionary work presupposes the knowledge and use of science’s most recent conquests; in my case, this means the usage of a musical language at the most advanced stage possible.”3 In addition to dedications to Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, whose voice resonates in Y entonces comprendió, Nono seeks to make his work understood and appropriated by a public even further sociologically removed from musical institutions, engaged in an imposed dialogue. In Al gran sole carico d’amore, where agitation and propaganda culminate in Meyerhold’s fascination in replaying in several settings the events of the Soviet Revolution and the Paris Commune in the first half, and the Russian strikes of 1905 in the second (reflecting the crisis of the 1970s, as captured by filmmaker Chris Marker in Le fond de l’air est rouge)–between an exaltation in the struggle and the knowledge that unfinished revolutions often lead to authoritarianism. Nono integrates the questioning of the fall, through characters whose presence is limited to the tribunal’s reading of their respective condemnations. Al gran sole finishes with its material in rags, taken from L’Internationale, the dialectic of proletarian passion opening a deep crisis in rational models, later expressed by philosophers Massimo Cacciari and Aldo Gargani.
With Fragment-Stille, An Diotima, after Hölderlin, and above all Prometeo, premiered in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice in 1984 (but conceived as far back as 1975), Nono developed a radical critique of the oversimplification of musical essence into the simple act of seeing. Prometeo, an extended synthesis of myths and sounds requiring no costumes, sets, or characters and no implicit staging–the fundamentals of a new dramaturgy, a “listening tragedy.” In the 18th century, though political rationalism developed the techniques and powers destined to direct individuals in a continuous manner, the construction of opera houses alienated music’s dionysiac spirit in the social rite, in accordance with the objectives of the government and the state in its infancy. There raged a strong preference for frontality, so that an audience member should be able to see the singers, and above all the conductor, the ultimate demigod. According to Nono, architecture and sociology confirm this tendency to translate sound into images, through the “horseshoe” layout of lyric theater. The space, organized to divert audibility, demonstrates our civilization’s imposed dominance of vision. “The unification of musical and spatial listening is the result of the one-way and one-dimensional use of geometry, aggravated in this particular case by the possibilities of reverberation. By concentrating musical experience in theaters and concert halls, what is irreparably lost is the unique spatial identity to places where a a continual upheaval of innumerable geometries intermingle. Imagine the Basilica San Marco or Notre Dame.”4 Simultaneously, and analogically, a return to classification of modes according to the Platonic ideal of éthoi, led in the writings and works of Rameau to categories such as triumphant, furious, or plaintive… Relegating sounds to categories, or to single means of listening, and the unification of the concert hall express an underlying rationalization of acoustic and architectural space. Marvelously oblivious, musicians wore down, their musical determination consuming their listening skills, subduing them to an image–an integral intermediary or prerequisite and a guarantee of the truth of auditory perception, in the framework of an ideological, literary, or even religious discourse. The listener has the “vision.” In Prometeo, Das atmende Klarsein, or Io, frammento dal Prometeo, based on Giuseppe Verdi’s scala enigmatica in the Ave Maria of Quattro pezzi sacri (before Nono reduced the pitches to two notes in A Carlo Scarpa, architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili, or the aura of a single note, as in “No hay caminos, hay que caminar…” Andrei Tarkowskij) listening is the central issue; a type of knowledge is at stake: “Knowing how to listen,” writes Nono, “even to silence,” even “to what we cannot hear.” This silence is a bond. The musician gives it to be heard, because listening requires a deeper silence in order to collect the sound, unique, fragile, and irreplaceable, so as not to confuse it with another. There, barely audible sounds, nearly abandoned, are united only by their common root in the world of silence, imbued with the responsibility of an introduction to nothingness. Through this type of listening between musicians, space, following the teachings of Gabrieli and Spanish polyphonists, through the transformative and infinite worlds of Giordano Bruno (Nono’s inspiration for Caminantes…Ayacucho), the listener concentrates on a listening phenomenon based on real and reduced perception. What is then brought to our attention is the act of listening itself in its essence, before it connects with emotion and memory. In Nono’s work, extreme dynamic levels (as low as ppppppp), a silence that resists idle chatter, confuse the distinction between timbres (as in Omaggio a György Kurtag) and as our understanding grows, incite us to lend an ear, to engage in “écoute ententive.” Without this attention and focus, there is no co-existence, no genuine sense of belonging to the Other.
Translation: Christopher Trapani.
Do you notice a mistake?