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Key Questions of Antagonist Music-Making: A View from Italy

Gianmario Borio

in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a ... More

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a politicization across different musical genres. The discourse of intellectuals and artists was significantly influenced by the writings of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, and in turn led the PCI of the early 1970s to an unambiguous commitment to resist ‘any impulse to identify with any specific “poetics” or “tendency”,...to ignore the great variety of creative experiences’ (Giorgio Napolitano), whilst affirming a faith in innovation and renewal as the vehicle for oppositional sentiment. This chapter examines this complex cultural network as it manifested itself in the distinct musical terrains of folk music, rock, jazz, and free improvisation, and avant-garde music theatre.Less

‘Music Left and Right’: A Tale of Two Histories of Progressive Music

Anne C. Shreffler

in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc

What kinds of music have been considered to exemplify left-wing thought in non-communist countries at different times and places? This chapter chooses an intentionally simplistic model of two basic ... More

What kinds of music have been considered to exemplify left-wing thought in non-communist countries at different times and places? This chapter chooses an intentionally simplistic model of two basic categories — Populist and Modernist — denoting music that is accessible to the masses on the one hand, and music that uses an advanced idiom in order to resist being co-opted by the commercial sphere or being used as a symbol of state power on the other. It proposes these categories as the articulation of two ideal types. The historiography of twentieth-century music in the United States understands Marxist music as intrinsically populist, whereas the modernist strain is almost completely unknown. In European historiography it is practically the reverse. So it is useful to outline these two perspectives for historiographical reasons alone. These models are illustrated and complicated through discussion of examples by Eisler, Copland, Schoenberg, and Nono.Less

The Dam Bursts: The First and Second Conservatories

Peter J. Schmelz

in Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw

The second chapter is about the musical development of the young Soviet composers in the Soviet conservatories of the 1950s and the nascent form of the “unofficial” music culture of the 1960s. It ... More

The second chapter is about the musical development of the young Soviet composers in the Soviet conservatories of the 1950s and the nascent form of the “unofficial” music culture of the 1960s. It details how, through a variety of sources, both foreign and domestic, both legal and illicit, the curious “young composers” became aware of the musical techniques prohibited from Soviet musical life for the previous decades, most significantly the many varieties of serialism. The chapter concludes by discussing the Soviet visits by foreign musicians, specifically Glenn Gould, Igor Stravinsky, and Luigi Nono, all of whom further widened the young Soviets' awareness of both the theories and practices of European musical modernism. Soviet conservatories serialism modernism Glenn Gould Igor Stravinsky Luigi NonoLess

Clarifications: 1956

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter begins by presenting the text that accompanied a letter dated January 10, 1956, which was sent to Luciano Berio for publication in his new journal Incontri Musicali. The first issue of ... More

This chapter begins by presenting the text that accompanied a letter dated January 10, 1956, which was sent to Luciano Berio for publication in his new journal Incontri Musicali. The first issue of the journal came out in December 1956. However, Nono's contribution was not published. The chapter then presents the letter to Berio that accompanied Nono's manuscript.Less

“Proust” Questionnaire: 1986

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents Nono's answers to a variety of questions. Among these questions are: What for you is the greatest disaster? Where would you like to live? What is your idea of perfect happiness? ... More

This chapter presents Nono's answers to a variety of questions. Among these questions are: What for you is the greatest disaster? Where would you like to live? What is your idea of perfect happiness? What errors do you forgive most readily? Your favorite heroes in literature? Your best-loved historical figure? Your most popular heroines in poetry? Your favorite painters? Your favorite composers? What qualities do you most value in men? What qualities do you most value in women? Your favorite occupation? Who would you have liked to be? The main trait of your character? What do you value most in your friends? Your greatest mistake? What historical figure do you despise the most?Less

From the Homeland: Teatro Musicale

Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi

in The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body

This chapter discusses fascism and futurism in Italy; Luigi Dallapiccola; politics, improvisation, post-serialism, the return of the human voice, relationship of opera and music theater; Berio, Nono, ... More

This chapter discusses fascism and futurism in Italy; Luigi Dallapiccola; politics, improvisation, post-serialism, the return of the human voice, relationship of opera and music theater; Berio, Nono, Bussotti, Maderna; the 1968 and post-1968 generations; and postmodernism and experimentalism in the work of younger Italian composers.Less

Voice, Music, Modernism: The Case of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Marcelle Pierson

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

Song, with the voice as its medium, is often associated with the heart—with authenticity, with passion, with emotion and its unmediated expression. Song and voice thus make uneasy bedfellows with ... More

Song, with the voice as its medium, is often associated with the heart—with authenticity, with passion, with emotion and its unmediated expression. Song and voice thus make uneasy bedfellows with modernism, which is so often associated with the head. This essay focuses on a serendipitous moment in the 1950s in which Karheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono each wrote highly stylized “songs,” and then, in the aftermath of their premieres, engaged in an increasingly hostile exchange about their different uses of the voice. This polemic, like the pieces themselves, articulates two very different positions regarding the status of song and singing in the late 1950s. In addition to a disagreement about musical aesthetics, theirs was a disagreement about the status and means of the voice in music, which in turn was a disagreement about the status and means of expression, of subjectivity, of music’s very humanity. This moment constitutes a special case of how two very different discourses and ideologies surrounding voice and modernism have clashed, sometimes spectacularly, in music written after 1950.Less

There Is No Such Thing as the Composer’s Voice

Seth Brodsky

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

This chapter revisits a venerable trope in music studies—“the composer’s voice” as coined by Edward T. Cone in 1974—from the perspective of a “long modernism” that stretches back to the early 19th ... More

This chapter revisits a venerable trope in music studies—“the composer’s voice” as coined by Edward T. Cone in 1974—from the perspective of a “long modernism” that stretches back to the early 19th century. The chapter unfolds as a series of scenes and digression, exploring “vocal moments” in four string quartets by Helmut Lachenmann, Luigi Nono, Alban Berg, and Ludwig van Beethoven. It engages its themes on three distinct registers. On a conceptual register, it postulates the composer’s voice as a fantasmatic web of sound, sense, time, and event whose conjuring power renders a structural absence—the singing composer—into an ineluctable presence. On a second, more historical register, the chapter proposes that this scenario is inseparable from a long musical modernism beginning with late Beethoven, if not in the works themselves, then with their increasingly complex reception and gradual transfor­mation into an ethics of musical composition. On a third, “generic” register, the chapter claims that this composer’s voice is fundamentally theat­rical, even operatic. But this “operaticness” is paradoxical: it stages the impossibility of making something manifest. It is a the­ater of truancy, an endeavor not simply to make nonappearance appear, but to make it sing.Less

“Conscience, Feelings, Collective Reality”

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This section is devoted to Nono's characteristic expressions as a “political” composer of the 1960s and 1970s. It considers the urgency of grounding the work of composition in an understanding of the ... More

This section is devoted to Nono's characteristic expressions as a “political” composer of the 1960s and 1970s. It considers the urgency of grounding the work of composition in an understanding of the historical emergence of social configurations, and represents the logical development of the program announced in 1959 with “Historical Presence of Music Today.” This, in fact, is the prelude to the passionate resumption of the Sartrian question “Why write?”, which, at the turn of a decade, is transformed into a harsh and thorough polemic against contemporary European avant-garde music. During those years, his orientation toward a politically focused musical production was sharpened and radicalized. It was aligned both with an agenda derived from a “progressive” reading of national culture and with that of the international workers' movement.Less

The “Possible Infinities”

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This section attests to the doubts and anxieties of Nono's last decade. It brings together his most radically questioning reflections, which go hand in hand with a poetic approach very different from ... More

This section attests to the doubts and anxieties of Nono's last decade. It brings together his most radically questioning reflections, which go hand in hand with a poetic approach very different from that adopted in the past. It is marked by the productive uncertainties and the utopian openness that are typical of his last, but earnest, creative phase. The texts cover topics such as other ways of listening, and how to consider the field of sounds: not in relation to three or four sounds as Ligeti and Stockhausen or others do, but to maintain different subdivisions, different relationships, and the different capacity of the ear and especially of technique.Less

Introduction

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This introductory chapter describes the life and career of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). It also provides an overview of the present volume. Born on January 29, 1924, in Venice, Nono's education and ... More

This introductory chapter describes the life and career of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). It also provides an overview of the present volume. Born on January 29, 1924, in Venice, Nono's education and musical apprenticeship took place during the crucial years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, in a family and intellectual milieu which were solidly middle class while being fundamentally hostile to fascism. In 1950, Nono approached his first orchestral composition, Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg—Schoenberg's opus 41. During the 1960s and 1970s, political commitment, social conflict, denunciation, and the treatment of individual psychology always in relation to the collective drama became constants of Nono's production as the concept of engagement took on for him the value of a “moral imperative” (Jean-Paul Sartre) to match the aesthetic imperative.Less

An Autobiography of the Author Recounted by Enzo Restagno: 1987

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents the long autobiographical interview of Luigi Nono collated and organized by critic Enzo Restagno in 1987. Nono answers questions such as when and under what circumstances his ... More

This chapter presents the long autobiographical interview of Luigi Nono collated and organized by critic Enzo Restagno in 1987. Nono answers questions such as when and under what circumstances his life began to be affected by music; the circumstances in which he met Bruno Maderna for the first time; what he enjoyed studying in high school; the meaning of “Missa Di dadi”; the meaning of the resurgence of his interest in Bellini, and what this music meant for him in the past when he first discovered it; his observations about the musical use of silence; and the cyclical process of his works.Less

A Letter from Los Angeles: 1965

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents a letter written by Luigi Nono dated February 25, 1965, describing his trip to the United States, specifically Boston and Los Angeles.

Interview with Renato Garavaglia: ca. 1979–80

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents an interview with Renato Garavaglia. The interview covered a variety of topics including Nono's trip to the United States and meeting with Zubin Mehta, students, and the ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Renato Garavaglia. The interview covered a variety of topics including Nono's trip to the United States and meeting with Zubin Mehta, students, and the organization of American musical life; his relationship with Varès; his trip to Darmstadt; his study of Giovanni Gabrieli; his relationship with Bruno Maderna and his first studies with him. It also covered his writing of La fabbrica illuminata and how he spent three days with the workers of Italsider of Genoa discussing his work with them, recording their words, and the acoustic environment in which they worked. Finally, it referred to his new works, particularly a string quartet and Prometeo, and what importance writing an opera has today.Less

Technology to Discover a Universe of Sounds: Interview with Walter Prati and Roberto Masotti 1983¹

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents an interview with Walter Prati and Roberto Masotti. The interview covers topics such the change in Nono's music following his experiments while rehearsing at the SWR ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Walter Prati and Roberto Masotti. The interview covers topics such the change in Nono's music following his experiments while rehearsing at the SWR Experimental Studio in Freiburg; whether he has acquired a different way of using the voice, beyond a codified style a consequence of working extensively with many contemporary technical possibilities; the relationship the current electronic experience have with the electronic music of the 1950s and 1960; what happened to the RAI Studio di Fonologia in Milan; whether the highly positive attitude on the part of composers and musicians has come somewhat belatedly; and the meaning of Nono's ideological, musical rupture.Less

Interview with Michelangelo Zurletti: 1987¹

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter presents an interview with Michelangelo Zurletti. It covers topics such as the split that took place between music theory and practice; whether the Italian conditions, the rare ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Michelangelo Zurletti. It covers topics such as the split that took place between music theory and practice; whether the Italian conditions, the rare opportunities for work, force potential researchers to take what they can find; and the discovery of live electronics. He says that tape is no longer used, and, therefore, nothing is predetermined. The starting point is the study of sound in relation to the sound space, conducted analytically in Freiburg. The genuinely new factor is the musical component of the space. One works for days with the space to understand what can be done. No longer is there a predetermined distribution of the orchestral sound, but rather a sound that is newly created time after time.Less

Music Onstage: From a “Theater of Ideas” to the “Tragedy of Listening”

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This section is devoted to the renewal of music theater, a problem present in Nono's thinking since the early 1950s, and which came to the forefront following his experience with Intolleranza 1960 (a ... More

This section is devoted to the renewal of music theater, a problem present in Nono's thinking since the early 1950s, and which came to the forefront following his experience with Intolleranza 1960 (a period during which he wrote a group of texts dedicated to the subject). The realization of a “theater of ideas” and a “theater of situations,” inspired by Sartre, dominates a long phase that embraces the central years of Nono's activity, approximately between 1960 and 1977. Thus, perceptible differences appear, in both the conceptual system and the form of expression, between the thoughts expressed in the 1980s in “Toward Prometeo” and Nono's earlier writings. These are indicative of the profound metamorphosis that his thoughts on musical dramaturgy underwent during those years.Less

Portraits and Dedications

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This section is devoted to backward glances into the past and to persons who featured in different ways in Nono's biography as both man and artist. Mirroring the progress of a journey, of an artistic ... More

This section is devoted to backward glances into the past and to persons who featured in different ways in Nono's biography as both man and artist. Mirroring the progress of a journey, of an artistic and emotional awareness gradually attained, or of an ever more living “presence” of the past, it is no coincidence that they focus especially on Nono's last two decades, the 1970s and 1980s. Here too, in contrast to the Italian edition, attention is given to personalities closer to American and extra-European cultures, rather than to those with closer links to the Italian political or artistic scene.Less

Musical Analysis and Composition

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This section contains Nono's reflections, dating from ca. 1948 to 1960, concerned with musical technique, many of them aimed at the international community of composers and referring to the Darmstadt ... More

This section contains Nono's reflections, dating from ca. 1948 to 1960, concerned with musical technique, many of them aimed at the international community of composers and referring to the Darmstadt courses. It includes one later text, written in 1976 (on Il canto sospeso), which, though preferring an approach that is more historical-documentary than analytical, presents a first-hand testimony regarding one of the most important compositions of the 1950s. It suggests that the particular practice in the choruses of Il canto sospeso, the use of the structure of a word requires a development in the chorus's own way of learning: because of laziness or habits, sufficient attention is often not paid to the need in these choral works to study the varied construction of the word itself. This habitual ease continues because people do not read what is indicated in the score.Less