Luigi Nono was not only a music composer. A complete artist, whose interests ranged from music to visual arts, photography, sculpture, and literature, politics, social sciences, philosophy, history. A man of his era, one of the fathers of electronic-classical music, which he wanted to be known and apprecoated by the widest possible audience, particularly by the working class. His concerts in the factories are still in the people's memory. Born and died in Venice, Italy (1924-1990) Luigi Nono left a huge collections of recordings, essays and papers. he was one of the most radical composers in the 20th century. Nono, who fought against the Fascists in the Italian Resistance during World War II, studied both music and law in the post-war years before joining the Italian Communist Party in 1952. During the mid- to late-1950s, Nono taught at Darmstadt, the center of European serialism, and with Boulez and Stockhausen was the foremost exponent of that music on the continent. Nono married Schoenberg's daughter, Nuria, in 1955, and severed his ties with Darmstadt in 1959, after delivering a lecture entitled "The Presence of History in the Music of Today." This lecture was the composer's most notable public statement concerning his own radical Marxist politics, and the 1960s and 1970s saw Nono taking an increasingly active role the affairs of the Communist Party.
Among the RECORDINGS:
A very good starting point is Luigi Nono: Como una ola de fuerza y luz, for Soprano, Piano, Orchestra & Magnetic Tape (1971-72) / ...sofferte onde serene... For Piano & Magnetic Tape (1976) / Contrapunto dialettico alla mente, for Magnetic Tape (1968) - Maurizio Pollini / Claudio Abbado
. Like Pollini, Abbado, and Berio, Nono's worldview was permanently shaped by the subjection of Italy to the Fascism of Mussolini. All turned to Marxism in response, and Nono's deeply held political beliefs are on display throughout this magnificent collection of works from the late 1960s and early '70s. Nono saw in serialism a revolutionary musical grammar with implications extending beyond the realm of the purely musical into the realm of the political. Nono's adoption of serialism was a response to the domination of capitalism, imperialism, and the continued subjugation of the many by the few. Nono's music, which is initially forbidding and inaccessible, can be understood as the embodiment of Marx's concept of the unity of theory and practice. This is a revolutionary music, through which the composer expresses his hope for a world of true freedom rather than slavery, alienation, and mass murder. "Como una ola de fuerza y luz" is dedicated to the memory of Lusiano Cruz, whose name is repeated in the work by the soprano vocalist (in this case, Slavka Taskova). Cruz, a Chilean revolutionary, died in 1971, two years before the Kissinger-planned coup which led to the death of Marxist president Salvador Allende and the installation of the Fascist Augusto Pinochet, who murdered Chileans en masse for the next 17 years. Nono's text implores the dead Cruz to "keep on glowing, young as the revolution in every one of your peoples' struggles." This powerful piece features thundering piano work from Nono's fellow Marxist, Maurizio Pollini, whose virtuosity is offset by the composer's jarring tape manipulations. A beautifully conceived and executed work. Pollini again contributes his piano skills to 1976's "... sofferte onde serene. . . ." Moments of lyricism are contrasted against Nono's magnetic tape arrangements, and the result is a stunning mixture of opacity and accessibility. A challenging, but ultimately satisfying work. "Contrappunto dialettico alla mente" (1968) again sets overtly political texts in Nono's pursuit of a total political engagement, "ideological and technical." The shrieking voices and intimations of violence echo the horrific destruction of the late-1960s. This is one of Nono's most important and ideologically characteristic works. In spite of what he would have liked, this is not considered music for everyone, but for the openminded and discerning listener, this disc contains treasures.
Among the BOOKS:
The structure of "Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik
" is in two parts, "Luigi Nono: Texte, this covers early essays on Nono's quite original usage of Text and Music, Politics, the early opera :Intolleranza: is discussed, as his "Notizen zum Musiktheater heute" (1961). There has even been some scholarly work on Nono's concept of theatre, the "action(s) scenes", where the dramatic impulse is presented in terms of fragments to subvert or disrupt(halt) the traditional notions of dramatic narrative. This is really an extension of Nono's technique of constructing individual works with text with the vigours of Post-Webernesque thinking. Nono always sought answers to the paradigm of organizing intervals even to his ultimate usage of tones impacted, compacted into clusters,(works of the early Sixties) the tones still bear a function to him. His study in Venice always had elaborate graphic posters, charts tables of interval distributions. Also here is his early position piece of "Musik und Resistenza (1963). Recall that post-war Italy still had a strong anti-fascist ideology at work with a strong organized Left. Under then "Texte zu einzeinen Werken" are short essays on his works, much more than program notes explaining the creativity that had surrounded works as "Incontri"(1955),"Cori di Didone"(1958), the powerful "Canti di vita e d'amore" (1962), and the more inflammatory (relatively) musical dramatic works as "A floresta e jovem e chja vida" (l966) on the war in Vietnam, and the energy of resistance fighters of the American Occupation, something a theme that doesn't go away, it has a timeless content to it. This section ends with an essay on Nono's second primary opera "like a burgeoning light of love"(1973), a work that the PCI had helped to sponsor."Aktuelles" largely then deals with Nono's turn to electronic music as a useful "realistic" genre that had the same structural potential as documentary in film. This covers also his work in Italian prisons preseting events there with Maurizio Pollini. Nono had abandoned the concert venue, he was ignored as well in the primary new music venues for his subversion. Here he could indulge his imagination with live documentary placements of speeches, excerpts from manifestos.
"Gespraeche" then is a series of interviews from 1958 to 1974, with such new music European luminaries as Guy Wagner,Martine Cadeau,Ramon Chao, Jean Villain, Massimo Mila, Helmut Lachenmann and Hans Werner Henze,both who largely held similar ideologic positions as Nono. There are also wonderful analytic work with graphic representations throughout here with a useful work list as an appendix.
