In 1955, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna founded the Studio di fonologia di Milano della RAI, which in contrast to the dogmatic attitude in Cologne at the time placed emphasis on free experimentation. It was here that Luigi Nono created his first electronic composition, Omaggio a Emilio Vedova, in homage to the painter of the same name who was an active participant in the anti-fascist resistance. The material from which the work is constituted is mainly made up of narrow bundles of sine- and square-wave sounds, primarily of a metallic character, with particular reverb lengths in the second part of the composition creating an imaginary spatial depth dimension. Formally, the piece, which is made up of sounds that often seem static and like a short ‘dripping’ sound, consists of two parts and a short epilogue. Part A is a fast movement lasting around two minutes, which takes on a calmer character towards the end and ends with a pronounced crescendo. Part B, which is around a minute-and-a-half long, is slower and presents raspy, completely new sounds, especially at the end. The third part is divided into two passages of around thirty seconds in length, which present rapid changes in sound across the entire tonal space. The piece ends with an ‘epilogue’ lasting about twenty seconds with droplike tones.
Luigi Nono A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum (1985)
A Pierre
Not only memories, not
only distant echoes,
‘not speaking of yesterday’
(W. Benjamin)
Today the ever-possible
The new—Also knowing how to
listen to silence—not only in
a single possible way
of hearing—hearing the others,
OTHER THINGS, in the silence.
Luigi Nono
Berlin, 10 May 1987
Luigi Nono Omaggio a György Kurtág (1983)
This piece is based on improvisations by Roberto Fabbriciani, Ciro Scarponi, and Giancarlo Schiaffini at Experimentalstudio Freiburg. Under Nono’s guidance and supported by electronic devices, the three soloists discovered how some tones in extreme registers (close to the limits of human hearing range) come close in sound to sinus tones (without harmonics) known from electronic music. In group performance, it was no longer possible to distinguish the identity and location of the sound source. To these static and indefinite sounds, Nono added an alto voice which uses its entire vocal range to sing phonemes from the name and surname of the work’s dedicatee.
Formally speaking, the composition consists of fourteen episodes of various length, separated by a grand pause or a long general pause (the longest of these should last more than a minute, through this indication is rarely followed in practice). The individual episodes are governed by different principles: micro-intervallic oscillations around one note, reaching selected components of the spectrum; chromatic expansion from the base interval, (frequently a fifth); color modulations attained by overlapping trills. The part of the alto voice is characterized by the same ‘static virtuosity’ which Nono developed in his writing for winds. Its difficulty lies not in acrobatic intervallic leaps and in fast or rhythmically complicated figures, but in achieving the smoothest possible transition from breath to sound, between sound ‘with air’ and pure sound, in precise micro-intervallic intonations, and in crescendos performed in a narrow pianissimo dynamic range.
The voice comes as if from a considerable distance and is frequently indistinguishable from the instrumental sound. One of the most riveting moments is one in which the alto voice, previously exploring the low and middle registers, sings a sustained G#5 tone and then leaps a fifth below. The new tone gains stability on a fermata and dies down, which Nono indicates in the score as come sospeso, interrotto (as if suspended, interrupted), alluding to the climate of Il canto sospeso, composed in 1956 to texts by European resistance fighters executed by the Nazis.
Luigi Nono Post-Prae-Ludium n. 1 “per Donau” (1987)
The title Post-prae-ludium n. 1 per Donau, for tuba and live electronics, refers to Nono’s intention to write a series of solo pieces for performers with whom he had closely collaborated ever since he began working at the Experimentalstudio. In this case the collaborator was the tuba player Giancarlo Schiaffini, who gave this roughly fourteen-minute piece its first hearing in Donaueschingen on 17 October 1987. The combination of post- and prae-ludium in the title stands for the notion of ‘simultaneity’ characteristic of Nono’s all-embracing mode of thought in his later years. It also relates to the equivalence of performer and composer, live sounds, and electronics. . . .
Luigi Nono Guai ai gelidi mostri (1983)
Guai ai gelidi mostri is a work of extremes, one in which Nono’s desire to avoid predefined focal points and musical gestures becomes concrete. Placed in a semicircle in front of the audience, all eight interpreters are treated as soloists and amplified by microphones. Their sounds are transformed by live electronics and distributed in space by loudspeakers that must be placed in the concert hall as asymmetrically as possible. In a self-referential manner, Nono extracts all materials for Guai ai gelidi mostri from earlier compositions such as Das atmende Klarsein or Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco n. 2. Nono transposes these sonic fragments, distributes them among different instruments, and places them in a new order. Nono also experiments with the music’s temporal structure, encroaching on it by leaving the parameters of time to chance and determining new note values by the roll of dice. The frequent annotations “Josquin” and “Dadi” (dice) in the sketches clearly demonstrate Nono’s musical thinking, in which any given aleatoric moment is intimately connected with historic-cultural phenomena. The three low string instruments create a rhythmically fluctuating continuum of sound in sustained note values. Their parts are furnished with a plethora of performance markings, similar to the score of the string quartet Fragmente—Stille, an Diotima. Gently, as if hidden behind acoustic masks, their chords begin to glow. The sounds emerge from the halaphon—a device that can control sonic movement in real time—and roam around the concert hall. The two altos weave sustained syllables within this fragile architecture of sound but alight on the single words that for him would seem to hold meaning. Nono often allows the vocal part to fan out in its lowest register, achieving this by adding alternating fourths and fifths as live electronic intervals. Then, suddenly, striking chords disrupt the fitful continuum of sound.
Luigi Nono and family, ca. 1961. Photo: Earle Brown
