Biografia | Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono Onlus 15/01/2011 15:39

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the foundation NONO, Luigi (Venice, 29.1.1924 - Venice, 8.5.1990)
luigi nono 1. LIFE AND WORKS. Born into a family of artists – his grandfather Luigi was a painter and his uncle Urbano a sculptor – Nono
biography took an interest from an early age in cultural history and art. His interest in music was encouraged by his parents, who were
amateur musicians and who owned a sizable collection of recordings. From 1943 to 1945 he studied composition with Malipiero
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at the Venice Conservatory, where there was an emphasis on vocal polyphony and the madrigal tradition, as well as an
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awareness of the music of the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky and Bartók. Nono’s experiences of the war, of the Nazi
bibliography occupation and the Resistance were fundamental to his general development, while musically his meeting with Maderna was
linkography critical; from 1946 onwards they forged a long-lasting association. A small community of musicians grew up around them in
works Venice who, through the examination of the contrapuntal, harmonic and formal foundations of European art music, aimed to
develop a new musical language. Their main point of reference was Dallapiccola, who belonged to the preceding generation of
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Italian composers and with whom Nono developed a relationship of reciprocal esteem and friendship in 1947. The group
exhibitions shared in particular a desire to discover and learn from the Second Viennese School.
bulletins In 1948 Nono and Maderna took part in Scherchen’s conducting course in Venice, following which they worked together for the
publishers Ars Viva. For several years Scherchen became their mentor, and through private lessons (at Rapallo, 1952–3) Nono
friends of the luigi
nono archives studied further the compositional techniques of Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Webern. On Scherchen’s recommendation
he was accepted as a student on the 1950 Darmstadt summer course, at which the first performance of his Variazioni
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canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Schönberg provoked contrasting reactions. In Darmstadt he attended classes given by
Varèse, whose influence became progressively more apparent in his work. Until 1959 – the year of his controversial lecture
Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute – he continued to take part at the Darmstadt courses (from 1957 as a
teacher), during which many of his compositions were performed for the first time and important discussions and meetings
took place. He came into contact there with members of the Schoenberg school, in particular the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, with
whom he collaborated on the composition of his Varianti; in 1955 he married Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria. The Darmstadt
summer courses confirmed Nono’s leading position and, together with Boulez and Stockhausen, he became a key figure in the
European avant garde.
Nono’s musical technique and artistic stance developed not only through contact with the international musical community, but
also from works and figures in other cultural fields. His friendship and later collaboration with the painter Emilio Vedova, his
study of the theatrical ideas of Meyerhold, Piscator and Josef Svoboda, his exposure to the philosophical and political thought
of Gramsci and Sartre, and the poetry of García Lorca, Neruda, Eluard, Pavese and Ungaretti were of crucial importance at
that time. From these poets Nono took the texts for his vocal works of the 1950s : Tre epitaffi per Federico García Lorca, La
victoire de Guernica, La terra e la compagna and Cori di Didone. In the last two of these, and in the unquestionable
masterpiece of his first decade’s work, Il canto sospeso (1955–6) to texts by condemned prisoners of the European Resistance,
Nono made use of a new style of singing which involves the fragmentation of the text and its attachment to musical structures
which vary from a single line to diverse types of textural layering. Nono’s intense involvement in the social issues of his time
gave rise to a style in which sound and text are inextricably linked; in which the work takes a firm hold in the ‘real’ world, as a
kind of a historical record. Increasingly, Nono used texts with political references (he had in 1952 become a member of the
Italian Communist party), culminating in the stage piece Intolleranza 1960 which, at its first performance in Venice (1961),
provoked protest and uproar. It represented a turning-point, not only because for the first time it made concrete Nono’s ideas
for a new form of music theatre which he had been developing in the 1950s, but also because it revealed the extent of the
political conflict in which the composer felt himself involved: racial intolerance, fascist violence, exploitation of the working
classes, and the struggle for freedom and independence in developing countries.
Nevertheless, Nono must still have felt his means of musical expression to be insufficiently developed to articulate these ideas;
for immediately after Intolleranza 1960, he turned to work almost exclusively with electronics. In the RAI Studio di Fonologia
in Milan he began work on a new stage composition, which was to evolve into a series of uncategorizable works. The first was
La fabbrica illuminata (1964) for female voice and tape, the tape part comprising sounds recorded in a factory, workers’
voices, a choir and the soloist herself (originally Carla Henius). A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida (1966) and Y entonces
comprendió (1969–70), among other works, went to confirm certain fundamental aspects of Nono’s musical thought: the use
of vocal material, with singers and actors chosen for their particular timbre and quality of gesture; interaction between live
voices and their alter ego on tape; amplification to highlight aspects of the sound which would otherwise be difficult to
perceive; diffusion of the sound from different points in space; and, last but not least, the employment of texts which
document contemporary history. These works represent an avant-garde stance which, abandoning traditional musical narrative
and grammar, employs the most advanced technical means in order to expose the structures of political power.
The 1960s witnessed intense confrontation between the theory and the practice of Marxism, and Nono played a significant role
in these events. In 1965 he realized a tape score for the play Die Ermittlung by Peter Weiss; the following year he worked on
material for Living Theatre; 1967 saw his first long trip to Latin America where he met the leading figures of cultural and
political opposition; and in 1968 he collected materials from the student protests in Paris, which are used in Musica-manifesto
no.1. The texts Nono employed during this period together create what amounts to a map of socialist culture: from Fidel
Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X, to revolutionary documents from various
continents. Nono’s theatre piece Al gran sole carico d’amore (1972–4) – in which events from different epochs are fused
together under the common theme of women’s struggle for liberation – is both the synthesis and conclusion of his openly
declared political position.

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With the string quartet Fragmente–Stille, an Diotima (1979–80), he seemed to be entering a more private phase in his career,
focussed on more abstract musical concerns. But although Nono worked with new ideas in this and subsequent pieces he did
not abandon the fundamental aesthetic and technical issues of the previous decades. For example, form constructed from a
discontinuous series of fragments – with which Nono had experimented for the first time at the end of the 1950s in the
orchestral Diario polacco ’58 – was now brought to the fore, with a considerable reduction in the length and dynamic level of
what might be described as sonorous islands, amid a scenery of silence. There continued, too, the conception of the performer
as a source of individual material, developed through collaborative exchange with the composer (in the 1970s this way of
working had, with Pollini, given rise to Como una ola de fuerza y luz and … sofferte onde serene …). And Nono remained
convinced of the need for technology in the process of musical creation. Indeed, the themes of violence, oppression and
utopian tension had not disappeared either, only now they were no longer dealt with on a historical or documentary level, but
rather on an individual level, taking on a quasi-ontological significance. Two factors, in particular, contributed to the
characteristic features of this period: Nono’s meeting with the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, and his work at the
Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung in Freiburg. The eclectic thought of Cacciari – strongly influenced by
Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke and Walter Benjamin, and also by the study of myth and Jewish mysticism – became an
inexhaustible source of inspiration. The texts for Nono’s pieces were now formed from collections of fragments of literary and
philosophical writing undertaken in collaboration with Cacciari; while in the Freiburg studio he worked closely with a team who
were mastering the most advanced techniques for transforming sound in real time and diffusing it in space. His concept of
‘composition’ broadened, now taking into account the internal evolution of sound and its spatial trajectory. The most important
project born out of the Freiburg experiments and his collaboration with Cacciari was Prometeo (1984), a large-scale work
which represented a new stage in the development of that form of music theatre which, from the time of Intolleranza 1960
onwards, Nono had defined as azione scenica. However, during the composition of Prometeo every narrative, scenic and visual
element was eliminated; there remained only a gigantic wooden structure, the shape of which resembles the keel of a boat,
but whose function is that of a gigantic resonating case which the architect Renzo Piano planned for the interior of the church
of S Lorenzo in Venice. Nono defined Promoteo as a ‘tragedy of listening’, alluding on the one hand to Greek tragedy with its
stasimons and choruses and on the other to a drama which unfolds within sound itself. During the composition of the work he
also turned at times to various shorter compositions for voices, a small instrumental ensemble and live electronics: Quando
stanno morendo (Diario polacco no.2), Guai ai gelidi mostri and Risonanze erranti. The same years also saw the appearance
of two major pieces for full orchestra – A Carlo Scarpa architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili and No hay caminos, hay que
caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij – in which conceptions of sound requiring the use of computers are re-thought on a purely
acoustic level.
2. COMPOSITIONAL THEORY AND PRACTICE. Nono’s output reflects a continuous and coherent evolution in compositional
technique, which goes beyond the controversial developments of 1959 (his polemical lecture against the Darmstadt circle) and
of 1980 (the explicit emphasis on the internal dimensions of music). His notion of sound as a complex event with its own
internal mobility, a notion that emerges explicitly in his last decade, is already evident in the early works which established his
international reputation. These pieces, often discussed under the rubric of ‘integral’ serialism, bear the trace of the
contrapuntal techniques of the Franco-Flemish school, which he had studied, and their influence on the dodecaphonic canons of
Webern and Dallapiccola. However, even in his first work, the Variazioni canoniche, the principle of canon is varied to such an
extent that it is no longer recognizable, even while it continues to serve as a basic structure. Variation, meanwhile, is
redefined as a structural procedure involving the progressive transformation of the note row’s motivic content, using
permutations of both pitch and duration (these parameters now being placed on an equal footing).
For a while Nono worked more intensively on the idea of the row as initial material, leading to ever-changing melodic-
harmonic groupings. In Tre Epitaffi per García Lorca, Due espressioni and La victoire de Guernica, he also experimented with
the serial development of rhythms from popular tradition, especially Spanish. However, the risk of a disparity between the
compositional principles in operation and the material used – which, though fragmented and re-arranged, was still
‘recognizable’ – soon became a cause of dissatisfaction. Incontri announces his move to a more abstract, integrated kind of
construction: durations and dynamics are linked together serially, and timbres, registers and textural density become
fundamental musical parameters. In the essentially ‘physical’ concept of continuously evolving ‘sound complexes’, driven by a
carefully designed macrorhythmic profile, the piece displays significant evidence of Varèse’s influence. With Il canto sospeso
Nono reached the climax of his maturing process. The nine movements which comprise the work are all rigorously organized
according to serial principles, though the number of elements, and how they are combined, varies from piece to piece.
Starting with a limited nucleus – an all-interval row and a Fibonacci sequence – diverse results emerge, the nature of which
depends directly on the meaning of individual texts and the dramaturgy of the work as a whole. Melodic splintering, in
particular, marked by sharp contrasts of register and dynamics, introduces a new kind of signifying relationship between word
and sound. In the instrumental and vocal compositions which immediately followed – Varianti, Cori di Didone, La terra e la
compagna, Diario polacco ’58, Sarà dolce tacere, and Ha venido: canciones para Silvia – serial techniques are no longer used
to generate new material but instead to determine the internal articulation of the sound aggregates. For example at the
beginning of Varianti, a single pitch is varied using a sequence of changing instruments and dynamics: a Klangfarbenmelodie in
miniature in which a kind of polyphony is created within the sound which endows it with extraordinary energy. These methods
form the beginnings of the late orchestral compositions of the 1980s, such as A Carlo Scarpa architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili,
in which Nono worked extensively with single pitches, varying them by means of microtonal inflections, different combinations
of timbre and texture, and spatial mobility.
Nono’s humanistic outlook was formed out of an insatiable curiosity for the viewpoints and methods of other artistic genres
(theatre, literature, painting, architecture and cinema) and a strong interest in all human forms of communication (from the
workplace to politics, from philosophical thought to the mythical and religious sphere): he believed that art is never exhausted
in its technical capacity, that it reflects the totality of human experience. His entire body of work from Il canto sospeso
onwards can be seen as an attempt to provide a satisfactory answer to Sartre’s question, ‘Why write?’; the Sartre-like reply,
while varied in its musical expression over the course of time, was ‘in order to fulfil our duty to produce the world’. This is the
source of Nono’s socio-political stance, completely at odds with that of, say, Eisler or his contemporary Henze. It was not for
him a question of reproducing in music the emotions of suffering, scorn, anger, rebellion, desire and love of which the texts
speak, or to which the titles of instrumental compositions refer; rather, it was the idea of formulating on a musical level, in the
unshakable unity of sound, issues for which humanity demands urgent resolution: ‘To listen is to know’.
Fired by the conviction that all artistic activity must be motivated by ethical and political considerations, Nono considered that,
for a piece to make an impact on reality, the composer must be familiar with the most advanced musical techniques of his

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age. The compositions in which Nono dealt explicitly with political issues thus became those in which he experimented most
with electronic technology. In A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida, for example, the voices of a soprano and several actors, the
sound of sheets of copper being struck and the multiphonics of a clarinet are transformed in the studio by means of a set of
modulators and filters; the same sound sources interact live with the tape, creating situations of tension and resolution which
redefine on a new semantic level texts from Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, an anonymous student from the University of
California, a South Vietnamese soldier, an Angolan guerrilla and Italian manual workers. In Quando stanno morendo (Diario
polacco no.2) texts by Russian poets, including Blok and Chlebnikov, serve as catalysts to portray experiences in prison and
exile in countries under the Soviet regime. This was also the first of Nono’s major works to treat voices and instruments in
performance by means of a coordinated system of live electronics – involving delay, reverberation, harmonic spectrum
modification and control of the movement of sound in space.
In his last decade, Nono saw his use of technology as having a positive role with regard to cultural, and hence social,
emancipation. Nevertheless many commentators have continued to view the period quite differently, as one of individualism
and the metaphysical; Nono’s image of Utopia redefined through his own concepts of ‘other ways of listening’ and ‘possible
infinities’. These last works not only call for a new attitude to sound perception, but also require that spaces in which we
listen, notation, the attitude of the performer and the whole conception of compositional work be changed. The position of
performers and listeners was altered by placing individual instrumentalists or orchestral groups in different parts of the hall,
while the fluctuating interior of the sound could now be controlled entirely through computer programmes, realized through
collaboration with technicians. Such programming was adapted to every new environment, and this called for a new flexibility
in musical notation, as well as the most sensitive understanding of the performers who – with their continuous micro-
variations in pitch, dynamic and timbre – both act in and react to the overall sound production. There is now no longer a
principal performer, but each member of the team, including the technicians, forms part of a larger reciprocally-acting mosaic
of members. Virtuoso players are required, but not in the traditional sense of an athletic display of numerous notes and
complex rhythmic figures; instead there is a sort of ‘static’ virtuosity, calling for concentration, control of the most subtle
oscillations in sound and the ability to interact with the other ensemble participants. A work is thus no longer the product of a
solitary composer, but the result of a continuous exchange of ideas within the triangle of composer–performer–technician. At
the end of his artistic pilgrimage, Nono was still as rigorous and tireless in his experimentation as at the start. He tackled
head-on many of the most salient questions of musical language of his time, and in so doing, opened up new horizons in
composing and listening. He occupies a position at the very forefront of 20th-century music.
(Gianmario Borio)

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