Before We Go: Luigi Nono, Omissions, Silence, & The Rhetoric of Wee Hours

Y    ou know, you are mistaken in the translation of this Khlebnikov poem. ‘When they are dying, horses feel profoundly relieved / When they are dying, shrubberies become sad / When they are dying, suns cease to shine / When they are dying, men sing’ is a more apt rendering of the sense of the Russian. Your ‘When horses die, they breathe / When grasses die, they wither / When suns die, they go out / When people die, songs are sung’ is badly wrong. Seriously in error. Every line. You should fix it. Otherwise, schmexy.”
  —  M. Vladov, email to CMT.

A  very interesting point. The CMT post that M. Vladov was commenting on was actually an essay I wrote last year while stuck in an airport with a long flight delay. It was on the Kronos Quartet performance of Henryk Górecki’s ‘and songs are sung…’ and how its meaning, for me, is closely tied to progressive disability and terminal decline to the end of life, as fundamental/inescapable parts of the human condition. The epigram at the top of that CMT post was actually someone else’s (Górecki’s?) rendering of the Khlebnikov poem into English, not my own.

And yet I very much like and appreciate M. Vladov’s clarification/correction. He/she says it’s not the survivors who sing on the occasion of the loved-one’s death. That comes later. It’s instead the one who is dying who, if lucky enough to have time and lucid moments so late in the game, “sings” an intimate, extemporized ‘epilogue’ of his/her life’s story, to anyone—anyone—who is nearby. Having worked for years in palliative medicine and hospice, I can say that that is true: the poignant, urgent need to create meaning by saying and singing to other members of our species—it is almost as strong as the need the heart has to beat and beat, or our hunger for air until, finally, the need collapses and we let go of that beating, breathing hunger and depart the planet. That is what Khlebnikov’s poem is about—or at least that’s what M. Vladov’s email makes me think, and what I believe he/she meant by ‘every line wrong’.

And the stars/suns don’t ‘fade out’ in the way that some English translations have it. This, in M. Vladov’s view, is just as outrageously wrong, same as the one in the liner of the Kronos CD. Instead, the stars/suns utterly cease! The light stops, they implode never to shine again—whatever. No dwindling, no dimming and fading, just sudden nuclear darkness.

Когда умирают кони - дышат,
Когда умирают травы - сохнут,
Когда умирают солнца - они гаснут,
Когда умирают люди - поют песни...
  —  Хлебников, 1912.

Further, it isn’t trivial grasses that wither and rot, prosaically, soullessly … in a manner that merits only passing regard from untouched humankind. Instead, the entire biosphere, vegetables and shrubberies and all, is ensouled and its members of all species have moral standing and have a capacity for sorrow, albeit implemented with very different nervous systems than we mammals have. And, oh, by the way, you will not get out unscathed by the death of the plants…

And horses, M. Vladov says, are relieved at the end—which I first-hand also know to be true, as I once owned horses and have seen them euthanized. The death rattle and last exhalation of a horse is louder than that of a human being. It’s a large animal with large lungs and big vital capacity and a tidal volume that is 10 to 15 mL/kg, or 6 liters compared to an adult human’s 750 mL. Horses are obligate nose-breathers. For those reasons, it is more likely that you will hear their dying breath and, if you hear it, more likely that you will hear it in enough detail that you will be able to grasp its several musical stages, millisecond by millisecond, until it is gone. You will not then doubt (if you ever did—) that the animal has a soul. It is not a stupid, empty moment. You can sense the animal’s relief as it lets go of the mortal body and flies away.

It is enough to, maybe, make you nostalgic for the time before you were born. No. Scratch that. For the time before you were conceived. [goes away from PC, listens to owls in moonlight, returns to desk, looks at a humorous photo of Luigi Nono]

I    believe that more than ever before humankind has the opportunity and the ability to study; to open up new routes; to reach for peaks; to discover peaks that are beyond the heavens—different spaces, different worlds! Different abysses! Different fantasies!”
  —  Luigi Nono.

Da capo… There is besides the Górecki, of course, another composition that referenced the same famous Khlebnikov poem and took it as an inspiration and point of departure: Luigi Nono’s ‘Quando stanno morendo’—the Italian for ‘When they are dying’. I’m not sure what M. Vladov will make of the Nono piece. Nono composed it for the Warsaw Music Festival of 1985, but the festival was cancelled. Some of Nono’s friends were in exile, some were in prison, and some were resisting the Russian ‘invasion that never happened’. Written in 1985 in Baden-Baden; ‘Quando stanno morendo No. 2’ is a chamber work that is scored for four female voices, plus flute, cello and live electronics. There are some analysts and historians who insist that this is a ‘political’ piece, but I think a valid personal, individualistic reading is also possible—in the same vein as the Gorecki. Anyone, I think, who has worked with the dying would think so…

L    isten to this moment: a weak power thinking bringing to a [mortal] halt.”
  —  Luigi Nono, Chorus, Prometeo.

Pure anxiety and beauty coexist in the vocal intervals that incarnate them. Nono was in those days experimenting with what one might call ‘timbral particle physics’, splitting the acoustic ‘atom’, combining different sonorities of instruments and instrumentalists’ breathing… anatomical sound-art of the human body, with instruments as prosthetic devices, crutches. For B-flat clarinet and C flute, dozens of tones are familiar to us; the contrabass flute, and contrabass clarinet ones, less so. The amplified flute here sounds like Khlebnikov’s expiring horse … my expiring cancer patient … evolving into gentle breath sounds and harmonics/gasps, followed by solo voices accompanied by low-pitched electroacoustics.

The finale has the singers again in restrained Khlebnikovian agony.

La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura’ takes us on a path that Nono suspects leads to a utopia—or at least something different than what we have now. Change we can believe in, not because we have any desire for or knowledge of the destination, but rather because we realize that our present location is no longer habitable. Our air is exhausted, our position here no longer tenable. It is patently obvious that it is untenable now; we have no choice but to depart this planet.

Luigi Nono

• Arrived: 29-JAN-1924, Venice, Italy
  
• Departed: 8-MAY-1990, age 66, Venice, Italy
  
• Cause of death: undisclosed
  
• Politics: Socialist
  
• Nationality: Italy
  
• Precis: Composer of serialist, electronic, and aleatoric music.
  
• Education: B.Mus, Venice Conservatoire (1941); JD, University of Padua (1946); studied composition under Gian Francesco Malipiero, Bruno Maderna, Hermann Scherchen
  
• Father: Mario Nono (civil engineer)
  
• Mother: Maria Manetti
  
• Significant other: at age 31 married Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg
  
• Daughters: Silvia Nono (b. 1959), Serena Bastiana (b. 1964)

    [50-sec clip, Schreck Ensemble, Luigi Nono, ‘Fabbrica Illuminata’, 1.2MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Schreck Ensemble, Luigi Nono, ‘La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura’, 1.2MB MP3]

L    uigi Nono’s only score for string quartet, ‘Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima’ [Hushed Fragments for Diotima] already expresses at the very beginning of the 1980s, with its ample phrases made up of fragments mingled with long-held notes and drawn-our silences, that ‘tragedy of listening’ that haunts the composer’s last works—a world both crepuscular and ethereal, shot through with shadows and fleeting sensations, and a meditation on the ‘eternal, silent brightness’ of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.”
  —  Arditti CD case blurb.

But beyond what must be said and beyond what we are so hungry to say at the end—beyond what occurs to us to sing just before we finally go—is that which is unsaid or unsayable, or unsung, unsingable. Luigi Nono’s composition for orchestra and electronics, ‘Prometeo’, is the epitome of that. John Wollaston gives a fine essay on the London Sinfonietta performance of ‘Prometeo’ earlier this year here. Prometheus was the Greek mythical figure who is symbolic of the belief in progress, and symbolic of unconditional love and hubris at the same time. [Hell, the idea of ‘unconditional love’ is hubristic all by itself, progress or no progress.] Prometheus also culminates Luigi Nono’s composerly thinking: extreme sound-art, predictable and unpredictable panning of sound fields within the performance space, and aleatoric compositional and performance processes—disembodied, spectral.

Prometeo’ as Luigi Nono’s answer to Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’? Nono’s ‘Quando stanno morendo’ is his answer to Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’? Well, no. To me, Nono seems more particular, more highly personal—more specific about the plight of the individual, rather than about the political plight of a class of people…


The estrangement of this body from its soul and the fragmentation of the sense of sight from the sense of sound that Nono achieves in ‘Prometeo’—especially if it is performed or recorded in a spacious performance hall—are remarkable. As Wollaston notes, “At this stage in Nono’s later musical theatre, sight no longer has a purpose. As he considered the visual realm a site for the most dangerous sorts of dictatorial manipulations, of both audience and source material, Nono aimed to rescue his musical theatre from visual elements. This anti-visual syndrome was developed in order that the fusion of the point of view might be a delicate one taking place within a craft of intricate networks upon magnified sonic elements.” Reflecting on the immediately prior CMT post on macular degeneration, I am led to wonder how low-visioned or blind people experience ‘Prometeo’. The uncertainties in ‘Prometeo’ are unnerving for us who still have good vision…

It’s an aleatoric-antiphonal chamber piece with four instrumental ensembles scattered to the four winds, with a choral ensemble on-stage, plus five solo singers deployed up on high platforms and scaffolding. Also distributed high in upper balcony/box locations on both sides of the auditorium are smaller groups of musicians and two narrators, along with tubas, a contrabass clarinet, and custom-made glass instruments. Electroacoustic parts are done via a speaker array that is deployed overhead and around the walls of the room. Wollaston says that this geometry “inscribe[s] several horizons, artificial or electronically produced, and actual. Each space has its chant; all together constitute the sky. And in these skies we might ‘rediscover the possible’.”

A    mplified echoes play explicit formal roles in the present sound, the electronics enable precisely defined constructions in the course of the now-time of hearing with shapes and resources of a previously articulated event. This re-enunciated remnant is made mobile to such extent in a multiplicity of movement that the listener becomes lost in a kind of unitary perception. … A tension exists between a sense of circling the ultimate fragmentation, not the highest but the last, as sound director André Richard said at a pre-concert discussion, ‘the last before dying’, between this ultimate finality and an open possibility is compassable, the realm of infinitely variable potentialities where we ought ‘rediscover the possible’. Nono’s sound unravels a paradoxical seamlessness between the collapse into silence and extreme fragments of sonic event, pregnant and intensive. In this way, silence becomes a principle motivating force within the music.”
  —  John Wollaston, review of London Sinfonietta performance of ‘Prometeo’.

W achtel’s nice book talks about the ‘transfiguration’ elements in Khlebnikov poems and others’ experiments with wordless ululations and ‘Zaum Gedichte’ (‘sound-poetry’; ‘beyond-sense-poetry’)—the organic, alinguistic simplicity of it; the association-free vocality of words sung, detached from human minds and intentions; emblems of Hölderlin’s tragedy as ‘the understanding in misfortune, the dreaming naive... to depict man’s understanding as wandering below the unthinkable.’


Semi-comprehending what they sing, we hear the experiences of the about-to-depart and imagine our own, sometime in the indefinite future. Long, sustained notes: a fragile, tenuous thread on which the spirit is suspended—in several different layers in musical space and in several layers of register/pitch. Fitting that I should happen to listen to this in the wee hours, on the basis of thoughts triggered by an email from an M. Vladov somewhere halfway around the planet…

Comments and emails are a delight when you send them to me here at CMT. I invariably learn something and often make new friends. If I make mistakes, please forgive me. Thank you! [goes back to listening to Arditti Quartet recording of Nono, Great Horned owls outside in the trees still howling aleatorically]

M    usically, the work is luminous. Nono is a serialist, but one who knows how to make music sing and make music dramatic. The piece is full of powerful moments. Much was made of the inclusion of worker's songs including the Internationale when the piece was premiered. The use of such straightforward tonal material in an avant-garde piece was against the grain at the time. After 25 years, this doesn’t shock anymore. What does stay with you is how well integrated the tonal material is with the serial material. Nono uses similar procedures on the workers’ songs as he uses on his tone rows. The result gells nicely. It does not have the pastische quality that quotations in Berio’s Sinfonia have. Rather, it packs emotional punch. Nono was always considered to be the most politically committed of the Darmstadt set of the 50s and 60s. (Though Xenakis certainly was as well.) This may explain why his music retains such a powerful impact. Where Boulez was looking for an almost mathematical approach to composition, and Stockhausen was alternatively a musical explorer and a mystic, Nono was motivated by deep love for people. As a result his music retains a humanity that is more readily apparent than in other Darmstadters.”
  — Christopher Forbes, Brooklyn.

• DSM. Górecki on Loss: Progressive Disability in the Shadow of Canonic Agency. CMT blog, 15-SEP-2007.
  
• DSM. Sound Art: Beyond Mere Music. CMT blog, 26-APR-2008.
  
• Arditti Quartet website
  
• Anonymous. It’s over, Debbie. JAMA 1988; 259:272. [50KB pdf]
  
• American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine
  
• International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care
  
• PalliMed Hospice and Palliative Medicine blog
  
• Khlebnikov page at Northwestern Univ (Chicago)
  
• Khlebnikov page at Taverner's Koans
  
• Khlebnikov site
  
• Another nice Khlebnikov site
  
• Online Russian translation (FreeTranslation.com)
  
• ImTranslator.net
  
• Translation2.Paralink.com
  
• Ensemble Sospeso New York
  
• Das NonoProjekt
  
• Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono
  
• Schreck Ensemble/Schreck Assembly (The Netherlands)
  
• Allwardt I. Die Stimme der Diotima. Friedrich Hölderlin und Luigi Nono. Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004.
  
• Arditti String Quartet. Nono: Fragment; Hay que caminar. (Disques Montaigne, 2003.)
  
• Barainsky C, et al. Luigi Nono: Al gran sole carico d'amore. (Elektra, 2001.)
  
• Beyst S. Luigi Nono’s ‘Quando stanno morendo, Diario Polacco No. 2’, JAN-2004, essay on d-sites.net
  
• Byock I. The Four Things That Matter Most. Free Press, 2004.
  
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• Kremer G, et al. La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura [Nostalgia for a Far Away Future Utopia]. (Deutschegramophon, 2003.)
  
• Lynn J, Harrold J. Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness. Oxford Univ, 2001.
  
• Mast C. Luigi Nono: Io, Prometeo. Stroemfeld, 2008.
  
• Metzger H-K, Riehn R, eds. Luigi Nono. ed. text+kritik, 1981.
  
• Musil R. A Man Without Qualities. Vintage, 1996.
  
• Nono L. Das Atmende Klarsein. (Col Legno, 2008.)
  
• Stenzl J. Luigi Nono. Rowohlt, 1998.
  
• SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden. Luigi Nono: Orchestral Works & Chamber Music. (Col Legno, 2000.) [Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima, for string quartet]
  
• Theus C, et al. Luigi Nono: Quando Stanno Morendo. (Stradivarius, 2008.)
  
• Wachtel M. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry. Cambridge Univ, 2004.
  
• Wollaston J. A weak power thinking bringing to a halt. [review of Prometeo, U.K première] Mute magazine, 28-MAY-2008.
  
• Williams S. Ngh Wht: The Dead Emcee Scrolls / Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop. SP, 2008. [Arditti Qt collaboration]