jwilzewske

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Stories of Water Falling: Forestalled Closure, Meta-Stories, and Monumental Uses of Silence

T hou still-unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggles to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
— John Keats, 1819, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Stanza 1.

I ’ve received quite a few emails recently concerning the several CMT posts that have appeared in the past several months about time and meter (links below). Thank you, to each of you who has shared your ideas.

M ost of these emails have been responses by way of examples illustrating how a particular pattern or figure can make us feel, either as performers or as listeners. Just yesterday I received an email from a composer who especially recommended the recent book by Martin Boykan, Silence and Slow Time, for its scope and insightfulness on these topics. I ordered a copy.

M eanwhile, though—while awaiting the Boykan book’s arrival—I’ve been enjoying Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s book on poetics—and listening to some recordings of Boykan’s pieces performed by Pro Arte Quartet.

Reading poems silently and aloud involves [at least] two separate dimensions of understanding. Reading music silently and playing it, likewise at least two dimensions. Unless we accept that ‘reading-silently-to-onesself’ and ‘performing-a-reading’ create [different] tensions and ambiguities that can only be resolved by our control of both experiences, we fail, I think, to understand how the texts really ‘work’.

It is fascinating to do—to read music without performing it or listening to it performed. It’s sad that not many regular people do this anymore. In the olden days, even amateur musicians used to do it to some extent. These days, mostly it is professionals. Why is this? People read words, read books without always speaking the words aloud. To not do this with music forecloses a whole world of imagination.

Narrative, when we engage it silently, has far different rhythms than narrative when it unfolds in performance. The succession of events, the ‘shape’ that they have as we perceive them, and the prominence of some details—chord progressions, melodic figures—and the deemphasis of others ... are tremendously different when we perform them (or listen to a performance), compared to when we read them silently. When we are in control, reading silently, our minds can make time dilate and contract. Our minds can keep and remember phrases or tokens of moments-just-past and continue attending to them, with a vividness and persistence that are greater than (and qualitatively different from—) how things are when we are performing the piece or listening to it.

Those things affect the way time appears to flow. Boykan’s ‘Echoes of Petrarch’ plays on my CD player. I am wishing I had the score in front of me…

How can we be sure that our “way of thinking [about music] … is faithful to the experience of playing or listening during a real performance” as Boykan recommends? How can we be certain our understanding resembles the composer’s act of composition?

According to the publisher’s blurb on the webpage where I ordered the book, Boykan “proposes a diachronic mode of musical analysis that considers not only the function of musical details but also the temporal location of such details. He contrasts his diachronic mode of analysis with a synchronic view of music whereby a composition is understood as a spatial object, something outside of time that we can perceive all at once.”

So I will try to project myself into a frame of mind that is faithful to this Boykan ‘Echoes’ piece by focusing my attention on its stream of events and their transformations and developments in musical time, to see what narrative emerges. Maybe certitude will emerge from that game.

Or not. The ‘Echoes’ has pauses and silences that defeat any attempts to conclude anything. It has trochaic pulses after the silences, sudden enough to stun. It is beautiful in its uncertainty, because of its uncertainty.

Boykan’s music … is ‘ekphrastic’. Its rhythmic silences and ‘whitespace’ illuminate the liveliness of the notes. Like a painting of a sculpture: the ‘Echoes of Petrarch’ composition is a ‘telling the story of’ its subject, and so—as Boykan becomes a storyteller, and as we follow the story—we hear the composition as a story (work of art) itself, as well as a story-about-a-story. A meta-story, a meta-compostion.

In this way, the composition re-presents reality, or Boykan’s expansive account of what he imagines that reality to have been—a sort of ‘notional ekphrasis’. One art work depicting another work of art that is still a ‘work-in-progress’ or, in this case, a reality that is not entirely knowable since the historical evidence is incomplete. …The distorted faces in a 14^th Century Italian crowd; a composition essaying particularly dark aspects of Petrarch’s 14^th Century Italian society—an ekphrasis built up, not with silences or pauses as strategic ‘punctuation’ or mechanical ‘fasteners’ merely, but instead as positive, load-bearing architectural elements.

In his analogy one silence form shares its own quietude—with all its shortcomings—with that of the ideal form, or template. A third class of quietude, too, may share the ideal form. He continues with the fourth form also containing elements of the ideal template/archetype which in this way remains an ever-present yet supremely inaudible ideal version with which the virtuosic silence-artist compares his work. As quietude after quietude shares the ideal form and template of all creation of silences, each quietude is associated with another ad infinitum, a Platonic ‘infinite regress of forms’.

Steven Feld’s ethnomusicological study of the Kaluli in Papua, New Guinea, showed that gulu or metric flow preserves continuity across silences and changes in meter. When the meter is choppy or there are gaps or silences then the Kaluli use the word kubu to refer to it. It is said to mimic irregular water-splashing sounds like when water falls over rocks. The Kaluli use the terms fo and bu to denote pulsating and interconnected quality of water rushing over rocks. A ritardando followed by an accelerando / a tempo is called golo, and denotes an eddy. Fasela and sob are terms they use to refer to places where their music mimics the rhythmic patterns of a benign, even-flowing waterfall. Don’t know what they call music that mimics killer Class VI rapids or malignant waterfalls...

Of course, waterfalls do not have rhythmic closure, except maybe on a geologic time-scale. Their harmonic cadences have a periodicity, but it is a sort that is normally only perceptible if you are patient enough to wait—possibly for many minutes or hours. Boykan seems to be very patient. Slow-time, he says...

Waterfall, comprised of jillons of H2O molecular artists perfrming on del Gesù rocks, not objecting to the conductorly, improvisational decisions of Gravity

There is an ekphrasis in the visual aspect of water-flow narrative / what-happens-to-water-happens-in-music. For the Kaluli people, ‘sob’ with mm = 120 denotes a continuous shimmering under the power of gravity. Spatial, atemporal, Boykanian silences intercalated with shimmering-water, propelled by the certitude of eternal gravity.

Feld shows how the ecology of natural sounds is central to a local musical ecology, and how this musical ecology maps onto the rainforest environment. For songs and weeping not only recall and announce spirits, their texts, sung in a poetry called "bird sound words", sequentially name places and co-occurring environmental features of vegetation, light and sound. Songs become what Kaluli call a ‘path’, namely a series of place-name tokens that link the cartography of the rainforest to the stories of its past and present inhabitants. These song-paths are also linked to the Kalulis’ spirit world of birds, whose flight patterns weave through trails and water courses, connecting a spirit cosmology above to local human histories below.

These gestures are all of a ritual, testimonial sort—rehearsing and reinforcing how the members of the culture should regard the world, how they should conceive of the cosmos. There is a monumental quality to them, one that defends against the ravages of aging and mitigates the fact of individual death. We get more of this in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion’, of course... Frozen gods, eternal quietude, beyond the passage of cyclical time, old marble ever-beautiful.

W hat if the composer’s problem is precisely that she/he does not know what one should say at a particular spot. What if silence and certitude are both equally impossible? The expectation of certitude reflects the cultural flip-side of the cultural craving for deferral of judgment and affirming uncertainty as beautiful. When certitude can be assumed or is obvious, then it needn’t be announced. But in an age where beliefs are unreliable, “militant fideism will be as characteristic as desperate scepticism,” as Barbara Herrnstein Smith says.

M artin Boykan (born 1931) studied composition with Walter Piston, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, and piano with Eduard Steuermann. He received a BA from Harvard University, 1951, and an MM from Yale University, 1953. In 1953-55 he was in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, and upon his return founded the Brandeis Chamber Ensemble. In 1964-65, he was the pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Boykan is currently the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University. He has been Composer-in-Residence at the Composer’s Conference in Wellesley and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, NYU, and Bar-Ilan University. Boykan has written for a wide variety of instrumental combinations including 4 string quartets, a concerto for large ensemble, many trios, duos and solo works, song cycles for voice and piano as well as voice and other instruments, and choral music. His symphony for orchestra and baritone solo was premiered by the Utah Symphony in 1993. His work is widely performed and has been presented by ensembles including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the League-ISCM, Earplay, Musica Viva and Collage New Music.

Amazon says the Boykan book will arrive on Saturday. I am looking forward to what is sure to be [an ekphrastic, poetical] meta-composition about composing. Gotta love his appropriation of Keats’s ode for his title...

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Latent Meaning: Performances as Authorship, Transcriptions as Intrepid Exploring

C an Bach’s famous keyboard variations actually be improved? . . . it depends what you mean by ‘improved’. If ‘given a fresh new perspective’ qualifies, then the answer, according to this CD, is a resounding ‘Yes’! Hearing three distinct voices instead of one truly enhances the experience of listening to this classic. So how did Dmitry Sitkovetsky transcribe it? Violin & viola for the right hand, cello for the left? It would be nice if it were that simple. Sometimes the treble line involves the viola and violin, sometimes just the violin. In the case of Variation 19, Sitkovetsky does something quite impish. He sneaks pizzicato figures into the counterpoint mixture, so that when the violin and viola are conversing, the cello provides background plucking. But wait! That’s not all! A few bars later, the pizzicato is traded back and forth among the instruments, only to fade in and out of prominence. And it all happens in less than two minutes. Other dazzling feats occur in this performance. The centerpiece is the haunting Variation 25, the longest (7:39) adagio in the piece. Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska called it ‘The Black Pearl’, perhaps for its deeply affecting, melancholic beauty. The trioists inject it with an impressive array of dramatic techniques, like deft shifts from pianissimo to mezzo-forte and slight shadings in tempo. It almost sounds like a string trio piece from the late classical period. Why does this arrangement of the Goldberg Variations succeed so well? … the structure of the piece lends itself to three instruments, not one. When played on keyboard instruments, the two upper voices are virtually indistinguishable [but in string trio the voices are each more distinct].”
— Peter Bates, review of Rachlin et al., AudiophileAudition, 11-JAN-2008.

I f you haven’t previously heard Dimitry Sitkovetsky’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ (BWV 988) for string trio [see links below], you will, I think, be pleasantly surprised. I particularly like the Deutsche Grammophon recording of the performance of it by Julian Rachlin (violin), Mischa Maisky (cello), and Nobuko Imai (viola).

[50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Aria’, 1.2MB MP3]

It is amazing how well-suited the variations turn out to be for strings. Sitkovetsky’s transcription is an expecially thoughtful and innovative one, which teases out new expressive elements that previously have been only ‘latent’ and never realized when played on a harpsichord or a piano.

New meanings that have lurked in Bach’s text for almost 270 years become apparent, even obvious. New kinds of tension—melodic, harmonic, textural, and metrical—that contribute to the music’s overall effect begin to take hold of us.

Dmitry Sitkovetsky was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1954 and is a Russian violinist and conductor. He grew up in Moscow, studying at the Moscow Conservatory. When he wanted to leave the Soviet Union in 1977, he feigned mentally illness, was granted permission to emigrate to the U.S. and studied at Juilliard. In 1979 he won first prize in the Kreisler Competition in Vienna. From then on he has appeared as soloist with renowned orchestras around the world. He was the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster Orchestra from 1996 to 2001 and was Conductor Laureate of the orchestra during 2002. Since 2003, he is Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Russian State Symphony in Moscow.

Each of the trio parts avails the player the opportunity for an expansive response to the text, as well as challenges to maintain a good blend and ensemble. Rachlin sounds especially intense and personal here, which is what one always wants from a performer. The prodigious insight of Sitkovetsky’s compositional decisions is ample justification for what might otherwise have been thought to be an ‘unnecessary’ transcription of ‘Goldberg’. Once you have it, you realize that you needed it all along...

Bach’s two- and three-part keyboard writing for most of the ‘Goldberg’, so double-stops might be thought to be the natural approach to a string trio transcription that would render the harmonies in the original text. But there is far more here than that. Sitkovetsky emphasizes the dialogues in the counterpoint by exquisitely leveraging the timbral differences between the instruments. Rachlin, Maisky, and Imai are genuinely inspired by the ideas that Sitkovetsky has provided, as you will readily hear in their superb Deutsche Grammophon recording.

Variation 18 ending

J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, V.18 mm. 23 - 32

[50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 18’, 1.2MB MP3]

Variation 19 opening

J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, V.19 mm. 1 - 5

Variation 19 ending

J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, V.19 mm. 28 - 32

[50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 19’, 1.2MB MP3]

Variation 20 opening

J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, V.20 mm. 1 - 6

[50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 20’, 1.2MB MP3]

In trying to understand why the Sitkovetsky string trio transcription of the ‘Goldberg’—and the Rachlin et al. performance of it—are so novel and genuinely illuminating, I recall that Peter Kivy once noted that “the quality that persists through [Landowska’s] various performances of the ‘Goldberg Variations’: performance is to be valued not as process but for the interpretation it embodies.” Kivy argued that performances are full-fledged ‘versions’ of works in precisely the same sense as arrangements are—performance becomes a vicarious act of composing. It is that full-fledged creativity that we hear here.

S o in the case of the Goldberg, there is in fact one pulse, which—with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications which I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.”
— Glenn Gould, interview with Tim Page, 1982.

Rachlin plays the opening aria with what feels to me to be just the ‘right amount’ of circumspection. The introspective sensitivity and exquisite variety of touch that Maisky and Imai achieve are a joy to hear as well. The transitions between Variations are well thought-out and deliver a perfectly coherent, consistent sense of ‘pulse’ from one Variation to the next—consummately Bach-like. The rhythmic alignments, Variation-to-Variation, amount to a kind of [64-bar] hypermeter that threads its way throughout the aria, the 30 variations in all their diverse 2-beat and 3-beat and 4-beat meters, and the da capo restatement of the aria. Click on the image below to open an Excel spreadsheet showing color-coded alignments of the tempi between Variations, as they are rendered in the Rachlin et al. recording of the Sitkovetsky transcription for string trio.

Raichlin et al., Goldberg Variations, Pulse Transitions between Variations (click image for Excel spreadsheet showing alignments)

To Kivy, music is never dominated by the text in front of us; music is performance and is therefore irreducibly ‘social’. It involves a direct and private communication from composer/transcriber to listener. The intelligibility of the piece is negotiated in real-time—none of the social participants has ‘omniscience’, or a privileged perspective of meaning and intelligibility.

How, after all, could we know would we know what Bach intended? All sorts of evidence, sure—some of it fragmentary, some flawed. So the musical text is under-determined with regard to performance practice, and performance interpretation can never be a matter of absolute ‘correctness’ but rather one of rigorous ‘coherence’ and thoroughgoing ‘genuineness’.

W hich is what we get here, in the Sitkovetsky played by Rachlin et al. Performers-as-composers/improvisers. Performers and transcribers as explorers, discovering new [historically informed] territory as they go.

This wonderful string trio transcription of ‘Goldberg’ convinces us that a piece of music is better considered as a ‘script’ rather than a ‘text’. We must not be relentlessly clinical or obsessively literal, focusing on the text as the ultimate source of truth and aesthetic value. To do that would be ruthlessly sterile and anti-musical, as Glenn Gould once said. This Sitkovetsky strikes me as one of the most ‘genuine’ transcriptions of anything, ever. Absolutely wonderful, and a fine ‘tool’ by means of which it’s possible to discover yet more meanings in a work that we might previously’ve thought we pretty thoroughly understood…

Julian Rachlin—Born in 1974 in Vilnius, Lithuania, his parents emmigrated in 1978 to Austria. In 1983, he entered the Konservatorium Wien and studied with Boris Kuschnir and Pinchas Zukerman. In 2005, Rachlin made his Carnegie Hall debut when he performed with the New York Philharmonic under Maazel. Rachlin also performs chamber music with such artists as Martha Argerich, Itamar Golan, Natalia Gutman, Gidon Kremer, and used to perform with Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2000, he joined Rostropovich and Yuri Bashmet, among others, in the premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Sextet. The same year, Rachlin also founded his own music festival in Dubrovnik, ‘Julian Rachlin and Friends’. In 2000, he was rewarded with the prestigious International Prize of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana of Siena. Julian Rachlin plays the 1741 ‘ex Carrodus’ Guarnerius del Gesù violin.
Mischa Maisky—Born in 1948 in Riga, Latvia, Mischa Maisky began his musical training at Riga’s Music School and Conservatory. In 1962 he enters the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1966 he won first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and began his studies with Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory. He was imprisoned by USSR authorities for 18 months and emigrated to Israel in 1973. He has maintained a busy and illustrious performing and recording career ever since.
Nobuko Imai—Born in 1943 in Tokyo, Imai began her training at Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen School of Music and soon after came to the United States where she studied at the Juilliard School and Yale University. She won first prize at both the Geneva International Music Competition and ARD International Music Competition at Munich. She taught as a Professor at the Detmold Academy of Music from 1983 to 2003, and currently teaches at the Conservatories of Amsterdam and Geneva, and at Conservatoire Supérieur et Académie de Musique Tibor Varga in Sion.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

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]

Luigi Nono, if a trombonist falls in a woodwind forest and there are only not-hearing musicians there, does it make a sound?

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…

Rehearsal before first performance of Prometeo in the Church of San Lorenzo, Venice; photo: Graziano Arici)

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.’

Vledimir Khlebnikov manifesto, quoted in Michael Wachtel, p.42

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.