Search - Luigi Nono, Stefania Woytowicz :: Luigi Nono: Complete Works for Solo Tape

Subjects that refuse to go away

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 01/23/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Foucault once said to Pierre Boulez that he admired new music for it at least kept pace profoundly with technology and came to powerfully utilize whatever dimensions it had offered the creative person, in concept.

Development in electronic sound/timbre was not without its own sets of dead-ends, and paradigms. At one point it was considered "mausoleum-like". Here you sit in an audience row staring at two large box seven-foot rectangles, suggesting nothing live, alive, nothing interactive, nothing leading anywhere,no human form of intervention, but into a frozen expanse, of a reconcocted abstract electronic space, i.e. whatever is projected out of these rectangles to you. Live electronics was certainly a breath of fresh air especially then with ensembles and groups with a better focus on human interaction and social content. Surely AMM of London, MEV in Rome, and Stockhausen's Group were great examples introducing the improvisitory element as well. There were others, but now we tend to think of improvised music situations as the "cutting edge" of this creative trajectory.



This two Disk set allows you here to survey Luigi Nono's contributions to this creative trajectory who also utilized live performers with electronics. Sorry the concept/ package here was to limit Nono's works to only those for "Solo Tape", (nastro magnettico). There are many important works missing I beleive " Musica Manifesto No.2 Non consumiano Marx",(1969), the impressive 40 minute "A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida"(1966),a dedication to Dallapiccola "Con Luigi Dallapicccola" (1979 and the powerful"La Fabbrica Illuminata"((1964)



Nono thought of the electronic genre as incredibly suitable to promuligating Marxism, the cause of the Left. The concert hall venue was increasingly hostile to political content and overall too difficult and bound to exclusively the middle classes.Who could better to afford seats at the opera.It was only with the help of the PCI in Italy that Nono was able to have any of his large-scale works produced, as his opera to activism in women's history, "like a burgeoning light of love" (1972/74)Obvious as well was this form of radical expression did not sit well within bourgeois venues, concert promotors and corporate funders.Nono at one point was banned from travel to the USA, and refused a visa. So having more complete control over the final product without sacrificing the technology or inflammatory content it may incorporate on a complex level appealed to Nono.Especially since his works were broadcast on the radio for a larger audience. Here he could utilize documentary-like texts, also live or pre-recorded footage from demonstrations for whatever he thought important relative to current events.It was as close as a composer can come to working in film. You can also pre-record singers without the "inaccuracies" rendered during a live performance.But then you need to circumvent the "frozen" stilted singing that may result, if edited and done with splicing the segments together. You can however finely hone a work as long as you like.

The radical content of much of the work here certainly reflects the scale of time portrayed roughly the Sixties, the time of the student movements, Algeria,and Vietnam,the rise of Nasser and the still functioning anti-fascist Left in Europe. There is also a long work after the Nazi Trials in Frankfurt, made into a Play by Peter Weiss, "Ermittlung".Weiss also wrote a situation, position text for this time "The Aesthetics of Resistance", a work that still holds true favor for the political artist if you care to read and follow it. Nono was asked by Weiss to provide electronic sounds for his controversial Play. This largley takened from Nono's previous work of the same subject matter "Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966), "remember what was done to you in Auschwitz". Both are powerful examples of how serious music can perhaps remain the only form to express, to represent how millions came to be were murdered,and for What? the question of genocide, of various "ethnic cleansings" still remains, as it also remains today in the Middle East.



The overall effect of the tape sounds here are mural-like,and the timbres sound dated with many different voices occuring simultaneously, with long sustained enveloping sounds,sharply cut,then noise-like"musicque concrete" events, shouting,all quite effective and powerful.The anti-war "Contrappunto dialettico alla mente" (1967-68)commissioned for radio broadcast especially has this incredible power of disunity,of fragmentations. It is serious music here with a rich complex pallette of sounds and texts from the Sixties.Nono thought of the medium itself of electronics as subversive, for it came to disrupt the logical projections of instrumental music. His opera "Intolleranza" for example, the electronics projected from multiple speakers throught the performing space "fights" with the pit orchestra and becomes circumvented where you cannot decipher whats going where.

There are also very detailed notes and complete texts for all the works here in the accompaning booklet, all translated into English. These texts are seminal,never published (in English) takened from the Studio Fonologia (RAI)in Milan and the Nono Archive in Venice.



Nono then went on , as you may know to requistion all this work, the experiences to a live electronics, that proved ever more developmental in the subsequent utilization of computer systems, storing sounds for released later within a work, antiphonal usage as well, and transformations of instrumental timbres, as his powerful "Prometeo""

Lots of interesting music to explore

White Bird | 12/17/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have other albums by Luigi Nono, but this I find the most interesting. The music like it's creator can be rather enigmatic at times. I think this album has an interesting sense of time and space that still sounds fresh today.

The fact that Nono began to incorporate documentary material (political speeches, slogans, extraneous sounds) on tape, and a new use of electronics, that he felt necessary to produce the "concrete situations" relevant to contemporary political issues (Annibaldi 1980). The instrumental writing tended to conglomerate the 'punctual' serial style of the early 1950s into groups, clusters of sounds--broadstrokes that effectively complimented the use of tape collage (Annibaldi 1980). I would like to hear a live performance of these works, but I will not hold my breath. "Omaggio A Emilio Vedova" is a very interesting slice of sound sheets and "Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente" has a haunting quality I find intriguing. All in all this is a pretty good collection of Nono's electronic work from his late 1950's to 60's period."