INTRODUCTION
Together with Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio, Ligeti, Goeyvaerts and Kagel,
Luigi Nono belongs to that handful of composers that provoked a
landslide in the music of the fifties and sixties of the past century,
that has remained unparalleled up to now. But, in contrast with many of
his contemporaries, who will be remembered foremost for their early
work, Nono (1924-1990) came to full bloom only at the end of his life.
From 1975 onwards he dedicated himself to the composition of a number of
closely related works such as ‘Das Atmende Klarsein’ (1980-1983), ‘André
Richard’ (1981), ‘Guai ai gelidi Mostri’ (1983) and ‘Quando stanno
morendo, Diario Polacco nr. 2 (1982). Apart from the important string
quartet ‘Fragmente-Stille. An Diotima’(1979-80) and works like “Hay que
caminar” sonando’ (1989), which enclose the whole as a kind of prologue
and epilogue, we can envisage all the works of this period as an
archipelago, in the middle of which arises the island of islands: the ‘Prometeo’.
This ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’, originally conceived for the San Marco in
Venice, was premiered in 1984 in the San Lorenzo in Venice. But it is
the second version, reworked on the basis of his experience in the San
Lorenzo in Venice, and premiered in the Scala di Milano in 1985, that has hence been
performed in many places throughout the entire world. Not only is the ‘Prometeo’
the jewel in the crown of Nono’s oeuvre, it may also be considered one
of the best works composed in the past century. And that holds
especially true of the unforgettable last movement of this opera: the
wonderful ‘Stasimo Secondo’.
THE VOICES
.
..un orbe descompuesto
en sones por el viento.
from: 'Tragedia del ascolto'
Vladimir García Morales
Let us first examine the musical material.
To begin with: those remarkable two- or three-part vocal fragments
running as a thread through the opera. It seems as though the
melodic/harmonic universe, which had expanded to an endless profusion of
points in serialism, is trying to reconstruct itself though absolute
negation: the points are transformed into sustained tones and their
profusion into single intervals– preferably octaves, fifths or fourths,
but also sevenths and seconds, or the tritone. Of these intervals, the
first tone often continues resounding when the second sets in, so that
succession is transformed into simultaneity, wholly in the spirit of
Schönbergs’ strive for integration of the vertical and the horizontal
axis. Or of Skriabin: ‘Melody is harmony opened out, while harmony is
melody drawn together’. Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit!
Through such reduction of the serial profusion to the elementary
interval, the tones are no longer freely floating in atonal space. The
one and only tonic, the gravity of which had been denied in Schonberg’s
universe, has become the very backbone of ‘Guai ai gelidi mostri’. In
the ‘Prometeo’ it is rather the fifth in which the implosion comes to a
standstill. The entire Prometeo seems to stay under the sign of the
fifth: it begins with and ends with this divine interval, and what
happens between seems to be one gigantic organum*. But one in which the
circling around the tonic has come to a standstill: the melody, reduced
to the succession of intervals, is moving so slowly, that it seems as
though we are gliding from one tonic to another. The linear succession
is broken up through frequent jumps to the higher or the lower octave,
so that the whole seems to capriciously move through the ever changing
registers of an expanded musical space. And also the strict parallel
movement is broken in that the fifth often narrows to a fourth or a tritone, before unfolding into a new fifth. Often, also the octaves
narrow into sevenths or widen into ninths. Thus, the organum unfolds to
that remarkable way of moving developed in ‘Das atmende Klarsein’: one
single note redoubles itself into a field of tension between tonic and
dominant, or the field of tension between tonic and dominant narrows
into a unison on a new tonic. Instead of the dodecaphonic beings that
begrudge one another their fall into the primeval ground, we are dealing
here with anxious mountaineers, cautiously moving over the mountain wall
from one hold to another. That is the way in which Nono succeeds in
conveying a feeling of constancy without having to resort to repeating
the same tone, as in ‘Guai ai gelidi mostri’.
In such implosion of the melodic/harmonic or serial universe in octaves,
fifths and fourths, Nono seems to have forgotten the thirds and the
sixths. But they are not entirely absent. Where they shimmer through,
they have something of an epiphany, as in the solos for bass flute in
‘Das atmende Klarsein’, where, already after the first minutes – at
least in the version of Fabricciani – the unbroken beauty of the triad
is got out of the instrument, played in overtones, which lend the sound
something of a glass-harmonium – an echo of times bygone. And also in ‘Terzo,
Quarta, Quinta Isola', but foremost in the ‘Stasimo Secondo’, they seem
to relentlessly try to break through – as if the organum wanted to come
to a standstill in a sustained triad, like in Wagners ‘Vorspiel’ to ‘Das
Rheingold’.
THE INSTRUMENTS
Este silbar del aire en flautas graves
es el sonido cercenado de la noche
el sonido inaudible
que sustenta el tronar
de trompas y trompetas en la tromba
de clangores que dañan el silencio.
from: 'Tragedia del ascolto'
Vladimir García Morales
Nono enhances the natural clarity of the human voice through letting it
sing on the most sonorous intervals – octaves, fifths and fourths (or a
concatenation of them). The effect is further enhanced in that the tones
are sustained for a long time, so that it seems as if the voice only
sings vowels. Of the instruments, on the other hand, Nono is corroding
the sonority in every conceivable way: by blowing too hard or too soft,
by playing over the fingerboard or at the bridge, by letting the bow
move around its axis (‘arco mobile’), by playing infinitely slowly, or
by playing tones nearly out of the reach of the instruments. Or he has
the tone pulsate through letting two instruments play not perfectly in
unison, so that interferences are produced. Or he piles up tones in such
quantities that the sound is approaching noise (clusters).
The effect of the unusual ways of playing is enhanced through the choice
of the intervals. In ‘Guai ai gelidi mostri’ the sound of the flutes
becomes unbearably piercing precisely because they are blown over on a
fifth. The effect is further enhanced in that the fifths are piled up so
that the harshness of seconds is added to the ‘dissonance’. These
strident blocks of sound are the prelude to the powerful blasts of the
coppers of the four orchestras, which again and again come to tear up
the subtle fabric of the Prometeo.
On top of that, Nono also has the timbre of the sound change. As in that
wonderful continuum of sounds played by the strings in the ‘Tyrannos’
from ‘Guai ai gelidi mostri’ or in the ‘Tre voci a’ and the ‘Interludio
secondo’ from the Prometeo. The subtle changes are obtained through
changes in the way of playing, through shifts in the relative weight of
the instruments, or through the fading away of instruments.
A CANTAR E A SONAR
But we would do injustice to Nono when so fiercely opposing the world of
the instruments to the world of the voices. Voices and instruments often
engage in a dialogue.
The interaction moves in two directions. Sometimes it is the voice that
seems to become an instrument: when the sound of the voice is taken over
by the sound of an instrument, that is so chosen as to be nearly
distinguishable from the voice, like in those marvellous passages in ‘Terza/Quarta/Quinta
Isola’, where the high register of the trombone seems to take the vowels
out of the singers’ mouth. And in the 'Stasimo secondo’ the instruments
engage in the most enchanting relations with the human voice. In all
these cases, the instruments are played in such a way as to resemble the
human voice or to gently merge with it.
In other cases, it is the instrument that seems to strive to become
voice – although not necessarily a clearly singing one. We immediately
think of those hesitatingly blown sounds of the bass flute in ‘Das
atmende Klarsein’. The audible blowing in the flute reminds of a voice
breathing in our ear. It is as if the instruments that are not allowed
to sing, resign themselves to speaking, if not to mere breathing. But,
remarkably enough, this move is not accomplished through bringing the
instrument to articulated speech, as in Berio’s Sequenza for trombone.
And that reminds us of the fact that, conversely, the voices do not
always sing. In the 'Prologo' and the ‘Isola Seconda (Io)’ we hear them
speak. In 'Hölderlin', they only pronounce consonants, so that it
becomes apparent how much unarticulated singing on vowels is, in Nono’s
mind, opposed to articulated speech. And in ‘Quando Stanno Morendo,
Diario Polaco 2’ the opposition of singing on vowels to speaking with
consonants is extended to a second opposition: the singing voice is
gently turning into a nearly concealed groaning in the depths, which is
contrasted with the ethereal voices singing in the heights. Such nearly
concealed opposition is the key to a better understanding of the more
concealed - aestheticised - opposition of voices to instruments in the
Prometeo: the divine singing voices as the heavenly counterpart to the
unbearable suffering in the human sublunar world, worded through the
instruments.
ASCOLTA! (Listen!)
Intermezzo on sound as a ‘phenomenon’
The dimension of pitch folding in on itself, the extremely slowing down
of movement, the strange sounds got out of familiar instruments: all
this compels us to concentrate on sound itself. Nono understands it as
an attempt at rehabilitating sound as a pure phenomenon. According to
him, from the eighteenth century onwards (Rameau), sound has
increasingly been understood as a means of expressing emotions – as a
sign within a system of keys. It matters to free sound of such semiotic
fetters. Nono is talking about a transition from ‘believing’ to
‘perceiving’ (Conversation entre Nono et Cacciari)**
From a theoretical point of view, that is a very misleading way of
tackling the problem. Certainly, Nono never lets the melody run through
all the tones of a scale. But that does not make him escape from
tonality. An interval does not consist of unrelated tones, and even an
isolated tone pre-eminently embodies the tonic wherein everything comes
to rest. So, were are not dealing with a transition from ‘sign’ to
‘phenomenon’, but with a shift in mimetic domain: Nono’s succession of
fifths does not evoke nothing, but something else than a melody running
through all the tones of a scale. And the same holds true for timbre: we
do not hear the hesitating sound produced by moving the bow extremely
slowly over the string as the friction of horsehair over catgut – not as
a ‘phenomenon’ hence – but as the hesitatingly shimmering through of
some apparition in musical space.
A second misunderstanding has been whispered into Nono’s ears by the
very semiotic paradigm that is responsible for many a ravage in art
theory***: as if a key would ‘refer’ to states of mind rather then
embody them – to be mimesis of their appearance. Such ‘referring’ is
dismissed as ‘story-telling’, ‘literature’, as ‘sign’ – and, as we shall
see later: as ‘image/representation’. To which sound is then opposed as
a pure phenomenon. But how little Nono understands his sounds as pure
phenomena is testified by the titles in ‘Guai ai gelidi mostri’. These
unmistakably betray that Nono is out at conjuring up a world, and leaves
no doubt whatsoever as to the nature of the beings that inhabit these
worlds: ‘In Tyrannos’, ‘Lemuria’, ‘Das grosse Nichts der Tiere’…
Nono’s comments on his own work brim over with such theoretical
misconceptions, as we shall see below. Fortunately, they have little
impact on the quality of his practice.
TIME
"Caminante no hay caminos, hay que caminar"
The corollary of the implosion of the universe of pitch into isolated
intervals or into sound moving in itself, is a slowing down of movement,
often accentuated through fermatas. Often, movement comes to a
standstill altogether, as in the long sustained tones of ‘Guai ai gelidi
mostri’ and ‘Tre Voci a’. Or it comes to revolve within itself, as in ‘Interludio
secondo’. Where events succeed one another at a higher speed, we have to
do with short outbreaks amidst the generalised non-happening. And
through the entire work, events are separated through often long
silences, exemplary in the slow, fragmentary procession of the song.
No dramatic unfolding hence, let alone interaction or conflict. It is as
though the whole world has come to a standstill. Or better still: as if
all the actors have left the scene. So that the audience is left utterly
alone in the void. Wherein silently the contours of an elusive event
loom up. Which is no more than an attempt to appear. In the sight of
which every partial engagement makes place for pure contemplation. In
this sense Nono’s music is really a phenomenon – an apparition: pure
epiphany. Although not of sound, but of the inaudible that wants to
become audible.
And this event as an attempt at appearing, at becoming audible, is
realised musically through a relentless recombination of elements on
diverse levels. Nono compares such combinatoric with the way in which
Wagner proceeds in the Tristan, where, according to Nono, always the
same elements appear time and again only to ‘open new possibilities!’
That goes in the first place on the level of pitch. The separate tones
acquire an ever changing character in that they are part of ever
changing intervals. The highest tone of a tritone becomes a dissonant as
soon as a fifth is added to its lowest tone. The fifth is turned into a
fourth when the lowest tone of the interval is played an octave higher.
And when the highest note of a second above the lowest tone of a fifth
is played an octave higher, it is turned into a ninth that encompasses
two fifths. Through the continuous changing from octaves, also the
density of the musical fabric becomes another variable in the
combinatoric: there is a generalised alternation between dense and wide
writing.
Also the global structure of the separate parts is governed by a
combinatoric. A limited number of sonorous material appears in ever new
combinations. In ‘guai ai gelidi mostri’ it is strings, voices and
piercing winds. In the ‘Stasimo Secondo’ it is a vocal group, a choir of
winds and a choir of strings. And so on.
And on the encompassing level of the whole work, finally, the kind of
combination of the separate elements itself is submitted to a further
encompassing combinatoric. Instruments and voices may move within the
same register of musical space and combine in the most diverse ways (Interludio
Primo; 3/4/5 Isola). Or they may be opposed as high to low (Hölderlin),
while in ‘Tre voci a’ the voices are embedded between the lowest tones
of the contrabass clarinet and the highest tones of the strings. On this
highest level, it appears that still other elements become part of a
generalised combinatoric. In some parts movement flows uninterruptedly (Hölderlin,
Interludio Primo); in other parts the silent movement is broken through
strident breakthroughs; in still other parts, tangentially swelling
crescendo’s loom up from the profoundest silence (Prologo, 3/4/5 Isola).
Or again: the deep sounds which stand on their own in the ‘Interludio
Secondo’, are combined with voices in ‘Tre voci a’. Or again: in the ‘Interludio
primo’ the choir sings only separate tones, while in the ‘Stasimo
secondo the tones are sustained, so that the voices begin to evolve in
two or three parts. Or again: in ‘Hölderlin’ the dense fabric of high
voices is opposed to the angular movement of bass clarinet and bass
flute in the depths, while in ‘Tre voci a’ the instruments, conversely,
form a dense evolving cluster in the depths as opposed to the voices
that follow a separate course in the heights. And so on …
But the Prometeo is more than a mere recombination without end. On the
level of the separate parts, there is a clear articulation from
beginning, over acme, to end. Thus, in Hölderlin, ever more voices are
joining over the angular movement of the instruments, until they finally
take over, while the ‘Sprechstimmen’ place the whole in a new
perspective. In the ‘Stasimo secondo’ the gentle flow is ever more
frequently broken up through deafening clusters, which unfold to more
complex groups of three, whereby increasingly echo-relations are
developed between the breakthroughs and the soft fabric in the
background. In ‘Tre voci a’ the increasingly layered sound dissolves
into a sustained unison. Other parts have a strophic structure: think of
the ‘Prologo’ – and of ‘Das atmende Klarsein’, which was intended to be
the last part of the Prometeo. Still other parts (Stasimo Secondo)
render an unchanging state.
The more you listen to the work as a whole, the more the structure of an
encompassing dramatic flow is revealing itself. In the beginning, it is
only the succession of the movements that seems to obey a compelling
logic. Thus, the ethereal song of the ‘Stasimo secondo’ seems to be a
release from the threatening sounds in the ‘Interludio secondo’. But
gradually it dawns on us that the ‘Prologo’ is a prologue indeed, and
the ‘Stasimo secondo’ a genuine end, although what comes between may
hardly be described as a development towards a peripety. Rather are we
dealing with a gradually dissolution of the tensions unfolded in the ‘Isola
prima’, with the ‘Interludio Primo’ as an onset to the final solution in
the ‘Stasimo secondo’. That there is a ‘Stasimo primo’ next to a ‘Stasimo’
secondo’, and an ‘Intrerludio primo’ next to an ‘Interludio secondo’,
suggests a binary structure. But there is no question of rigid
symmetries. The ‘Interludio primo’ is more akin to the ‘Stasimo secondo’
than to the ‘Interludio secondo’, while, conversely, the ‘Stasimo primo’
is more akin to the ‘Interludio secondo’ than to the ‘Stasimo secondo’.
That is why the binary structure rather reminds of the motet – if not of
the two parts of Schönberg’s ‘Moses and Aron’, the third part of which
is left unfinished.
We could tackle the problem of the overall structure in the vein of
Lachenman, who conceives the Prometeo as ‘one gigantic madrigal’
(Symposium Luigi Nono**) – which implies that the overall structure is
determined from without by the text. But that would do injustice to the
fact that the structure of the Prometeo is musical in the first place.
And it is in so far besides the question that it sweeps the sucession of
attempts at breaking through, the ‘non-event’, under the carpet. For,
with Nono, the endless return of the same elements opens up a totally
different universe than in Wagner’s Tristan. With Nono, it is as if we
get stuck in the onset of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony – which is equally
built on a local combinatoric of fifth and fourth. Or as if of Mahler’s
first Symphony we would only hear the first chord, so admired by Nono.
Or as if Wagner’s entire Ring would flow back into the waters of the ‘Vorspiel’
to ‘Das Rheingold’. Or again: as if of Berg’s first ‘Orchesterstück’ we
would hear only and endless recombination of the first germ cell. And -
in another dimension - we are reminded of the fact that Prometeo
partakes of the ‘organum’ – that other germ cell out of which the entire
Western music has developed, long before it unfolded to the titanic
dimensions of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and Mahler. The truth is namely
that the additive character of Nono’s experience of time is a reflection
of life in a world wherein not so much the possible stays in the
foreground, as rather the existing – which is so terribly overwhelming,
that the possible can only survive as a faint flickering. Thus, the
endless recombination is to be understood as an ever renewed effort to
master ever new facets of one and the same problem that cannot be
overseen as a whole. That is what is so poignantly affirmed/denied in
the text on the music of that marvellous ‘Stasimo secondo’: ‘Und ist in
der Wüste unbesiegbar’ (‘And is invincible in the desert’)… Such mood
and such experience of time is the common denominator of the implosion
of the serial universe with Nono, and the implosion of the
melodic/harmonic universe with Liszt, who also restricted himself to a
combinatoric of elementary motives – which he, just like Nono, often
structured on symmetric positions around a central tone. Although
Liszt could not refrain from now and then letting his minutest elements
unfold to a melody of a somewhat longer breath, the élan of which
nevertheless comes to a standstill in the void.
Also terms like ‘work in progress’ (Stenzl) or ‘fragment’, which are all
too easily used in connection with the late Nono, only betray how dearly
Nono would have welcomed a further unfolding of his universe. Such
phrasings only conceal that the Prometeo is not just an ‘onset’ that
only tentatively approaches Nono’s idea. Quite the contrary: a more
poignant, more accomplished achievement of this feeling is unthinkable.
The parallel with the work of the late Liszt is telling.
In this sense, the technique of the late Nono is not a rupture, but a
deepening or a reductive generalisation of the earlier dodecaphonic and
serial way of thinking.
REAL SPACE
Although practical considerations eventually referred to the San
Lorenzo, and even though the Prometeo has been performed in different
spaces since, it was conceived to be performed in the San Marco in
Venice - with four orchestral groups, a choir of soloists, and an
extended electronic apparatus to distribute sound in space! No better
way to indicate that the Prometeo is meant to join the Venetian
tradition of the cori spezzati, inaugurated by Willaert and accomplished
by the two Gabrielis.
But Nono’s reference to the San Marco is rather ambivalent. More often
than to the space of the San Marco contained by its five domes, Nono is
referring to the open space of Venice, traversed with countless
channels, more specifically the acoustic landscape – the soundscape –
that unfolds to the ear when the murmuring of the water mingles with the
sounds of the ships, the noise of the shipyards, the drone of motors,
the ringing of the bells and the turmoil of the marketplace. Or, as it
is phrased in the ‘Conversation entre Nono et Cacciari’**: ‘The sound of
the bells spreads in different directions: some add to one another, are
transported over the waters along the channels, other sounds evaporate
nearly totally or mingle in various ways with the other signals of the
lagoon and the city’. In his footsteps, André Richard is talking about
‘the way in which, at night, when walking through an alley, one can hear
footsteps other than one’s own, or hear voices that sound as if they
were nearby, while one can still continue walking without encountering a
single person, and than suddenly stumble upon someone that one did not
hear approaching. One is submerged in a sound space: the experience of
an “acoustic labyrinth” wherein one does not know whether what one hears
is nearby or far away…’
What catches the eye in such evocations is the emphasis on the hearing
of things that are invisible. But foremost the fact that, in audible
space, the sounds seems to break loose from the source of sound in
visual space. That is why every soundscape – think of the sudden
outburst of bells ringing over the city – has something of an epiphany
(see: Musical space and its inhabitants’) – an auditory version of
Plato’s cave wherein only the sound of the voices would resound. However
much the prisoners in the cave would – this time freely – look around,
they would never lay eyes upon the visual appearance from which the
lovely voices were emanating.
Such disentanglement of audible and visual space is precisely what Nono
is seeking. For, according to Nono, musical space has been subordinated
to visual space: since the advent of the concert hall and the opera
house, everything is focusing on the actors or the musicians on the
scene, or, worse still, the gesticulation of the conductor. Nono’s
philosophical friend Cacciari is referring to Foucault – theatres and
concert halls appear simultaneously with jails and asylums – and to
Derrida’s ‘idein’, the critique of the dominance of seeing. In a ‘tragedia
dell’ascolto’ such subordination to the eye has to be undone: the
instruments should be displayed around the listeners: the Venetian
soundscape as the realisation of Nono’s dream to free sound from its
visual fetters.
But there is a crucial difference between the audible soundscape over
Venice and musical space that unfolds in the San Marco of the Gabrielis.
It suffices to imagine the ‘Interludio Secondo’ performed in the San
Marco. Wherever the deep sounds of the strings and winds may be
produced, or wherever they may be distributed with the electronic
apparatus, we do not hear them at our right or left, before or behind
us. They rather seem to resonate in fathomless depths, not otherwise
than Nietzsche’s ‘Ruf aus der Tiefe’. And when we imagine the ‘Stasimo
secondo’ performed in the basilica, we would hear the voices high above
us, wherever the singers may have been placed in the San Marco.
This simple experiment reminds us of a remarkable characteristic of
musical space. In musical space, sounds are distributed alongside an –
imaginary – vertical axis: high sounds ascend to the heights, and deep
sounds descend to the depths, irrespective of the place where they are
produced in real space. A rather modest attempt at constructing such
spherical space is Renzo Piano’s construction for the performance of the
Prometeo in the San Lorenzo: the audience is in the centre, surrounded
with space – an echo of the more ambitious spheres in the midst of which
Stockhausen imagined his audience:
Suppose we had the singers perform the ‘Hölderlin’ high above the
audience in Renzo Piano’s ‘barca’ and the bass instruments deep below.
Such arrangement would only endorse the propensity of the sounds to
ascend or to descend. But the un-musical nature of the whole enterprise
- the difference between a soundscape and musical space - would
immediately become apparent when we had the sopranos perform below the
audience and the bass instruments above it. Unexpectedly, we would find
ourselves amidst a soundscape, surrounded by a multitude of sounds, of
which we would, eagerly looking around, try to determine the origin in
real space.
We suddenly understand why composers – besides: only during a short
period - restricted themselves to the distribution of two or more choirs
on the arms of the cross of the San Marco, and did not proceed to do the
same in the vertical dimension – for which the Hagia Sofia would have
been a more appropriate place (the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg, where
Berio had his ‘Cronoca del Luoca’ performed, is a poor substitute).
Musical space articulates itself on its own in the vertical dimension.
That is why the technique of the cori spezzati is merely an episode in
the conquest of musical space. It had already reached considerable
heights in the Renaissance, and is pushed forward by Beethoven, Wagner
and Mahler – and, as we shall see, by Nono himself. The distribution of
instruments and singers in the horizontal plane is at best a method of
letting musical space, that naturally unfolds in the vertical dimension,
also expand in the horizontal dimension. Which is necessary as soon as
more than one event is happening in one and the same layer of space, as
in the music of the Gabrielis. Although the technology of pure musical
space - not least with Nono - disposes of its own means of producing the
same effect, as we shall see.
The electronic means of distributing sounds in space may at best give a
new impetus to the creation of new kinds of soundscapes, like in Xenakis/Corbusier’s
pavilion for Expo ’58 or Parc la Villette in Paris – successors of more
primitive soundscapes like bell ringing or gun salvos. But to the
development of musical space, the distribution of the instruments in
real space is rather indifferent. A comparison with a stereo system
speaks volumes. It is all too often overlooked that a stereo system does
not at all disclose musical space: it rather renders more accurately the
position of instruments in the real space of the concert hall. Although
stereo is far more pleasurable to the ear, it has nothing to do with the
unfolding of musical space. It suffices to play ‘Fragmente-Stille. An
Diotima’ or “Hay que caminar” sonando’ (1989) on your system with the
switch on ‘mono’: the unfolding of the rather impressive musical space
of these works is not hindered at all.
MUSICAL SPACE
Nobody would deny that a rather impressive spatial effect emanates from
Nono’s Prometeo. But it is important to remind that such effect is not
the result of the distribution of sound in space, but from a masterly
use of purely musical means.
To begin with, Nono has a predilection for very high and very low
sounds, which expand the limits of musical space to the height and to
the depth. Therein, he is the successor of the above-mentioned
conquerors of space. While they introduced new instruments, Nono also
introduces new electronic devices – think of the ‘harmonizar’ which is
able to render the sound of an instrument on a higher or lower pitch.
And, as opposed to the electronic means of distributing sound in space,
electronic means of changing pitch and colour may contribute to the
construction of musical space indeed.
Again, with Nono the voices are moving with large leaps: fourths and
fifths, octaves, sevenths and ninths. Nono enhances the effect through
contrasting those leaps with seconds and micro-intervals circling around
the end-points of the larger intervals. These intervals enhance the
feeling of space: octaves, fourths and five sound ‘hollow’, and also
here that effect is enhanced through contrast with seconds or clusters.
One could object that also in many contemporary music sounds are
tumbling through space on far greater intervals. But, apart from the
fact that they are not contrasted with more dense intervals, above all
the hierarchy between the tones is missing; space is no longer
articulated around the beacons of the tonic on the vertical axis of
musical space. Nono, on the other hand, articulates his expanded space
through the quasi permanent presence of a tonic and the manifold
octave-jumps or octave-doublings. This technique comes to its apogee in
the ‘Stasimo secondo’: here, musical space extends from the highest to
the lowest regions, and this enormous span is bridged through an
articulation in clearly distinguishable layers, wherein the separate
voices are moving each on their own level. Nono uses a similar technique
in his impressive blocks of sound (chords or clusters) reaching from the
highest to the lowest regions: the space in between is made all the more
tangible in that Nono subdivides it in segments moving independently –
the effect of which is further enhanced in that those segments resonate
from different places in real space.
And, finally, there are the contrasts of volume: Nono summons up the
whole range from the nearly audible to the deafening, in sudden
outbursts or in breathtaking crescendos. Even more than the echo (see
below), such ‘super-echo’s’ ensure a further expansion of space, this
time in the horizontal dimension. The massive blocks of sound suggest a
massive object in a large space. And that influences the perception of
the nearly audible sounds wherein they are embedded: we situate them on
a far distance in a endless space, so that they are experienced as
something large, and not as something intimate nearby. Let us remark
that, also here, the intermediate plans are articulated. As a rule it is
voices that occupy the middle regions. Their mid-position as far as
dynamics is concerned is further enhanced through timbre: Nono’s voices
are singing clearly, which contrasts with the ‘infrasonorous’ sound of
the hesitatingly produced sounds on the instruments, or with the ‘suprasonorous’
vehemence of the deafening chords and clusters played by the whole
orchestra.
These techniques come to their apogee in ‘Fragmente-Stille. An Diotima’
and ‘Hay que caminar sonando’, with which we previously did our
experiment with the mono rendering. We did not choose these works by
chance: from the poor couple of square meters within the confines of
which a handful of instruments are playing, an unbroken musical space is
built up that is often, if possible, still more impressive than that in
the Prometeo.
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF MUSICAL SPACE
But Nono could not refrain from having the parts of the latter work
played from different places in the concert hall. Although he motivates
this procedure through a ‘literary’ given: ‘hay que caminar’. A late,
somewhat easy echo of Kagel’s music theatre.
And that makes us ask the question why of all composers Luigi Nono, a
master in creating musical spaces, was so obsessed by real space.
Somewhat like the painter that would have the volume on his paintings
enhanced through adding a third dimension like in a bas relief.
No doubt, Nono will have felt Stockhausen’s and Boulez’ breathing down
his neck. But it catches the eye how late Nono introduces this new
parameter in his work, and how he treats it totally differently than his
competitors.
In a first series of cases the distribution of the loudspeakers only
conceals the fact that Nono primarily uses purely musical techniques.
From way back, contrasts between loud and soft are used to conjure up
the horizontal dimension of musical space: the dynamic echo, counterpart
of the pitch-echo (repetition on a different pitch) which structures
musical space in the vertical dimension. With Nono, such musically
evoked effect seems to be obtained through the distribution of the
loudspeakers in space. But it is not so much the distribution of the
loudspeaker that produces the special effect. Rather is it the
difference in volume. For, however long the distance between the
original source of sound and the loudspeaker through which the ‘delay’
resounds, the difference is too small to produce the effect intended. So
that the composer has to resort to the purely musical technique of the
dynamic echo. Thus, the distribution of the loudspeakers can be
restricted to the range of the traditional orchestra. The reversed echo
seems to be new – electronics has a predilection for amplifying. When a
sound is repeated and amplified on another place, we get the impression
that suddenly an imaginary space is opening up. But also such reversed
echo is only an extension of the old mimetic procedure of intensified
repetition, which creates the effect of approaching.
The effect of an echo can also be obtained through a change in timbre,
as when a motif is first played by one family of instruments, and then
by another. Such ’colour echoes’ develop into a genuine auditory ‘plan’
(coulisse). The effect is obtained when two families of instruments are
first playing together, while one of them stops before the other. We
then have the impression that a second appearance was hiding behind the
first one. That is a most efficient way of creating a feeling op musical
depth. The effect is amply used in ‘Al gran sole carico d’amore’. In the
‘Prometeo’, the technique is further refined through electronically
changing the colour of the instruments.
Also resonance determines the kind of space evoked. Formerly, the
quantity of resonance was a characteristic of a given space. The
imaginary representation of a larger or smaller sphere - or cave -
replaced the real space in which the music was performed. Only on some
instruments was it possible to additionally control the quantity of
resonance through pedals and dampers. But it is only electronics that
made it possible to control the quantity of resonance at will. As when
in ‘Ommagio a Kurtag’ a sound in the foreground suddenly seems to
resound from within an immense resonating cave. Addition of long
sustained echoes makes space further expand – and shrink our body
accordingly. Think of the ‘Stasimo secondo’ in which the many-layered
space finds its counterpart in the often threefold echoes on the axis of
time. But, on the other hand, a long echo suits only a single sustained
tone, that then seems to pervade the entire space. For, when sounds
succeed one another rapidly, the echo of each of them is adding to the
other, so that in the end everything merges into one cluster of echoes –
wherefore a damper has been introduced on the piano. When listening to
the ‘Hölderlin’, it immediately becomes apparent that change of pitch
and echo are incompatible indeed, and that the electronic techniques
have no adequate means of tackling the problem – apart from controlling
the volume of the echo. Already the simple dampers on the piano are more
sophisticated. Not to mention the sovereign way in which the Gabrielis
succeeded in neutralising the constant echo of the San Marco through
delicately balancing the length of the notes with a well-thought change
of chords. Wherein Nono - at least in the Hölderlin – largely fails.
And, finally, also the splitting up of the orchestra in diverse groups
of instruments and singers – and of loudspeakers – distributed all
around the audience, can only facilitate the unfolding of musical space.
At least in so far as coherent musical events are produced in one and
the same place, or in so far as more or less independent parts of one
encompassing musical whole are spread over different places – which was
evident for the old masters of the cori spezzati (double choir
technique). To accomplished musical mimesis, this causes no problems
whatsoever, because the ‘inhabitants’ of musical space dispose of purely
musical means of being together (see: ‘Musical space and its
inhabitants’). But as soon as musical events – under their simplest
form: individual sounds – begin to move in space, our deep rooted
instinct to localise them is stirred. There is no more efficient means
of destroying musical space. For, in order to localise a sound in real
space, we have to stop situating high tones in the heights and lower
ones in the depths. And, worse still: we equally have to leave musical
space. For, equally compelling is our propensity to compensate our poor
potential to audibly localise sounds in real space through switching
over to our eyes. So that we inexorably have to land up in precisely the
visual space from which Nono so dearly wanted to release us. Precisely
here, in real space where sounds are surrounding us from all sides,
sound is subjugated to the eye. And it now dawns on us that such was not
the case in the concert hall at all: the imaginary musical space unfolds
not only into the heights and the depths, but also far behind and far
before, far to the left and far to the right of the scene where the
musicians are playing.
Granted: in contrast with so many others, Nono escapes the metamorphosis
of composer into an architect of auditory landscapes. In the first place
because time flows so slowly, that musical space can unfold undisturbed
- reason why also the Garbielis had an outspoken predilection for long
sustained tones. And when the sounds are moving altogether, they do so
gradually and subtly.
Let us remark that it does not matter whether the movement in space is
realised with electronic means or through instruments distributed in
space – as when Nono has the sound turn around the audience by letting
subsequent orchestras fall in. And that makes us ask the question what
is gained through the use of the new electronic means. Nono himself
unwillingly betrays how superior the old method is, in writing down many
an echo (be it of pitch, dynamic or colour) – not least the many ‘echo
lontano’s’ spread all over the Prometeo. And it remains to be asked why
he did not do that with all the echoes – the ‘Stasimo secondo’, but
foremost the ‘Hölderlin’ would only have gained. It suffices to compare
the confuse and messy fabric of the voices in the ‘Hölderlin’ with
comparable passages in ‘Al gran sole carico d’amore’, which are
musically far more convincing.
Writing down the electronically realised effects would also have spared
the Prometeo and other works of the late Nono another fate. In the
meantime, we know all too good how the accelerated technical innovation
also accelerates the tempo in which the outdated is dumped in the waste
bin. And it remains to be seen whether the Prometeo will be translated
with each further technological revolution. Bearing the piles of vinyl
in mind that are doomed to silence without the corollary pick-ups – we
cannot but regret that Nono has not meticulously written down his works.
Scores can be read by now for centuries, and they will continue to do so
for centuries to come…
THE TEXT
The text now. For after all, next to ‘Intolleranza’ (1960) en ‘Al gran
sole carico d’amore’ (1975), the Prometeo is Nono’s third opera.
Although we cannot call it an opera in the strict sense. Not only does
Nono ban the spectacle, as in an oratorio, but first and foremost the
word. The Prometeo is conceived as a ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’, a ‘tragedy
of hearing’, where purely musical events silence the word and drive the
actors from the scene. That should not surprise us, since we already
analysed above how the dramatic tension is falling apart in a series of
timid attempts at getting loose from the ground tone. The Prometeo is
not meant to be narrative, just like Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’
It seems paradoxical, then, that Cacciari selected a quite extensive
corpus of texts for this ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’. But Nono adopts a
rather ambivalent stance on those texts. In many cases they are not set
to music at all. In ‘Isola Prima’ Prometheus’ report of his benefactions
conferred to mankind and Hephaistos’ report of Prometheus sufferings
imposed by Zeus, are only written down on the score. Whereby Nono
remarks: ‘The text should never be read! He should be heard and felt
through the orchestral groups.’ In that sense the texts have the
function of the more usual verbal indications on the score like ‘espressivo’,
although they are more extensive and rather metaphoric. In other cases,
it is only fragments that are set to music. Therein Nono develops the
practice inaugurated in ‘Das atmende Klarsein’, where he only uses
isolated fragments from Rilke’s text. But the words are nearly
understandable and are reduced to musical sounds: wholly in the spirit
of Nono’s endeavour to ban the sign and to restore music as a
‘phenomenon’. The effect is further enhanced when delays, filters and
the halaphone are set at the text, as in the ‘Isola seconda’. And in the
‘Prologo’, finally, the text is simply spoken. That makes it
understandable, but in ‘Hölderlin’ the effect is neutralised in that the
speakers recite different texts simultaneously. In that same ‘Hölderlin’
the speakers have to omit the vowels and accentuate the consonants. Also
these two interventions reduce spoken language to a pure ‘phenomenal’
material, just like in Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’.
Also the text, then, stays under the sign of ambivalence: the repressed
word is re-introduced in the music, only to be so maltreated as to
become unrecognisable. It seems as though Nono is wrestling with the
prohibition against pronouncing the name of God. For, the emphasis on
the consonants in ‘Hölderlin’ inevitably reminds of the omission of
vowels in Hebrew. Against this background, it catches the eye that, in
Nono’s music, precisely the most important words are selected, while in
the Temple ‘the word’ must not be named. And also: that the entire
opera, foremost the ‘Prologo’, brims over with names from the
polytheistic pantheon of the Greeks – the negation of the name of the
one and only God?
Be that as it may, the Prometeo has not really become the ‘tragedia
dell’ascolto’ announced in the title: the music is also determined with
a non-musical, inaudible element: the text. This is already the case on
a purely audible plane: words sung and spoken. But the text also governs
the music from within. Nono himself complains that not enough attention
has been paid to the way in which the treats the text. Let us explore
the relation between the – audible or inaudible – text in the Prometeo.
The most obvious relation is to be found in ‘Hölderlin’. There we
literally hear the Gods from Hölderlin's ‘Schicksalslied’ walk over the
clouds high above our heads, while, in the sublunar world, we hear the
contrabass clarinet and the bass flute move angularly – ‘von Klippe zu
Klippe geworfen’. The remarkable thing is that the text, which paints
the fate of the mortals, is not sung in the deeper regions where mankind
has to dwell, but in the higher spheres were the Gods are moving in the
‘Götterlüfte’. Only at the end, a third party recites the text as if it
were a comment on the whole scene. A similar tone painting, but on a
more detailed level, is to be found in ‘Io’, where a ‘Sprechchor’ is
shouting ‘hu!’ and ‘ha!’. This is an illustration of the text written in
the score: ‘In what kind of world have I been dropped!’ – the sung
versions of those deafening chords with which the brass instruments are
tearing up the soft fabric of the Prometeo. In still other cases, as in
the ‘Interludio secondo’ there is no text at all, unless the final words
of the previous ‘Tre voci b’ ‘This soft force, listen to it!’ refer to
it. And, as a rule, the relation of text to word is far more general and
vague, as in the ‘Stasimo secondo’. The music suggests individual beings
blindly groping their way in a dark void – although it gives not
precisely the impression of the desert, wherein, according to the text,
‘the people is invincible’ (Und ist in der Wüste unbesiegbar’).
No doubt, this music is illustrative. But what it tells in itself is so
eloquent and overwhelming, that it seems as if the relation of text and
music is reversed: where, in many a case, music is merely a poor and
local filling in of what is fully conjured up in the text, with Nono the
text seems rather an attempt to confine the undetermined richness of the
music into the limits of a narrow interpretation. Herein the function of
the text with Nono reminds us of the function of the mise-en-scène with
Ligeti: under the guise of a literary or scenic fulfilment of the music,
the musical content is rather negated. This time it is not so much the ‘mise-en-scène’
which comes down to a ‘mise-hors-musique’ but the ‘mise-en-texte’. For
that matter, Ligeti’s treatment of the word would have been far more
becoming to the Prometeo: imagine the vocal parts sung on divine pure
vowels, how eloquent would have been the contrast with the voices
uttering meaningless consonants and the hesitatingly played instruments
in the sublunar human world? Only then would the Prometeo truly have
been called a ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’, where music would have been
telling its own story, without any comment of someone who felt called to
give us an interpretation through a text, or to determine its content
beforehand.
Thus, in Nono’s ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’ the repressed word continues to
govern the music. That is already apparent from the fact that probably
the text to the Prometeo is read more often than that to whatever other
opera. And that lends an unexpected overtone to the words of Jürg Stenzl’
(Le nouveau Luigi Nono)**: ‘What is generally qualified as extra-musical
has from the beginning been an intra-musical factor in the music of
Luigi Nono’.
THE VISUAL DIMENSION
Perhaps even more radical than the word, Nono claims to ban the image
from his music. According to Nono, visual representation is far more
leading astray from the content of music. He reminds of the fact that
Berlioz and Wagner coupled totally different representations to the
second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony: where the one heard a
funeral march, the other saw a dance. Such ‘illustrative thinking’ or
‘visual lecture’ has to be replaced with a ‘listening that is able to
shrug off the idolatrous fetters of the image, of the story, of the
succession of moments, of the elementary discourse of words’
(Conversation entre Luigi Nono en Massimo Cacciari)**. From this
quotation – in which Nono explicitly refers to Moses’ golden calf – it
is apparent that image and text are closely connected in Nono’s mind.
That should not come as a surprise: after all, visual representations to
music are above all mediated through a text. That is why, with Nono and
his philosophical guardian angels, text and image are subsumed under the
common denominator ‘sign’ and hence contrasted with music as
‘phenomenon’, as we have seen.
Which does not prevent Nono from being far more irreconcilable with the
image than with the word. The text still survives as fragment in the
music, and determines from without the whole unrolling of the opera.
Visual representation, on the other hand, is radically banned. No actors
and no scene in the Prometeo. That reminds of the ambivalence of Moses’
mimetic taboo: while representation mediated by words – the story of the
golden calf included – survives as a story in the Bible, the golden calf
itself is irrevocably smashed to smithereens.
The ban on the visual lays also at the basis of Nono’s obsession with
the distribution of instruments and loudspeakers in the concert hall. As
we have seen, this was an attempt at freeing music from the fetters of
the ‘unidirectional’ space wherein it had been confined ever since the
advent of concert halls and opera houses. We already pointed to the
danger that musical space that used to unfold in the San Marco would be
replaced with the unmusical - while real - soundscape over the waters of
the sinking city.
.
That should make us suspicious. The obstinacy with which Nono banned the
visual, has something of a defence against an opposite tendency. And
indeed: initially Nono had not so much a ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’ in
mind. Rather did he aim at a kind of ‘integration of the arts’: as if he
was out to integrate not only the parameter of space, but colour as
well. Schönberg already preceded him in this matter, just like Skriabin,
who – not by chance also in a ‘Prometheus’ – wanted to add colours
produced on a light organ to the sounds of the orchestra. Instead of
Skriabin’s light dome, Nono was playing with the idea of curtains, moved
through ventilators – he must have thought of something like polar
light. Sound not freed from the visual, hence, but firmly chained to it,
not otherwise than Prometheus on his rock. Although Nono seems not to be
aware of the problem. For in his mind ‘visual’ is rather a synonym to
‘figurative’. So that colour, as long as it is free from every
representation, is on the same footing as pure sound. It is even
audible: Nono is talking about ‘hearing colour as I hear heaven or the
stones of Venice’ – the stones of that very Venice that formerly was
praised for its disentanglement of sound and vision! The opposition
between eye and ear is surreptitiously replaced with the opposition
between ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’. And of course: to Luigi Nono,
music belongs to the ‘abstract’ ‘non-mimetic’ arts! The shift is sealed
in that Nono understands the intimate relationship of sound and colour
in terms of vibrations. Which reminds of Hauer, who constructed a colour
circle comprising twelve compartments assigned to the twelve tones of
the chromatic scale. To assimilate sound and colour, Nono not only
reduces visual representation to colour, but also sound to pure
vibration! To the effect that sound is no longer a phenomenon, but
rather its complete opposite: a number – in the Jewish tradition the
equivalent of the letter – the sign! An umpteenth contradiction between
theory and practice! All these theoretical inconsistencies cannot
conceal the fact that, even when God has exchanged his representation as
a golden calf for the more ‘abstract’ fire of the burning bush, he
nevertheless continues to appear there, and for the eye at that!
Perhaps precisely therefore, the ‘fire’ has been banned, of all places
in an opera dedicated to the hero who stole the fire from the Gods! The
initial scenic concept survives in the wooden construction of Renzo
Piano for the San Lorenzo. There were several plans, connected with
stairs on which the musicians had to move. Jürgen Flimm would provide
the colour effects. But Nono was afraid that the music would be referred
to the background and restricted himself eventually with black-and-white
effects. Until, in later performances, the visual dimension totally
disappears and only survives in the guise of colours on the score. The
title ‘tragedia dell’ascolto – added by Cacciari – seals the process of
repression. Thus is, in a broader historic perspective, undone the
movement with which Wagner in Bayreuth made the orchestra disappear
under the scene, so that the view of the orchestra would no longer
interfere with the spectacle on the scene. Perhaps, Nono was rather
thinking of this development when demonstratively distributing the
instruments in space again. To accomplish his move, we should perform
Nono’s music in a completely darkened space wherein, conversely, every
reminder of the proceedings on the scene would have disappeared…
But it is precisely in such darkened space that the repressed dimension
of the visual resurges again. For, pretending that musical space is
‘unidirectional’ through the positioning of the instruments on the
scene, comes down to the assertion that sound is in the instruments –
just like in the visual world, where the sound of the motor is in the
car and the voice of the singer in the larynx. Only when music would
dwell in the instruments, would it make sense to distribute instruments
in space. As we have seen, musical space only unfolds as soon as sound
breaks free from the source of the sound: only in real, visual space
does the sound of Wagner’s ‘Vorspiel zu Lohengrin’ emanate from the
strings; in musical space it descends from heaven. We need no Venetian
channels to disentangle sound and its source: the miracle is happening
in whatever concert hall, as soon as the instruments start playing. A
well-thought-out distribution of loudspeakers is only necessary when a
soundscape has to be constructed, where Unidentified Sounding Objects
are moving hence and forth – like in the cinema, where sound is
irrevocably connected to the happenings on the screen. That Nono more
often refers to the auditory landscape in Venice than to the musical
space in the San Marco, betrays his blindness for the specific nature of
musical space. Happily, the misunderstanding is merely of a theoretical
nature: the musical spaces Nono conjures up as a composer are so
overwhelming, that they easily would survive whatever distribution of
instruments or loudspeakers in space, provided it would not be too much
against the grain.
PROMETHEUSDoch uns ist gegeben auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn...'
Hölderlin, Hyperions Schiksalslied
We may surmise that also to the aborted expulsion of the word is the
result of an opposite move.
Is Prometheus not the revolutionary that steals the fire from the Gods
to bring it to humankind? Wherefore he is chained on the rock and
mankind is plagued with Pandora’s box. Nono, who had to witness the
decay of the Old and the New Left – broader: the decay of the Socialist
Revolution - after World War II, emphasises the second half of this
story. Which makes him a spirit kindred to Hölderlin, who witnessed
another decay – that of the French Revolution in Germany – broader: the
decay of the Bourgeois Revolution. To Hölderlin’s ‘Schicksalslied’,
which paints as it were the situation after the assault on paradise, is
dedicated an entire part of the Prometeo, and fragments of it are
shattered throughout the entire opera.
The failure of the revolt – the Prometeo is written in the era of the
triumphant advent of neo-liberalism under the auguries of Thatcher and
Reagan – devaluates the aim to illusion and the striving for it to sin –
the sin of hybris. Wherefore Nono no longer walks the Shining Path, but
resigns to being under way. Repeatedly he quotes Machado: ‘Caminantes,
no hay caminos, hay que caminar’. And such is also the fate of his
Prometheus: ‘The figure of Prometheus represents and everlasting quest,
an everlasting finding, transcending, fixation and transgression’. Nono
also refers to the Talmud where it is written about Jacob’s ladder: ‘To
the left or to the right, upwards or downwards, it matters to progress
without questioning what lays behind or before us’. Marx’ ‘spectre of
the revolution haunting Europe’ – the title of one of Nono’s works from
1971 – is transformed into the wandering Jew, and thus Marx’ proletariat
into the Jewish people that is ‘invincible in the desert’.
Nono seems to have gone a long way. On a purely political level the
theoreticians of the socialist revolution are first replaced with the
Frankfurter Schule, Benjamin, Foucault/Derrida/Cacciari and eventually
Levinas: the Talmud and the Cabbala! In the wake of this succession, the
struggle of classes is replaced with the battle of the Gods, in case:
Christ versus Jahweh: ‘'A la logique eidétique, haptique, aux dieux de
l'Occident, qui se montrent, ou au Dieu de la révélation incarnée
s'oppose, scandaleusement, le "Ecoute-moi, Israël!"...'**. Also Allah is
firmly in charge these days. There is no question of a sudden betrayal
of his former revolutionary stance, which was from the beginning only a
form of revolt against all kinds of suppression, especially that of the
Jews through fascism – but also that of all kinds of rebels against
Stalin. And from hence it is only a step to a generalised rejection of
all kinds of power, as with Foucault, or to an identification with the
people that is hated by many, but chosen by God. That is the thread that
runs through Nono’s political biography. It explains also how it is
that, while working on the Prometeo, Nono also composed ‘Quando stanno
morendo Diario Polacco nr. 2’ (1982), a fierce indictment of Jaruzelski's coup. The style of this work is nearly discernable from
that of the Prometeo. It is only more explicit: the voice is literally
smothered to a groaning, above which the celestial voices of the
sopranos are hovering like a consoling hallucination. Which sheds a new
light on the more ‘mythological’ and less explicit ‘Prometeo’, in which
the divine voices continue singing and only the human instruments are
doomed to groan.
Remains the question why Nono did not seal this development with a
choice of a Jewish hero – we immediately think of Moses! The answer is
that the shift in his world view had unexpected consequences for Nono’s
position in the - this time musical - revolution of which he has been a
fervent advocate ever since the fifties. In an era when the then
avant-garde was out to extend the Schönbergian series to the parameters
of timbre, dynamics and duration, the promethean act par excellence
would have been to introduce the visual dimension as a further
parameter. Such total integration had already been announced in another
Prometheus: that of Skriabin in 1911. About the same time, also
Kandinsky played with the idea in ‘The yellow Sound’ and his friend
Schönberg realised ‘Die glückliche Hand’ in 1913, in the score of which
successions of colour are noted. But instead of the ‘Artwork of the
Future’ expected by Kandinsky, Schönberg wrote ‘Moses and Aron’ in 1930
– his true response to Skriabin’s Prometheus? For, in the Jewish
tradition, the act of Prometheus is accomplished through the idolatrous
mass that erects the golden calf against the will of Moses. As Nono
begins to understand himself as a Jew, he cannot but resign to this in
essence heathen enterprise and join the efforts of his spiritual father
and physical father-in-law Schönberg. There are lots of references to
the ‘Moses and Aron’ in the Prometeo: the last words are borrowed from
it. Also the bipartition of the Prometeo could be a kind of mimicry of
the two of the originally intended three movements of Schönberg’s opera.
But it is above all Schönberg’s idea to electronically transfer the
six-part choir - the voice of God – into the concert hall that is echoed
in Nono’s Prometeo: the omnipresent voice of God as his omnipresent eye.
Do we here stumble on the the deeper roots of Nono’s conquest of real
space? The rage of Zeus against Prometheus replaced with the obedience
to the Law of Moses: what should have been a mystic marriage of sound
and light, is transformed into a ‘tragedia dell’ascolto’ playing in the
dark and steeped in an ineffable melancholy – totally opposed to
Skriabin’s Prometheus, that comes to its apogee in the triumph of light
welcomed through the whole of mankind. But the initial heathen gleam of
the act survives on the level of the text – hors-musique: Nono’s drama
is not about the idolatrous mass, but about Prometheus. And also the
dome, upon which in Skriabin’s Prometheus the orgy of light was
celebrated, survives in the dark of Nono’s concert hall – Nono’s San
Marco – albeit equally hors-musique, outside musical space, as analysed.
The instruments and loudspeakers that are so deliberately distributed
around the audience, are the nearly concealed afterglow of the light in
the dome above the heads of the audience in Skriabin’s Prometheus. And
to complete the story, we should have to refer to the way in which Nono
- in more revolutionary times, when he had no problems with the stories
that afterwards have been discarded as ‘big’ - did not hesitate to set
up a grand spectacle with sound and colour slides. In the context of
domes that cannot fail to remind of the pantheistic epiphany of Gods and
saints on the domes of the San Marco, or its predecessor in the Hagia
Sofia.
Nono’s resignation from the Prometean rebellion under the auguries of
Moses acquires its full weight when we open larger historical registers.
For, in fact, the Prometean revolution has taken place a long time ago,
in Bayreuth, albeit under Arian auguries: there, Wagner had word,
performance and music merge in his ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. Of this
revolution, Skriabin is already a restoration: there is no text and the
performance on the scene is reduced to a play of colours on the dome of
light. This restoration goes hand in hand with a narrowing of the
content: Prometheus, who with Beethoven still referred to Enlightenment,
and who with Wagner was transformed into Siegfried, has become the
concocter of a mere artistic ecstasy with Skriabin. And Schönberg’s
move against Wagner/Skriabin goes hand in hand with a relapse in the
very religion, that has been so scorned by the Enlightenment. From
Stockhausen and Boulez, as from Nono, we could have expected an
extension of the serial organisation to the visual dimension. But, with
Boulez, the image appears only via the text, as with Schönberg. On
instigation of Kagel, Stockhausen chose for a scenic solution in ‘Originale’,
just like Ligeti in his Aventures. In a further stage we see Stockhausen
play around with seven colours and regress to a rather cheap mysticism.
But, on another level,with Stockhausen and Boulez the visual dimension
is surreptitiously introduced under the guise of the parameter ‘space’.
And, in this context, it is all too apparent that the movement of sounds
in space is a substitute for the acting of the actors on the scene. Also
here Kagel has set the tune through promoting the movements of the
musicians to a scenic event. Where the peripeties of sound, confined
within the body, steal the show: from Kagels musicians playing a box
match to Stockhausen’s and Boulez’ sounds moving around in space… Nono,
on the other hand, first introduced the image as a representation
conjured up by words. Of the visualising of space with Stockhausen and
Boulez we find with him only a faint echo, which has rather the
character of a lapsus, which is more than countered through the
impressive unfolding of true musical space.
Via another formula - the dissolution of art in life - artists like
Hermann Nitsch intended to eliminate the sensory specialisation of art. But they
knew only to realise the ‘integration of arts’ through replacing mimesis
with life itself. Especially with Nitsch we are witnessing a regression
– and a formidable one at that: to the pre-religious times of Freud’s
murder of the primeval father.
It appears that Nono’s move is merely the epiphenomon of a far
deeper collective process. After the ‘Götterdämmering’, also the ‘Menschendämmerung’.
A prologue to the barbarism that will flood a world wherein the belief
in the ‘big stories’ is forsworn. Only to leave room to far more archaic
forebears – in the best case the liberalism of the early Enlightenment,
but in the worst case those from the dark religious, if not
pre-religious – primeval phases.
CARO GIGI
...el poder leve
de la memoria líquida en el aire.
from: 'Tragedia del ascolto'
Vladimir García Morales
Which does not prevent that we cannot but dearly recommend this music!
It is unheard in all the senses of the word: not only sometimes nearly
audible, but above all totally new, and quasi unknown at that. For, our
comments on the literary content of the Prometeo and the ideological
fabric woven around it are not concerning the music. Immune for the
text, as it always has been, it is talking of the fundamental feeling of
all those who are conscious of what has happened and what is about to
happen.
Wherefore we cannot be grateful enough that Luigi Nono has left us such
music.
Ascolta!
© Stefan Beyst, June-July
2003
*Organum developed from the practice of adding voices running parallel
above a plainchant.
*** See Arthur Danto and
Nelson Goodman
** CONSULTED TEXTS
ABBINANTI, Frank: 'Prometeo, Tragedia d'ascolto. an Opera by Luigi Nono'
http://www.cubeensemble.com/arch/arch1994.html
BERTAGGIA, MIchele: 'Conversation entre Luigi Nono et Massimo Cacciari'
From: Verso Prometeo, La Biennale/Ricordi, Venise 1984. Entretien
réalisé au printemps 1984, avant la création de la première version de
Prometeo.
BRADTER, Cornelius: Eine experimentelle mehrkanalaufnahme. Luigi Nonos
Prometeo in der Philharmonie Berlin:
http://www.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~cbradter/nono/
CACCIARI, Massimo: 'Verso Prometeo'
DAVISMOON, Stephen: 'Luigi Nono: Suspended Song', Harwood Academic Pub
(June 1, 1999)
DE CARVALLO, Vieira: ‘New Music between Search for Idenitity and
Autopoiesis. Or: the Tragedy of Listening’http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/details/issue/
sample/a009054.pdf
FENEYROU, Laurent: ‘Moses and the Warsaw ghetto. Arnold Schönberg
according to Luigi Nono’ http://www.teatromassimo.it/inglese/avidilumi/
issue15/feneyrou15.htm
INTERVIEW MET HANS PETER HALLER:http://home.t-online.de/home/
3200424166970002/interviev.html
PANKOW, Edgar, PETERS, Günter (ed.): ' Prometheus. Mythos der Kultur'.
München: Fink 1999. See also:http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/avl/AVLinC/Projekte/
Prometheus.htm
SALLIS, Friedemann: 'Le paradoxe postmoderne et l´oeuvre tardive de
Luigi Nono', in Circuit 11 (2000), no 1
http://www.erudit.org/erudit/circuit/v11n01/sallis/sallis.htm
SYMPOSION LUIGI NONO:
METZGER, H-K. en RIEHM R.: ‘Luigi Nono’ in Musik-Konzepte 20, Munich
1981
STENZL, Jurg: "Luigi Nono", Livret-programme Ed. Festival d'Automne à
Paris, Contrechamps, Paris, 1987, pp.86-97.
STENZL, Jurg: 'Le nouveau Luigi Nono
'
STENZL, Jurg: 'Les chemins de Prometeo' (nouvelle version)
http://www.festival
-automne.com/public/ressourc/publicat/1987nono/170.htm
STENZEL, Jürg: 'Luigi Nono' Rowohlt, 1998.
referrers:
Fondazione Archivo Luigi Nono
The Guardian
Stefan Drees
Vladimir García
Morales
Classical Composers
Database
Références/musicologie
La mediathèque
Center for New Music University of California
Berkeley
María de la O del Santo Mora y José Vela Castillo.
New Music Links
Alistair Appleton
Future
of Modern Music
Forum Klassika
schreck
Quoted in:
ENRIQUE, Gavilán: 'Escúchame con atención: Liturgia del relato
en Wagner',
Universitat de València, 2007 (p.193).