Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono's political activism was most notable in the 1950s when he played an exceptional role in the exclusive circle of the Darmstadt School serialists, which also included Henze, Stockhausen, Maderna, Ligeti, and Boulez. As an avowed communist, Nono would often resort to producing works of political substance by employing aleatory (chance) techniques and serialism, and sometimes fragmenting language and using electronically manipulated sounds to commemorate victims of Fascism. By 1980s, Nono makes a complete turn in his musical development by devising a whole new approach to composition and technique as an indictment against Soviet Cold War tyranny. The new technologies allowed the sound to circulate in space, giving this dimension a role no less important than its emission. Such innovations became central to a new conception of time and space.

We can still ponder this quartet written for the Bonn Festival in 1980. It has a wonderful quality of longevity, striking a passion for the timbre of the human voice. Arditti fully understood what Nono wanted: not a pretty but rather a threadbare timbre, unfinished and ugly, carrying the weight of the 20th century horrors and its challenges; Am Steg, like fingernails slowly descending down a chalkboard, the string body pulverized into fine particles of timbre not dissimilar to Penderecki's masterpiece on the subject of nuclear terror. While modernity may have died, Nono still lives on, for his departure always seem to give rise to another beginning of his impassioned love for unshackled timbre.

La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988-89) is for 8-track tape mostly containing diverse pre-recorded and manipulated violin sounds (played by Arditti, manipulated by Nono), and a solo violin part. The solo violin interacts with the tape, yet to a certain extent it is up to the discretion of the performer at which moments the solo violin involves in an interaction with the tape. The violin sounds from the tape often sound as if coming from another world, due to their electronic manipulation. This is among the most extreme examples of textural music - the processes in the music almost may be experienced as changes within one "single" sound or soundscape - not unlike some of the late Stockhausen pieces (eg. the Electronic Music from Friday from Light or the Helicopter-string quartet).