carola nielinger - 'the song unsung' - luigi nono's il canto sospeso

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131 no. 1 83–150

© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. All rights reserved.doi:10.1093/jrma/fkl001

‘The Song Unsung’: Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso

carola nielinger

A WORK by a dedicated Communist that dared to address Nazi crimes whenthey were still largely taboo in West German cultural life was bound to causecontroversy when it was first performed in Cologne at the height of the ColdWar.1 Although the première of Nono’s Il canto sospeso was itself a success, thework’s reception in Germany (and later also in Britain) was soon overshadowedby the context of Adorno’s distorting but influential association of integral seri-alism with totalitarian regimes (Nazi as well as Stalinist).2 Moreover, Stockhausen’scondemnation of the use of text in this work did Nono few favours.3 Neverthe-less, Il canto sospeso was a great breakthrough and of such importance to Nonothat, towards the end of 1960, he returned to it anew. He felt compelled to doso in the context of the Algerian War of Independence and the atrocities towhich it gave rise. Thus, despite the fact that Nono had developed and radicallyrefined his serial technique in the intervening four years, the entire fourthmovement is integrated into the music-theatre piece Intolleranza 1960, where itis explicitly tied to the political situation in Algeria.4 The same year, the Italianmusicologist Massimo Mila concluded his observations on Il canto sospeso in thefollowing terms:

The novelty and rigorous idiomatic originality of Il canto sospeso . . . do not, fortunately,exhaust the merits of this work. Once again, invention and technical command serve to com-municate a message whose fully perceptible depth is what counts. The emotional response

1 Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1955–6) was premièred under Scherchen in Cologne on 24 October1956. The concert also included Webern’s Pieces for Orchestra, opp. 6 and 10, as well as Schoenberg’sFriede auf Erden, op. 13.

2 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Das Altern der neuen Musik’, broadcast April 1954, first published inDer Monat, 80 (1955), 150–8, expanded in Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen,1956), 136–59; ‘The Aging of the New Music’, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will,in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, 2002), 181–202.

3 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Musik und Sprache’, lecture delivered at Darmstadt (1957), publishedin Darmstädter Beiträge, 1 (Mainz, 1958); revised version broadcast on SWR, published in dieReihe, 6 (1960), 36–58, and in Stockhausen, Texte, ed. Dieter Schnebel, ii (Cologne, 1964), 58–68,149–66.

4 In Intolleranza 1960 the fourth movement of Il canto sospeso links the ‘Interrogation’ and ‘Torture’scenes (Act 1, scenes iv and v). It follows a chilling quotation from the book La question (1958)by Henri Alleg, a personal account of the practice of torture in Algerian detention camps with apreface by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was seized by police in France as soon as it was published.Nono used a quotation from Sartre’s preface in the ‘Torture’ scene.

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which Il canto sospeso produces even in non-musicians is something that is rarely experiencedtoday but continuously sought: it is the elimination of that much-deprecated chasm whichdivides modern art from the common man, an elimination obtained without the shadow of aconcession and without compromising strict adherence to idiomatic originality.5

The composer, about to transfer the ‘message’ of Il canto sospeso to a new polit-ical context, must surely have embraced Mila’s conclusion, with its emphasis onboth content and idiomatic originality. And yet bringing the two together ana-lytically, in the light of the most recent discoveries concerning Nono’s use ofpermutational systems, has proved elusive; and the new availability of sketchesat the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice since 1993 has probably influenced thetechnical focus of later analytical writing.6 My own analysis, too, results froman ever-growing fascination with the intricacies of Nono’s serial technique; mybroader concern, though, is with how this technique – which to Nono was buta means, not an end – is used to express the work’s urgent message.

One important technical aspect is a method of pitch permutation that wasoriginally conceived by Bruno Maderna, but is relevant to a number of serialcomposers in Italy at the time, including Nono, Berio, Clementi and Donatoni.This technique, which is employed in several movements of Il canto sospeso, hasnot sufficiently been taken into account in recent full-scale analyses of thiswork.7 The aim of this article, therefore, is twofold: to offer a detailed, moresympathetic historical contextualization of Il canto sospeso; and to add to themany analytical facets of this fascinating example of integral serialism by takinginto account important recent research on music by Maderna and Nono as wellas insights gained from my own study of the sketches. It is hoped that some ofthe myths surrounding Il canto sospeso, particularly in Britain, may thus be dis-pelled, and that the work itself may be understood as one of the most expres-sive, but also one of the most rigorously structured, musical monuments toEuropean anti-fascist resistance, whose message is as urgent as ever today, in theage of Bagram, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

‘Never before did I experience such tension in the audience with my work!’,Nono wrote to Paul Dessau after the première of Il canto sospeso. ‘Tension astotal silenzio, no noise throughout the performance, nothing.’8 Herbert Eimert, too,describes the remarkable impact of this performance: ‘Il canto sospeso . . . probably

5 Massimo Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, La rassegna musicale, 30 (1960), 297–311 (p. 311). Translationsare my own unless otherwise indicated.

6 Henceforth abbreviated as ALN. Many thanks to those at the Archive who made my workingenvironment a most pleasant one. My wholehearted thanks also go to Angela Ida De Benedictis,whose careful reading of this text led to substantial improvements.

7 Kathryn Bailey, ‘Work in Progress: Analysing Nono’s Il canto sospeso’, Music Analysis, 11 (1992),279–334; Wolfgang Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck (Saarbrücken, 1996); Laurent Feneyrou,Il canto sospeso de Luigi Nono (Paris, 2002).

8 Nono, letter to Paul Dessau (1956), ALN: ‘in meinem Werk nie von Publikum eine solcheSpannung gehört! Spannung als totale silenzio, während der Aufführung kein Lärm, nichts.’

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left the most significant impression to date of any concert work of the younggeneration of composers today. . . . This one work would be enough to legiti-mize the enigmatic “legacy of Webern” once and for all.’9 Adorno’s view that‘no one is actually challenged’ by integral serialism, ‘no one recognizes himselfin it, or senses in it any binding claim to truth’ could not have been provedwrong with greater poignancy.10 But what exactly is it about Il canto sospeso thatleft and continues to leave such a strong impression? One aspect, certainly, isthe choice of texts from letters of European resistance fighters about to be exe-cuted. Nono selected these from the anthology Lettere di condannati a mortedella Resistenza europea, published in 1954 by the left-wing Giulio Einaudi.11

The score is dedicated ‘a tutti loro’ (‘to all of them’) and cites the following pas-sage from the book’s preface by Thomas Mann:

the faith, the hope, the readiness for sacrifice of a young European generation, whichbore the fine name of the ‘résistance’, of internationally unanimous resistance against thedisgrace of their country, against the shame of a Hitlerite Europe and the horror of aHitlerite world, though who wanted more than simply to resist, feeling themselves to bethe vanguard of a better human society.12

Some of the letters selected by Nono indeed focus on this aspect of hope andsacrifice for a better world: ‘Muoio per un mondo che splenderà con luce tantoforte con tale bellezza che il mio sacrificio non è nulla . . . Muoio per la gius-tizia. Le nostre idee vinceranno’ (‘I am dying for a world which will shine withlight of such strength and beauty that my own sacrifice is nothing . . . I amdying for justice. Our ideas will triumph’; Anton Popov (26), Bulgaria, no. 2);‘Muoio per la libertà’ (‘I am dying for freedom’; Andreas Likourinos (14),Greece, no. 3); ‘Vado con la fede in una vita migliore per voi’ (‘I go in the beliefof a better life for you’; Elli Voigt (32), Germany, no. 9). Others simply dealwith the difficulty of saying ‘addio per sempre alla vita così bella’ (‘goodbye forever to life which is so beautiful’; Esther Srul, Poland, no. 6b).13 Most of the

9 Herbert Eimert, ‘Uraufführung von Nonos Canto sospeso in Köln’, Melos, 23 (1956), 354.10 Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, 185.11 Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza europea, ed. Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli

with a preface by Thomas Mann (Turin, 1954). This first edition of 1954, which Nono musthave used, is not found among his books, only the second edition of 1964. I will therefore referto this second edition. An anthology of letters by Italian resistance fighters was compiled by thesame editors two years earlier: Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (8 settembre1943–25 aprile 1945) (Turin, 1952).

12 As cited in the score, trans. Peter Owens (London, 1995), 89.13 Ibid., 90–1. More overtly communist ideals are articulated in some of the texts that were later

discarded, e.g. a letter of the Bulgarian communist Nicola Botušev, who asks his family to‘search for the meaning of life in the struggle’, or the letter of the Austrian communist OskarKlekner, written to his brother shortly before their decapitation by the Gestapo in Vienna on2 November 1943: ‘Now . . . it is our turn. We, too, will go to the gallows with heads high andhand over the flag of liberty to those who will be fortunate enough to experience the hour offreedom.’ Lettere di condannati, ed. Malvezzi and Pirelli, 61, 119.

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texts are extracts from longer letters. The first to appear in the sketches, how-ever, is the aphoristic note ‘addio mamma, tua figlia Liubka se ne va nell’umidaterra’ (‘Goodbye, mother, your daughter Liubka is going into the moist earth’).14

Liubka Shevzova was a member of the Russian resistance movement known asthe Young Guard, and among those captured in December 1942 for helping75 prisoners escape from German concentration camps. Like many of her com-rades, she was tortured, without revealing information, and was finally beatento death under the eyes of a Rotenführer of the SS on 7 February 1943. Hershort testimony, representative of the fate of so many of those cited in thisanthology, lies at the heart of the conception of Il canto sospeso and was laterused for movement no. 7, the lyrical apotheosis of the central part of the work.

Nono himself referred to Il canto sospeso as a cantata, while Massimo Milalater coined the term ‘freedom mass’.15 None of the chosen letters seeks refugein religion, however. Nono may have agreed with Mann that ‘those who do notspeak of God and Heaven find much higher, more spiritual, and more poeticexpression for the idea of living on’.16 Furthermore, Il canto sospeso was writtenduring a time when Italian communists were publicly denounced and officiallyexcommunicated from the Catholic Church, whose role in European anti-fascist resistance movements was not in any case prominent.17 Nono, who hadjoined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1952, could not but write a secularcantata. Had the work not been a West German commission, its political mess-age might have been voiced in stronger terms but, under the circumstances,contemporary politics could only be alluded to. The passage Nono quotes fromMann is in fact part of a vicious attack on the deadlock situation of the thendivided world: ‘a world of evil regression’ ruled by superstitious hate and perse-cution mania, a world where weapons of mass destruction are entrusted to thosewho are intellectually and morally incompetent, and a world in which ‘the sink-ing level of culture, the atrophy of education, the mindless acceptance of atroc-ities committed by a politicized judiciary, bigwigs, blind greed for profit, the

14 Ibid., 794.15 The term ‘cantata’ is found among the earliest sketches, ALN 14.02.01/04 (current catalogue

marking). Mila speaks of a ‘messa della libertà, che non può concedersi la gioia sfolgorante delGloria’ (‘a freedom mass that does not allow for the radiant joy of the Gloria’). The analogy istaken further: the orchestral introduction is regarded as the Kyrie, the first a cappella chorus(no. 2) as the Credo, the tenor and soprano solos (nos. 5 and 7) as the Benedictus and Agnusdei, and no. 6 for chorus and orchestra as the Dies irae. Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 302–7.

16 Thomas Mann, preface to Lettere di condannati, ed. Malvezzi and Pirelli, repr. as ‘Vorwort zudem Buche Briefe Todgeweihter’, Mann, An die gesittete Welt: Politische Schriften und Reden imExil, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), 812–19(p. 816).

17 The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was ousted from government by the Christian Democratsin 1948. Card-carrying communists were excommunicated by Pope Pius XII in the bull Avvisosacro of 1949. Few communist activists, therefore, were practising Catholics. The PCI, however,never defined itself as explicitly anti-Catholic or anti-clerical. On the PCI and the CatholicChurch see Cris Shore, Italian Communism: The Escape from Leninism (London, 1990), 38.


decay of loyalty and faith’ seemed to offer ‘poor protection’ against the threat ofa Third World War.18

Nono alludes to this deplorable state of affairs not only by quoting Mann,whose preface may well have been known to German readers at the time,19 butalso through the work’s title. Il canto sospeso – literally The Suspended Song – hasrightly been regarded as a rather ambiguous title, with the Italian word ‘sospeso’being translated as either ‘floating’ or ‘interrupted’.20 Only recently, Angela IdaDe Benedictis rediscovered that the title is taken from a poem by Ethel Rosenberg,the Jewish American who, with her husband Julius, was accused of spying andtransmitting secret scientific information on nuclear warfare to the SovietUnion. Their essentially unjustified execution on 19 June 1953 caused outragewithin the European left, particularly in France, and may well have been one ofthe ‘atrocities’ Mann had in mind in his attack on the politicized judiciary.Nono owned the Italian translation of the Rosenberg correspondence, pub-lished under the title Lettere dalla casa della morte in 1953.21 The preamble to thecorrespondence is the poem If We Die by Ethel Rosenberg:

You shall know, my sons, shall knowwhy we leave the song unsung,the book unread, the work undoneto rest beneath the sod.

Mourn no more, my sons, no morewhy the lies and smears were framed,the tears we shed, the hurt we boreto all shall be proclaimed.

Earth shall smile, my sons, shall smileand green above our resting place,the killing end, the world rejoicein brotherhood and peace.

Work and build, my sons, and builda monument to love and joy,to human worth, to faith we keptfor you, my sons, for you.22

18 Mann, ‘Vorwort’, 817–18.19 Lettere di condannati, ed. Malvezzi and Pirelli, was translated into German and published

under the title Und die Flamme soll euch nicht versengen (Zurich, 1955).20 Il canto sospeso, score, p. 89.21 Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Lettere dalla casa della morte, trans. Renato Nicolai and Giuliana

Orlandini, Attualità politica, 5 (Rome, 1953). The Italian translation replaces the original titleof the poem, If We Die, with the beginning of the third stanza, Lavorate e costruite, figli miei(Work and Build, my Sons), thus giving it a slight communist touch.

22 Ethel Rosenberg, If We Die (24 January 1953), The Rosenberg Letters (London, 1953), 6. ThisBritish edition includes letters of protest by Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon

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Translating Rosenberg’s ‘song unsung’, Il canto sospeso thus also contains a hid-den reference to a more contemporary case of violently ‘interrupted’ song: thatof the Rosenbergs in 1953. The poem that inspired this deliberately enigmatictitle is essentially a personal tribute to the Rosenbergs’ two young sons,aged 6 and 10 at the time. It does not claim to be high art, but is yet anothermoving testimony of the sort found in the letters of the European resistancefighters. Mann describes the peculiar effect of such documentary texts: ‘Oneadmires poetry because it can express itself like real life. One is doubly affected bylife itself, because unintentionally it expresses itself as poetry.’23

Notably, Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New Music’ cites a document of similarnature: the title-page illustration from the first edition of Karl Kraus’s apocalyp-tic drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind; 1921). Thepicture represents ‘the execution of the deputy Battisti, accused by the Austriansof spying’, with ‘a merrily laughing hangman’ at its centre. The fact that thispicture – ‘along with another that was, if possible, even more shocking’ – wasomitted in the drama’s first post-World War II edition prompts Adorno toargue that

as a result of this seemingly superficial change something decisive was transformed in thework. A similar transformation, a little less crass, occurred in New Music. The soundsremain the same. But the anxiety that gave shape to its great founding works has beenrepressed. Perhaps that anxiety has become so overwhelming in reality that its undis-guised image would scarcely be bearable: to recognize the aging of the New Music doesnot mean to misjudge this aging as something accidental. But art that unconsciouslyobeys such repression and makes itself a game, because it has become too weak for seri-ousness, renounces its claim to truth, which is its only raison d’être.24

In setting text which no longer merely conjures up the image of a ‘merrilylaughing hangman’ but Nazi-style executions and, ultimately, the exterminationcamps, Nono, among very few other composers of his time, took the bold stepdemanded by Adorno and addressed his European contemporaries with a workthat forced them to confront the recent past. Moreover, he did so with compo-sitional means of the most advanced kind. While Il canto sospeso retains the tra-ditional lineup of soloists, chorus and orchestra, as well as the movement structureof established genres such as oratorio or cantata, each of its nine movements isalso a perfect example of serial technique. Nono later described the work as a‘Divertimento of different compositional ideas’,25 and indeed the variety with

among others. Rosenberg’s poem is mentioned by Mila in ‘La linea Nono’, 306. No referenceis given by Mila, and the German translation of this article in Jürg Stenzl, Luigi Nono: Texte,Studien zu seiner Musik (Zurich, 1975), 380–93 (p. 388), provides the wrong reference to Letteredi condannati, ed. Malvezzi and Pirelli.

23 Mann, ‘Vorwort’, 814.24 Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, 183.25 Nono, ‘Un’autobiografia dell’autore raccontata da Enzo Restagno’ (1987), Scritti e colloqui, ed.

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, Le sfere, 35 (Lucca, 2001), ii, 477–568 (p. 511).


which serial technique is employed in Il canto sospeso is hardly surpassed in laterworks of this period and certainly justifies the attention this masterpiece hasbeen given in purely analytical terms.26 However, one question does pose itself:are these adequate means for the expression of such content – if, indeed, anysuch means can be said to exist? This question has been asked time and again,especially in German criticism, ever since Adorno first formulated his mostheatedly debated dictum: ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. This dic-tum, overtones of which are also present in ‘The Aging of the New Music’,reached a wider German audience only with the publication of Adorno’s collec-tion of essays entitled Prismen in 1955.27 Specifically with regard to the text ofIl canto sospeso, Eimert remarks: ‘Can one “set” this to music? Embarrassing tothink that this may have been done with traditional means of expression, descrip-tive narrative or sensational reportage with large-scale magazine reproductions.’28

Eimert’s response to Nono’s treatment of the text, however, is essentially positive:

Nono does not interpret the words, nor does he cover them up. Instead the word isincorporated into the structure – not only words, but syllables, too, meander through thevoices. The phonetic thus becomes part of the ‘serial’ – this happens here for the firsttime outside the field of electronic music. And it happens so convincingly that the ‘com-posed’ vocal colour merges into a vibrating image of sound, an objectified music ofmetallic plasticism and greatest intensity.29

26 In addition to the analyses by Bailey, Motz and Feneyrou already cited, much has been writtenon individual movements of Il canto sospeso. On no. 1: Wolfgang Motz, ‘Konstruktive Strengeund kompositorische Freiheit im ersten Satz des Canto sospeso’, La nuova ricerca sull’opera diLuigi Nono, ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli and Veniero Rizzardi, Archivio LuigiNono: Studi, 1 (Florence, 1999), 53–66. On no. 2: Stockhausen, ‘Musik und Sprache’;Jonathan Kramer, ‘The Fibonacci Series in Twentieth-Century Music’, Journal of Music The-ory, 17 (1973), 110–49 (pp. 126–30); Erika Schaller, Klang und Zahl: Serielles Komponierenzwischen 1955 und 1959 (Saarbrücken, 1997), 112–25; Angela Ida De Benedictis, ‘Il rapporto testomusica nelle opere vocali di Luigi Nono: Studio filologico-analitico con particolare riferimentoa Canti di vita e d’amore’ (Laurea in musicologia, University of Pavia, 1996), 235–47. On no. 4:Gianmario Borio, ‘Sull’interazione fra lo studio degli schizzi e l’analisi dell’opera’, La nuovaricerca, ed. Borio, Morelli and Rizzardi, 1–21 (pp. 15–17); Matthias Herrmann, ‘Das Zeitnetz alsserielles Mittel formaler Organisation: Untersuchungen zum IV. Satz aus Il canto sospeso vonLuigi Nono’, Musiktheorie: Festschrift für Heinrich Deppert, ed. Wolfgang Budday (Tutzing,2000), 261–75. On no. 6: Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘Luigi Nono: Il canto sospeso VI a, b’, Luigi Nono,ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte, 20 (Munich, 1981), 58–79. Onno. 8: Gianmario Borio, ‘Tempo e ritmo nelle composizioni seriali, 1952–56’, Le musiche deglianni cinquanta, ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli and Veniero Rizzardi, Archivio LuigiNono: Studi, 2 (Florence, 2004), 61–115 (pp. 112–14). On no. 9: Angela Ida De Benedictis,‘Gruppo, linea e proiezioni armoniche’, ibid., 183–226 (pp. 204–5).

27 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms, trans. Samuel and ShierryWeber (London, 1967; repr. Cambridge, MA, 1981), 17–34 (p. 34). ‘Kulturkritik und Gesell-schaft’ (1949) was first published in the Festschrift Soziologische Forschung in unserer Zeit:Leopold Wiese zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Gustav Specht (Cologne, 1951), and later included inPrismen (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), 7–31.

28 Eimert, ‘Uraufführung von Nonos Canto sospeso in Köln’.29 Ibid.

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As is well known, Stockhausen responded with much greater uneasiness. Hisanalysis of the second movement of Il canto sospeso begins with the followingreflections on the music–text relationship:

In certain pieces of the ‘Canto’, Nono composed the text as if to withdraw it from thepublic eye where it has no place . . . The texts are not delivered, but rather concealed insuch a regardlessly strict and dense musical form that they are hardly comprehensiblewhen performed. To what end, then, text, and particularly this one? One can explain itas follows: particularly when setting those passages from the letters where one is mostashamed that they had to be written, the musician acts purely as a composer . . . he doesnot interpret, he does not comment. Instead, he reduces language to its syllables . . . per-mutations of vowel-sounds, a, ä, e, i, o, u; serial structure. Should he not have chosentexts so rich in meaning in the first place, but rather sounds? At least for the sectionswhere only the phonetic properties of language are dealt with?30

In part, Stockhausen’s stern critique of the text–music relationship in Il cantosospeso can be understood as a self-defence against similar attacks on the decon-struction of text and structural use of phonetics in Gesang der Jünglinge (alsopremièred in 1956).31 Such deconstruction is justified in his own piece,Stockhausen argues, because the text – ‘a sequence of acclamations from theApocrypha to the Book of Daniel’ – is not only extremely repetitive but, to agreat extent, ‘general knowledge’.32 Stockhausen’s critique of Il canto sospeso, itbecomes clear, is essentially related to the nature of the text itself. Not only arethese testimonies felt to be too personal to be placed in the public eye, but tothe ordinary German who endured the Nazi regime without much resistancethey must have evoked an overpowering sensation of shame and guilt.33 Pre-cisely this feeling of disgrace had prevailed in the radio broadcast of 8 May 1945in which Thomas Mann laid bare the truth of the camps:

The thick walls of the torture chamber Germany was turned into under Hitler have beenforced open. Our disgrace is revealed to the eyes of the world, to the foreign commis-sions, to whom these unbelievable images are now shown and who report at home thatthis exceeds all dreadfulness that any human being can imagine. ‘Our disgrace’, German

30 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Music and Speech’, trans. Ruth Koenig, die Reihe, 6 (1964), 40–64(pp. 48–9), and Morag Josephine Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2001), 203.Stockhausen may have been searching for a serialization of vowel sounds in this movement,but this is not present.

31 Ludwig Wismeyer, ‘Wider die Natur!’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 118 (1957), 136–7. Thisreview is discussed in Grant, Serial Music, 198. For further reviews in this vein see Karl AmadeusHartmann und die Musica viva, ed. Renata Wagner (Munich, 1980), 136–7.

32 Stockhausen, ‘Music and Speech’, 57.33 Stockhausen himself is a typical example. His own mother, a victim of the Nazi euthanasia

programme, had been ‘officially put to death’ in 1941. His father was shot in battle in April1945. And yet Stockhausen states: ‘I simply accepted it as given, not as an injustice, a challenge,that’s my way.’ Stockhausen, ‘About my Childhood’ (1971), Stockhausen on Music, ed. RobinMaconie (London, 1989), 15–23 (pp. 20–1).


readers and listeners! Because everything German, everybody who speaks German, writesin German, and has lived the German way, is affected by this degrading revelation.34

German culture had been severely dislocated. Even Adorno’s incessant reli-ance on negative dialectics is inseparable from the watershed event encapsulatedin the name Auschwitz. Time and again Adorno reflects on the dilemma of theimpossibility of representing Auschwitz and the imperative of having to addressit. The topic is already present in Minima moralia, written in exile but pub-lished only in 1951:

All the world’s not a stage. – The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasingimpossibility of representing historical events. That there is no adequate drama aboutFascism is not due to lack of talent; talent is withering through the insolubility of thewriter’s most urgent task. . . . The impossibility of portraying Fascism springs from thefact that in it, as in its contemplation, subjective freedom no longer exists. Total unfree-dom can be recognized, but not represented. Where freedom occurs as a motif in polit-ical narratives today, as in the praise of heroic resistance, it has the embarrassing qualityof impotent reassurance.35

The much-debated dictum on poetry after Auschwitz, however, is later put intoquestion by the author himself in Negative Dialectics (1966): ‘Perennial sufferinghas as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it mayhave been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.’36

Adorno here clearly moves on from his original statement in ‘Cultural Criticismand Society’ and adds: ‘A new categorical imperative has been imposed byHitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so thatAuschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.’37 Despitethis concession, written at the time of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and pub-lished just after the production of Peter Weiss’s documentary drama Die Ermitt-lung (for which Nono wrote music in 1965), Adorno never fully embraced artthat addressed the topic of Auschwitz, however modernist or conscious of itsfunction in society. One reason for this, with regard to music, was Adorno’smodernist belief in the inherent historicity of the musical material itself. Poli-tics, however, was clearly also at stake, and most certainly so in the case of

34 Thomas Mann, ‘Die Lager’ (1945), An die gesittete Welt, ed. de Mendelssohn, 698–701 (p. 699).Throughout the 1940s Mann regularly addressed the German people with appeals to actagainst the Nazi regime. Once a month an eight-minute message was recorded on disc, trans-mitted by phone to London and then broadcast by the BBC. The broadcasts are publishedunder the title ‘Deutsche Hörer!’, ibid., 473–625. Mann’s broadcast on the camps and its effecton German listeners was later mentioned by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, trans.Raymond Rosenthal (London, 1988), 161.

35 Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott(London, 1974), 143–5. Nono owned the first Italian edition, Minima moralia, trans. and ed.Renato Solmi (Turin, 1954).

36 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London, 1990), 362.37 Ibid., 365.

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Nono. As is evident from Hans Werner Henze’s autobiography, Adorno refusedoutright to align with intellectuals in communist alliances. When asked for aletter of support in the context of the ill-fated première of Henze’s Das Floß derMedusa in 1968, Adorno responded positively at first but changed his mind afterhaving heard that such letters had already been written by Nono and Weiss.38

Such were the political frontiers in West Germany when Heinz-KlausMetzger’s defence of integral serialism in response to Adorno’s ‘The Aging ofthe New Music’ not only excluded Nono, but explicitly accused him of serialistcomposition of the sort that, ‘stagnant’ and ‘without a sense of history’, couldserve only to justify Adorno’s critique of this technique. Il canto sospeso, evenMetzger is forced to concede, is ‘perhaps the most impressive’ of Nono’s serialworks, but

Partisans in the struggle against reactionary oppression can no longer write one last lineto their mother before being executed without becoming the subject of a masterpiece byone of the composers who specialize in these matters. The war in Algeria had not evenended by the time Nono had prepared himself to process in music the screams of thosewho were tortured there, with the usual 12 notes, in order to present them at the nextimportant festival to the applause of a delighted bourgeoisie. Of all the well-known com-posers of his generation, however, the author of Intolleranza 1960 resists musical progresswith the greatest intolerance – a serial Pfitzner.39

In marked contrast, Massimo Mila argued that precisely because Il canto sospesostems from the context of Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New Music’ and success-fully denies the philosopher’s historical pessimism, its significance ‘surpasses theusual satisfaction with an accomplished work of art’.40 Well aware of the politicalimplications of Adorno’s polemic, Mila openly defends Nono against Metzger,41

but also specifically homes in on the Italian context:

Another criterion for testing the idiomatic authenticity of Il canto sospeso is the nauseaproduced by the voluntary celebratory pieces with which musicians take advantage of themoral values of the Resistenza for their tired local communities. In Il canto sospeso there isnothing of that cheap sentimental blackmail which has prompted surviving partisansmore than once to paraphrase Lecomte de Lisle: ‘It is forbidden to lay music on thetombs of our dead.’ On the contrary, the most rewarding praise one can possibly writefor Il canto sospeso is that the music is worthy of its texts and that, within its own sphere,it manages to recreate the dramatic moral depth of the letters of the Resistance fighters

38 Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths, trans. Stewart Spencer (London, 1998), 244. ‘Saluto aHenze’, the letter Nono wrote in support of Henze, is included in Scritti, i, 254–5.

39 Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Das Altern der jüngsten Musik’ (1962), Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten(Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 113–28 (pp. 120–1).

40 Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 300–1.41 Mila (ibid., 310) quotes a similarly scathing passage from Metzger, ‘Ecksteine neuer Musik’,

Magnum, 30 (1960). In this passage Metzger accuses Nono of ‘having succumbed to the slogansof the Prague Manifesto’ with ‘a return to tonality, speaking choruses, arioso opera clichés,popular dance rhythms and Gregorian chant’ in his Lorca trilogy.


condemned to death – of words, that is, the validity of which has been affirmed by themost decisive of proofs.42

The difference between the West German and Italian appreciations couldnot be clearer. Since 1945 the Resistenza had formed an integral part of Italiancultural life, not only in literature but also in music. Many intellectuals, includ-ing Maderna and Nono, had actively supported the resistance. Maderna cameinto contact with the anti-fascist ‘Fronte di Liberazione’ in Verona after return-ing from army service in the autumn of 1943 and joined the partisans in theregion of Verona in February 1945. Nono did not go up into the mountains tofight, but he and his sister hid arms and other important items such as metalstamps for counterfeit passes.43 Such first-hand experience was bound to bereflected in music. Soon after the liberation, Bruno Maderna (1920–73) wrotemusic for a radio documentary entitled ‘Poesia della Resistenza’, broadcast on17 November 1946.44 A chart in Joachim Noller’s dissertation on GiacomoManzoni (b. 1932) also shows that Nono was by no means the only composer touse letters by resistance fighters.45 In the footsteps of Dallapiccola’s Canti di pri-gionia (1938–41) and Il prigioniero (1944–9), both Maderna and VittorioFellegara (b. 1927) chose to set excerpts from Pirelli’s anthology of letters fromthe Italian resistance almost as soon as it was published: Maderna in his cantataQuattro lettere (1953) for soprano, bass and chamber orchestra, and Fellegara inLettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (1954) for speaker, chorusand orchestra.46 Like Il canto sospeso, Maderna’s Quattro lettere was written spe-cifically for performance in West Germany, and the following revealing com-ment is found in a letter to Nono:

The letters on the Resistenza are very beautiful, but I don’t want to cause speculation. Iresolved the problem by thinking of four different letters: the first a letter from theResistenza; the second a love letter (probably a letter from Kafka to Milena); the third abusiness letter (from which it will become clear how a large capitalist TRUST can dam-age a small business . . . ); the fourth will be a letter or excerpts from Gramsci’s prison

42 Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 311.43 This information was kindly provided by Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. Nono’s future brother-in-

law was an important communications person in the resistance.44 Angela Ida De Benedictis mentions this radio programme in her book Radiogramma e arte

radiofonica: Storia e funzioni della musica per radio in Italia (Turin, 2004), 15. Also see MaurizioRomito, ‘I commenti musicali di Bruno Maderna: Radio, televisione, teatro, II’, Nuova rivistamusicale italiana, 36 (2002), 79–98 (p. 79).

45 Joachim Noller, Engagement und Form: Giacomo Manzonis Werk im kulturhistorischen undmusikkritischen Zusammenhang (Frankfurt, 1987), 90.

46 Other works by Fellegara, who also briefly attended the Darmstadt courses in 1955 and 1956and adopted serialist practices in the late 50s, demonstrate thematic closeness to Nono’s work.These include Epigrafe per Ethel e Julius Rosenberg (1955) for speaker and five instruments, twomajor works that set texts by F. García Lorca (Requiem di Madrid (1958) and Dies irae (1959))and two chamber works on texts by Paul Eluard, Epitaphe (1964) and Chanson (1974).

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correspondence. I am enthusiastic about this idea and think that it will be a very beauti-ful Cantata Krakaka.47

The choice and juxtaposition of texts in Quattro lettere are typical in that theResistenza is clearly associated with Italian communist identity. Of all anti-fascistparties in Italy, the communists had been the largest force in the armed partisanstruggle (1943–5) in which Maderna himself participated. Anti-fascism in turnbecame the great appeal of communist identity, particularly to those who joinedthe party in the immediate aftermath of the war (1944–7):

Communism, it seemed, was the only force in Italy that had stood up to Mussolini andliberated the nation from the yoke of dictatorship . . . Anti-Fascists were the heroes of thehour and the making of a popular politician lay in the sacrifice to the struggle againstFascism (hence the virtual canonisation of Antonio Gramsci and the enormous respect forthe Soviet Union). It was possible, therefore, to be ‘liberal’, patriotic and communist.48

Gramsci’s prison letters and notebooks were first published by Einaudi in thelate 1940s and indeed took Italy by storm.49 Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, inparticular, appealed to Italian intellectuals and caused many of them to join thePCI. The concept emphasized ‘the need to carry the political struggle onto thecultural front and to spread Party influence into every aspect of Italian society’,whereupon the so-called ‘organic intellectual’ would take on a key role.50 Gramscianhegemony essentially promoted a way of changing society from within ratherthan by means of violent revolutionary uprising. It thus provided an invaluablealternative to the Stalinist model of socialism, and lies at the heart of the greatsuccess story of the PCI in comparison to all other Western European com-munist parties. The German communist party, for example, was banned in1956, while the PCI, even during the ‘hard years’ of Cold War persecution,gained more than 22% of Italian votes. Maderna and Nono joined the PCI dur-ing those ‘hard years’ in 1952. One acute reason for joining the PCI at this timewas the Christian Democrats’ introduction of a new electoral law, according towhich any alliance of parties that gained more than 50% of the votes wouldreceive two thirds of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Communists andSocialists immediately dubbed this law ‘la legge truffa’ (‘the swindle law’), andsaw in it a dangerous parallel to Mussolini’s ‘Acerbo law’, which had consolidated

47 Maderna, letter to Nono (14 February 1953), ALN. Parts of this letter, the texts and theirsources are published in Nicola Verzina, ‘Tecnica della mutazione e tecnica seriale in VierBriefe (1953)’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 34 (1999), 309–45 (pp. 321–2), and idem, BrunoMaderna: Étude historique et critique (Paris, 2003). ‘Cantata Krakaka’ refers to the work’s subtitle:Kranichsteiner Kammerkantate.

48 Shore, Italian Communism, 35.49 Nono’s library contains a large selection of Gramsci, including the first Einaudi edition of the

prison letters and notebooks. The volume of Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere (Turin, 1947) isannotated.

50 Shore, Italian Communism, 71.


the fascists in power in 1923.51 As it happened, the centre coalition missed the50% mark by a fraction in the 1953 elections (49.85%) and the law was annulleda year later. With the Christian Democrats’ loss in popularity, however, theItalian neo-fascists managed to emerge as a permanent force in Italian politics.52

It is against this political background that one has to understand the contin-ued importance of the Resistenza in Italian culture of the 1950s and Maderna’sand Nono’s commitment in particular. ‘Resistenza’, Nono would later state inreply to a questionnaire from the communist weekly Rinascita, was not only ‘aglorious banner of the past’, but a ‘persistent struggle’ and an ongoing develop-ment of a ‘new consciousness’ in support of the ideals ‘for which so many diedand are being murdered still today’.53 With regard to the Resistenza’s impact onmusic, Nono went on to say:

In post-war Italy musical research and creativity developed in a very different way fromelsewhere. The urgency of a new idealism, provoked by the Resistenza, was coupled withthe search for adequate technical means and new possibilities, in electronic music as well.Ideological commitment went hand in hand with commitment to language. BrunoMaderna, the head of this new musical situation in Italy, led the way. In 1951 [sic] hecomposed a chamber cantata, Quattro lettere . . . This composition (never yet performedin Italy) is marked by the mutual interaction between its new and complex idealist con-tent and the novel projection of musical concept and invention. There were only a few ofus around Maderna at the time who spoke of total engagement, ideological as well astechnical.54

Such total engagement governed the choice not only of text but also of themusical material itself. As Verzina has shown, Maderna’s Quattro lettere is basedon one of the most famous songs of the Resistenza: Fischia il vento (The WindWhistles).55 This choice of material was again far from exceptional: both Nonoand Manzoni used political songs for a number of compositions in the 1950s.The middle movement of Nono’s first Epitaffio a Federico García Lorca (1952),for example, makes use of rhythmic material from the communist ‘hymn’Bandiera rossa, which was sung by the partisans as well as the International

51 On the ‘legge truffa’ and Mussolini’s Acerbo law see Paul Ginsborg, A History of ContemporaryItaly (New York, 2003), 142–3.

52 Ibid., 143–5.53 Nono, ‘Musica e Resistenza’, questionnaire set by Luigi Pestalozza, Rinascita, 20/34 (7 December

1963), Scritti, ed. De Benedictis and Rizzardi, i, 144–7 (p. 144).54 Ibid., 145.55 Verzina, ‘Tecnica della mutazione’, 319–45. The song Fischia il vento uses the melody of the

Soviet song Katyusha (text: Michail Isakovsky, music: M. Blantér, 1939), probably known toItalian soldiers since their retreat from Russia in the winter of 1942. The Italian version, ofwhich there are many variations, was written by Felice Cascione, a partisan commander whosebrigade fought in the region of Imperia. The song was widely known and sung by almost everybrigade. See Canti della Resistenza italiana, ed. Giorgio Solza and Mario de Michelis (Avanti,1960), 163 (ALN), and Philip Cooke, ‘The Resistance Movement: 1943–1945’, The ItalianResistance: An Anthology, ed. Cooke (Manchester, 1997), 3–17 (p. 9).

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Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.56 The Internationale and another songfrom the Spanish Civil War, Mamita mia, were later used for La victoire de Guernica(1954).57 Manzoni’s Cinque Vicariote (1958) for chorus and orchestra also makesuse of popular song: five prison songs from Sicily’s most notorious prison, theVicaria in Palermo.58

While the choice of such source material is very much in line with the ‘neo-realist’ trend that dominated Italian literature and cinema immediately after thewar, the way it came to be used was perhaps more ‘formalist’. Formalism, inItaly, was by no means irreconcilable with Marxism – another reason for Nonoand Maderna to join the PCI. In the party’s debate on ‘Social Realism’, someItalian communists, including the party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, preferred toavoid the term formalism altogether.59 However, a number of artists also baldlydeclared:

Under the conviction that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not irreconcilable wedeclare ourselves Formalists and Marxists. This is of particular importance today, whenprogressive elements of our society must take on a revolutionary and avant-garde stanceand should not fall victim to the error of a burnt-out and conformist realism which, asrecent experiences in the visual arts show, is a path of great limitation and narrowness.60

Nono himself later mentions the debate to Philippe Albèra:

Bruno and I joined the Communist Party in 1952. This was the period in which socialistrealism was in full swing. In Italy there were critics from [the communist newspaper]L’unità who were against dodecaphony, which was officially regarded as ‘bourgeois’,‘imperialist’, etc., all these stupidities of the time. We answered that we had followedSchoenberg, followed Varèse in our studies. The party’s secretary in Venice then told us:‘that is your own affair, we do not want to intervene in this matter’. Gramsci’s thoughton the autonomy of confronting models was of great importance at the time.61

56 On the use of Bandiera rossa in ‘La Guerra’ and the original movement, ‘Lenin’, which itreplaces, see Borio, ‘Tempo e ritmo nelle composizioni seriali’, 71–3.

57 Mamita mia was written by Ernst Busch to a Spanish folk tune. It is an ironic song, makingfun of four fascist generals. The title ‘my dear mother’ refers to Madrid. On links between theItalian Resistenza and the anti-fascist struggle in Franco’s Spain and its importance to Italianpost-war composers see Luigi Pestalozza, ‘La guerra civile spagnola e i musicisti italiani deldopoguerra’, Federico García Lorca nella musica contemporanea, ed. Antonio Trudu (Milan,1990), 12–23.

58 On Manzoni’s Cinque Vicariote and the influence of Il canto sospeso on this work see Noller,Engagement und Form, 95–105.

59 Togliatti contributed to the debate under the pseudonym Roderigo di Castiglia and publishedvarious statements in support of Italian neo-realism in Rinascita.

60 Manifesto published in the art journal Forma I (15 March 1947), signed by the artists Dorazio,Perilli, Accardi, Attardi, Consagra, Guerrini, Sanfilippo and Turcato. Cited in NicolettaMisler, La via italiana al realismo: La politica culturale artistica del P.C.I. dal 1944 al 1956(Milan, 1976), 39.

61 Nono, ‘Intervista di Philippe Albèra’ (1987), Scritti, ii, 415–29 (p. 417).


For music, this meant that politically suggestive material such as the abovecould be treated in a highly abstract and technically advanced way, often tosuch a degree that it was no longer recognizable. Instead it took on a generativefunction. Materials were also freely combined, again placing them beyond rec-ognition. In Nono’s work this is perhaps most evident in sketches for La victoirede Guernica, where six pitches from Mamita mia and three pitches from theInternationale are combined to form a new nine-pitch series.62 Despite this, Lavictoire de Guernica, dedicated to the apostle of the German workers’ musicmovement, Hermann Scherchen, was also the most overtly ‘communist’ workof the young Nono. With its recognizable use of the rhythm of the Internationaleand speaking choruses of a rather pithy nature it created many enemies, espe-cially in Darmstadt. Even Maderna felt compelled to protest:

Don’t sell yourself in such a big way to politics and humanity. Don’t write anotherGuernica . . . You have to believe firmly in the Due espressioni, the Polifonica and theComposizione per orchestra 1952. These are the compositions which make you the true andgenuine composer, the sincere and loving friend, the precious and courageous compan-ion that you are . . . Scherchen is right to say that music has to be human (‘l’uomo’), buthe is wrong to say that music has to be common (‘l’uomo della strada’). We are not, can-not be, men of the street . . . WE are the true human beings (‘uomini’), and not only webut all those like us . . . Instead, think of yourself as Luigi Nono: someone who has greatresponsibility, someone who truly is a composer, perhaps a great composer. Think of thisin objective but modest terms. I still think, and always will do, that your Composizione1952 is one of the most beautiful and TRUE works of our time that are known to me.63

Perhaps it was this letter that caused Nono to rethink.64 Perhaps it was alsoStockhausen’s earlier criticism,65 or even Boulez, whom he visited from time totime between 1952 and 1954 and for whose concert series Domaine Musical hewrote his first strictly serial work, Canti per 13 (1955). Nono here first employedthe all-interval series upon which Il canto sospeso and almost all subsequentpieces up to Composizione per orchestra n. 2: Diario polacco ’58 (1959) are based:A B A B G C F C F D E E . In stark contrast to the politically suggestivematerials of previous works, the nature of this series is extremely objective. Anyremains of melodic or motivic characteristics are eliminated. Similar to the

62 ALN 08.03, fol. 10v.63 Maderna, letter to Nono, 11 March 1955 (ALN).64 Nono later admitted: ‘After all, at a certain point in time La victoire de Guernica represented a

flirtation’ and ‘a reaction against all that happened in Darmstadt: more and more repetitiveand sterile formulas, supreme exaltation of unifying “rationality”’. Nono, ‘Un’autobiografia’,514.

65 In a letter of 9 May 1953 Stockhausen criticized Nono heavily for lack of attention to the serialorganization of dynamics and duration, but also to the ‘significance of register proportions’.The correspondence between Nono and Stockhausen is discussed in Veniero Rizzardi,‘Karlheinz Stockhausen e Luigi Nono: Teoria e invenzione musicale 1952–1959’, Diastema, 3/7(1994), 37–40.

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series of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück I (a chromatic scale on C),66 Nono’s series isbuilt of two chromatic hexachords. Interlocking chromatic expansion from theopening pitch here also guarantees the full interval reservoir.67 This markedlyschematic all-interval series is subjected to a great variety of techniques inIl canto sospeso, among which the most astonishing and most difficult to detect isthe so-called ‘tecnica degli spostamenti’ (literally ‘technique of displacements’,but better translated, perhaps, as ‘technique of mutation’). This technique occursonly in the first of the three parts of Il canto sospeso (I: nos. 1–4; II: nos. 5–7; III:nos. 8–9), where it is used for movements 1, 3 and 4. The technique, which gen-erates the pitch structure of these movements, was first identified by GianmarioBorio and Veniero Rizzardi in the early 1990s by means of analyses of thesketches for Maderna’s Improvvisazione n. 1 (1951) and Nono’s Composizione perorchestra (1951).68 Its use in Il canto sospeso, however, was fully understood byBorio and Motz only in 1997, just after the publication of Motz’s Konstruktionund Ausdruck. Motz subsequently published a revised analysis of the first move-ment, while Borio explained the pitch structure of movement 4.69 In my discus-sion of this technique I will therefore place particular emphasis on the thirdmovement, which has not yet been represented in clear analytical terms.

The ‘tecnica degli spostamenti’ essentially goes back to Maderna’s and Nono’sfascination with ‘magic squares’. As Nono recalls in his autobiographical con-versation with Restagno: ‘Already in 1948, while writing his two Studi su Kafka,Maderna reduced his material to a minimum of intervals, searching for as manyrelationships and combinations as possible by means of the famous “magicsquares”.’70 Magic squares are also mentioned in the composers’ correspond-ence. Early in 1953 Maderna reminds Nono that ‘the magische Quadrat’ was notinvented by Scherchen but was part of their joint effort to inject serialism withhumanity and new communicative skills.71 Without further elaboration another

66 Nono briefly analysed this piece for his first Darmstadt seminar: ‘Sullo sviluppo della tecnicaseriale’ (1956), Scritti, i, 9–14 (pp. 13–14). Annotations to Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–IV arealso found in Nono’s copy of the score (ALN).

67 The series is classified as the ‘basic chromatic form’ of all-interval series in Herbert Eimert’sLehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik (Wiesbaden, 1950), 25. Nono briefly discusses this row, thoughnot in very clear terms, in ‘Sullo sviluppo della tecnica seriale’, 14. For further discussions of thenature of this row see De Benedictis, ‘Gruppo, linea e proiezioni armoniche’, 204; Motz,Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 22–8, and Bailey, ‘Work in Progress’, 281.

68 See Borio, ‘Sull’interazione tra lo studio degli schizzi e l’analisi dell’opera’, and Rizzardi, ‘La“Nuova Scuola Veneziana” 1948–1951’, Le musiche degli anni cinquanta, ed. Borio, Morelli andRizzardi, 1–59. In his research on Maderna, Verzina uses the term ‘tecnica della mutazione’. Anexcellent analysis of Maderna’s use of this technique is Christoph Neidhöfer, ‘Bruno Madernasflexibler Materialbegriff: Eine Analyse des Divertimento in due tempi (1953)’, Musik und Ästhetik,9/33 (2005), 30–47.

69 Wolfgang Motz, ‘Konstruktive Strenge und kompositorische Freiheit im ersten Satz des Cantosospeso’; Borio, ‘Sull’interazione tra lo studio degli schizzi e l’analisi dell’opera’.

70 Nono, ‘Un’autobiografia’, 502. Also see Borio, ‘La tecnica seriale in Studi per “Il processo” diFranz Kafka di Bruno Maderna’, Musica/Realtà, 32 (1990), 27–39.

71 Maderna, letter to Nono, Rome, January/February 1953 (ALN).


letter reveals: ‘I found a constructive way of turning squares into structures.’72

The technique, which both Nono and Maderna employed for the first time in1951, uses the numbers of a magic square to generate a system of permutationfor a fixed number of pitches. In Composizione per orchestra n. 1, the first ofNono’s works to incorporate this technique, nine pitches are permutated, whilethe last three pitches of the chromatic total (E , E, D – SED) are reserved forthe politically suggestive Finale.73 The technique is used again in the thirdmovement of the Epitaffio n. 1, ‘Casida della rosa’ (1952), where it appears intwo layers: one of four pitches, the other containing the remaining eight.74

Sketches show that the song material of La victoire de Guernica is also subjectedto this technique, again with a limited number of pitches. The technique isthen applied to a 12-note series in Canti per 13, in this case with numbers of theFibonacci series.75 While the same series is used for Il canto sospeso, the numbersquares which govern the pitch permutation are different. As regards pitch, move-ments 1 and 4 make use of the same square (see Table 1). The square consists ofthe numbers 1–12, the number sequence for the pitch A being derived from thesequence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 by counting through in loops and selectingevery fifth number. The number series for each subsequent pitch is derivedfrom the sequence of the previous pitch by means of the following permutation:2 4 6 8 10 12 1 3 5 7 9 11 (every second number, starting with the second andreturning to the beginning after reaching the last digit). As a result of this per-mutation, the series on pitches F –E are the retrogrades of those on the pitchesA–C. The pitch structure which results from this number square is shown inExample 1, a transcription of a sketch for the first movement of Il cantosospeso.76 Each number refers to the number of pitch elements to pass beforethe pitch it applies to will recur. In other words, the number classifies the dis-tance between a pitch and its next occurrence – hence Motz’s term Tondis-tanzreihe, ‘tone distance row’.77 The pitch A, for example, is placed again beforethe series has run through once. In accordance with its number sequence it comesafter five pitches, together with the seventh pitch of the original series (F ), andthen again after 10, 3, 8, 1, 6, 11, 4, 9, 2, 7, 12 such spaces. Every subsequentpitch follows the same system according to its own number sequence. Because

72 Maderna, letter to Nono, Hamburg, 23 November 1954 (ALN).73 As mentioned by Rizzardi, the technique had already been used to derive the 21 series which

underlie the Monodia of Nono’s Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951). The first work to incorpo-rate the actual method of permutation in the composition itself, however, is the Composizione perorchestra n. 1 (1951–2). For details see Rizzardi, ‘La “Nuova Scuola Veneziana”’, 29–30, 50–4.

74 See Pascal Decroupet, ‘Nono: Lorca-Epitaphien, Incontri’, Im Zenit der Moderne, ed. GianmarioBorio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg, 1997), i, 340–4; and Borio, ‘Tempo e ritmo nelle com-posizioni seriali’, 74, 77.

75 See Borio, ‘Tempo e ritmo nelle composizioni seriali’, 98–104.76 The original sketch and transcription were first published by Motz, ‘Konstruktive Strenge und

kompositorische Freiheit im ersten Satz des Canto sospeso’, 53–4. Examples 1–12 are printed atthe end of the article.

77 Ibid., 55.

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each series contains the same numbers 1–12 (adding up to 78), the all-intervalseries returns in its original form when the square has run full circle and each pitchhas occurred 13 times. As shown in Example 1, the result of this particular numbersquare is a structure of 8½ × 12 elements containing 0–5 pitches. While eachpitch occurs at equal measure, the pitch combinations are continuously mutating.

How this translates into composition is most clearly seen in movement 4,where the above pitch structure runs through as written. Like no. 1, no. 4 ispurely instrumental. It ends the first part of the work and, with its varied useof percussion (including vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, tubular bells andvarious untuned percussion), echoes the last words of no. 3: ‘Your son is leav-ing, he will not hear the freedom bells.’ In stark contrast to no. 1, which gainsmuch of its expressiveness through the use of extreme registers, a sense ofoppressive confinement is here created by means of strict adherence to a singlemiddle register (e′–e ′′).78 Quite unusually for Nono, the speed ( = c.92) tooremains fixed. Tempo change is achieved not by means of speed change but byalteration of duration value. Each of the 8½ systems of the pitch structure (seeExample 1) is assigned one of four duration values (crotchet divided by 3, 4, 5, 7),and each pitch element is assigned one of 12 duration factors. In order to determine

78 With the exception of the double basses, sounding an octave lower. The expressive use of regis-ter is one of the most fascinating aspects of Il canto sospeso. As Motz states at the end of his ana-lysis of the first movement: ‘It almost seems as if the extremely high and delicate sounds of thestrings attempt to go beyond the boundaries of musical space, like blades of grass breakingthrough tar. The conscious use of high registers for a utopia that is in contrast with dismal realitypervades the whole of Il canto sospeso and becomes a hallmark of Nono’s music right up to hislast compositions.’ Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 43.

TABLE 1

IL CANTO SOSPESO: ‘MAGIC SQUARE’ USED TO GENERATE PITCH

STRUCTURE OF MOVEMENTS 1 AND 4

A 5 10 3 8 1 6 11 4 9 2 7 12

B 10 8 6 4 2 12 5 3 1 11 9 7

A 8 4 12 3 11 7 10 6 2 5 1 9

B 4 3 7 6 5 9 8 12 11 10 2 1

G 3 6 9 12 10 1 4 7 5 8 11 2

C 6 12 1 7 8 2 3 9 10 4 5 11

F 12 7 2 9 4 11 6 1 8 3 10 5

C 7 9 11 1 3 5 12 2 4 6 8 10

F 9 1 5 2 6 10 7 11 3 12 4 8

D 1 2 10 11 12 8 9 5 6 7 3 4

E 2 11 8 5 7 4 1 10 12 9 6 3

E 11 5 4 10 9 3 2 8 7 1 12 6

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the duration factors, Nono reads his number square from bottom to top (first 8½columns).79 The result is a clear division into eight sections (4 + 4 + coda), withduration values accelerating in sections I–IV and decelerating in sections V–VIII.The resulting arch form is accentuated further by means of dynamics and timbre.Dynamics increase and decrease with the acceleration and deceleration of values,and from section V the flutter-tongue sonority is abandoned in wind and brass.In terms of duration and dynamics the movement evolves as shown in Table 2.

The beginning of the movement (bars 240–6, sections I/II) is annotated withduration factors in Example 2. As regards instrumentation, the orchestra is splitin two. Wind, brass and percussion render the pitch structure of Example 1 inthe most pointillistic fashion, with each pitch rendered by a different instrumentaccording to the assigned durations.80 As may be suspected from the continu-ous change of instrumental colour, the instrumentation of this layer is indeedserialized, as shown in Table 3.81 The serialization of this instrumental layer isconcordant with the pitch structure in Example 1. With each of the 12 muta-tions of the original all-interval series (13 × 12 pitches in total), Nono uses a dif-ferent rotation of his original series of instrumental colours. In addition, thoseelements of the pitch structure that happen to contain no pitch are rendered byuntuned percussion (the first time this occurs is in bar 250, where the penultimate

79 This was brought to my attention by Angela Ida De Benedictis.80 The fact that Nono later condemned the term ‘pointillist’ as a derivative coined by ‘illustrious

German aesthetes’ which is ‘passively taken up by many who are incapable of really reflectingand studying music’ should not prevent the use of the term pointillism in this context. Afterall, in terms of serial organization Il canto sospeso is still ‘punktuelle Musik’, and Nono was tomove on to group composition later. See Nono, ‘Una testimonianza di Luigi Nono’, Scritti, i,331–5 (p. 333).

81 This has been pointed out to me by Angela Ida De Benedictis, who very generously allowed meto publish this table.

TABLE 2

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 4: DISTRIBUTION OF DURATION VALUES,

DURATION FACTORS AND DYNAMICS

section bars value duration factors dynamics

I 240–6 3 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 4 8 10 5 ppp–pII 246–51 4 5 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 4 8 10 p–mfIII 252–6 5 4 8 10 5 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 mp–fffIV 257–6 7 10 5 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 4 8 mf–fff

V 260–3 7 9 7 12 6 3 4 8 10 5 11 2 1 f–fffVI 264–8 5 3 4 8 10 5 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 mp–fffVII 269–74 4 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 4 8 10 5 11 p–mfVIII 275–81 3 8 10 5 11 2 1 9 7 12 6 3 4 ppp–mpCoda 281–4 3 7 12 6 3 4 8 ppp–p


element of section II, with duration factor 8, is rendered by the ‘alto’ cymbal).The result is a continuously mutating band of sound. The clear formal divisionsof this layer are then deliberately blurred by means of the strings. Their func-tion is to double each pitch, hold it until the end of its next occurrence, pause,then sustain the pitch again from its next entry, and so on (see Example 2). Theeffect is highly textural and is accentuated by the use of dynamics. Wind, brassand percussion are assigned even dynamics throughout. In this layer singleblocks of colour mark out the proportions of the duration factor series. In con-trast, the sustained string sounds are marked crescendo and decrescendo and, on amuch larger scale, translate into sound (and silence) the proportions of thenumber square that generates the pitch structure. Overall the music articulates agesture of resignation, but it is the subtlety of the interacting layers that createsthe extreme expressiveness of this movement.82

Compositional layers of a much more complex nature interact in the thirdmovement. Three texts are set in this movement for soprano, alto, tenor andorchestra:

. . . mi portano a Kessarianì [per l’esecuzione] insieme ad altri sette. [Muoio per la libertàe per la patria . . .] (. . . They are taking me to Kessarianì [for execution], together withseven others. [I am dying for freedom and for my homeland . . .]; sopr.)

82 Heinz Joachim describes the mood as follows: ‘With its floating flageolet sounds and subtledots of colour, this movement almost conjures up a vision of cosmic rapture (“Entrückung”).Nono here achieves a purification of expression which artistically enhances the sinister image.’Heinz Joachim, ‘Luigi Nono: Il canto sospeso’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1957), 103, cited inMotz, Konstruktion and Ausdruck, 72.

TABLE 3

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 4: SERIALIZATION OF INSTRUMENTAL

COLOURS FOR WIND AND PERCUSSION

A B A B G C F C F D E E

vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr.trp. 3 cl. 2 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 2 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 mar. fl.cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 cl. 1 bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar.xyl. hrn 1. b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl.b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1bells tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl.tbn. 1 trp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bellstrp. 2 vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1vibr. fl. trp. 3 cl. 1 mar. trp. 5 xyl. hrn 1 b. cl. bells tbn. 1 trp. 2

` ` # # `


. . . oggi ci fucileranno. Moriamo da uomini per la patria. [Siate degni di noi . . .](. . . Today they will shoot us. We die as men for our homeland. [Be worthy of us . . .]; alto)

. . . m’impiccheranno [nella piazza] perchè sono patriota. Tuo figlio se ne va, non sentiràle campane della libertà . . . (. . . They are hanging me [in the square] because I am apatriot. Your son is leaving, he will not hear the freedom bells . . . ; ten.)

The texts are merged and condensed into a single statement:

Mi portano a Kessarianì (sopr.); m’impiccheranno (ten.); oggi ci fucileranno (alto);insieme ad altri sette (sopr.); perchè sono patriota (ten.); moriamo da uomini per la patria(alto). Tuo figlio se ne va, non sentirà le campane della libertà (sopr., alto, ten.).

According to Nono himself, the idea was to ‘formulate that which all three situ-ations have in common with heightened intensity’.83 The movement is in twoparts with an instrumental prelude: the prelude for wind and brass only (bars158–76), Part I (bars 177–219) with fragments of text led by the respective solo-ists and additional strings, and Part II (bars 219–39), the joint rendition of thetenor’s final phrase, accompanied by wind and brass only. Each soloist is assigneda compositional layer. These layers are distinct in register and instrumental colour:

Layer 1 (ten.): c–c¢¢¢, oboes (a2), bassoon, trombones (a2)Layer 2 (alto): f–f ¢¢¢, clarinets (a2), bass clarinet, horns (a2)Layer 3 (sopr.): c′–c′′′′, flutes (a2), trumpets (a5).

All three layers are generated by means of the ‘tecnica degli spostamenti’, againusing the all-interval series beginning on A. They also share a single unit ofduration (semiquaver). However, each layer is assigned a different number squarefor pitch generation. Five uneven numbers are employed in this movement:layer 1 (tenor) and layer 2 (alto) use the numbers 1 3 5 7 9, while layer 3 (soprano)uses only four numbers, 1 3 5 7. The squares that generate the pitch structuresare shown in Table 4. In each square the sequence for the pitch A is palindro-mic and the method of permutation remains the same: position 1 moves toposition 12. The resulting pitch structures are shown in Examples 3a–c. Becauseof the different total of the numbers used for each layer, they are each of adifferent length. With seven series of 12 elements plus 4 (=88), layer 1 (tenor) isthe longest. Layer 2 (alto) follows with exactly 7 × 12 elements (=84), while thestructure of layer 3 (soprano) contains only (5 × 12) + 4 elements (=64).Duration factors are again attributed to each pitch element in such a way thatthe first series of durations now corresponds with the number sequence for thepitch A. The method of permutation, too, is already known from the pitchgeneration in movements 1 and 4: 2 4 6 8 10 12 1 3 5 7 9 11 (every secondnumber). When applied to a palindromic number sequence, as here, the resultingsequence is again palindromic. Lines 7–12 are thus identical with lines 1–6. Table 5

83 Nono, ‘Testo–musica–canto’ (1960), Scritti, i, 57–83 (p. 73).


TABLE 4

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 3: NUMBER SQUARES FOR GENERATION OF PITCH

STRUCTURES OF TENOR, ALTO AND SOPRANO LAYERS

LAYER 1 (TENOR)

A 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3

B 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 3

A 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 3 7

B 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 3 7 1

G 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5

C 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 7

F 9 7 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 7 9

C 7 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 7 9 9

F 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7

D 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5

E 7 3 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1

E 3 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7

LAYER 2 (ALTO)

A 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5

B 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 5

A 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 5 3

B 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 5 3 1

G 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 5 3 1 9

C 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 5 3 1 9 5

F 7 5 9 1 3 5 5 3 1 9 5 7

C 5 9 1 3 5 5 3 1 9 5 7 7

F 9 1 3 5 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5

D 1 3 5 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9

E 3 5 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1

E 5 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3

`

`

#

#

`

`

`

#

#

`


shows the duration factors used in the score (exceptions from the rule are shownin bold typeface). The series of duration factors assigned to layer 1 (tenor) addsup to 64 ((2 × 1) + (2 × 3) + (2 × 5) + (4 × 7) + (2 × 9)), that of layer 2 (alto) to60 ((2 × 1) + (2 × 3) + (4 × 5) + (2 × 7) + (2 × 9)) and that of layer 3 (soprano) to40 ((4 × 1) + (4 × 3) + (2 × 5) + (2 × 7)). When multiplied by the common durationvalue of a semiquaver, this results in units of 64, 60 and 40 semiquavers or 32, 30and 20 quavers, all structured palindromically. Sketches show how Nono exper-imented with the combination of these layers.84 The final version is representedin schematic form in Figure 1, which shows how the various units of duration ofdifferent lengths interlock. (As in Nono’s sketches, lengths are indicated in semi-quavers; rests are marked in brackets.) The different mutation of pitch elementsguarantees a multitude of new pitch constellations. The restriction to a singleduration value and just five duration factors, however, means that althoughwhole units of duration never coincide, single durations occasionally do, andthus take on a unifying function. In the instrumental prelude (bars 167–8), forexample, the first element of the second series of layer 2 (alto) (A; hrn) coincideswith the third element of the second series of layer 3 (sopr.) (F, G, A ; fl./trp.)on duration factor 3. A little later (bar 170), the fourth element of the secondseries of layer 1 (ten.) (C, C , E ; ob./trb.) coincides with the last element of thesecond series of layer 3 (sopr.) (C, D, E ; fl./trp.) on duration factor 7.

Example 4 shows the opening of the movement notated layer by layer. Whennotated in this way, the pitch structures and durations can be followed easily

84 Sketches 14.05/01, ALN.

TABLE 4 continued

LAYER 3 (SOPRANO)

A 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1

B 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 1

A 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 1 7

B 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 1 7 1

G 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 1 7 1 3

C 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 1 7 1 3 5

F 3 5 3 1 7 1 1 7 1 3 5 3

C 5 3 1 7 1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3

F 3 1 7 1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5

D 1 7 1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3

E 7 1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1

E 1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7

`

`

#

#

`

`

# `

`


(all spaces in the pitch structures are realized as rests in this movement).85 Alsoapparent from this example is the gradual displacement of the pitches of the all-interval series in widespread registers. The speed is steady (; = c.152), and themood is quietly contained with dynamics ranging between ppp and mf. Themusical fabric is driven primarily by the short values (duration factor 1), whicheffectively punctuate the various pitch progressions, especially in the high regis-ters. Real focus is given to the movement when the voices enter together withthe strings in Part I (bar 177). Details of the instrumentation and the mostlysyllabic text distribution are summarized for each layer in Table 6. The layers,listed separately here, merge and overlap as shown in Figure 1. Most interestingin Part I is the use of the sonority of the strings as an added compositional device,against the grain of the underlying serial principles. As so often in Nono’s work,compositional freedom of this kind is symbolically linked to content. The

85 Very occasionally, a pitch is also replaced by a rest, e.g. at the beginning of layer 1 (ten.) in Part I(bar 180).

TABLE 5

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 3: DURATION FACTORS FOR TENOR, ALTO AND SOPRANO LAYERS

LAYER 1 (TENOR)

3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 37 5 9 7 1 3 3 1 7 9 5 75 7 3 1 9 7 7 9 1 3 5 77 1 7 9 3 5 5 3 9 7 1 71 9 5 3 7 7 7 7 3 5 9 19 3 7 7 5 1 1 5 7 7 3 93 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 33 1 5 7 (see sopr.)

LAYER 2 (ALTO)

5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 53 9 7 4 1 5 5 1 5 7 9 39 5 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 5 95 1 3 7 5 9 9 5 7 3 1 51 7 9 5 3 5 5 3 5 9 7 17 5 5 3 9 1 1 9 3 5 5 75 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5

LAYER 3 (SOPRANO)

1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 17 3 3 5 1 1 1 1 5 3 3 73 5 1 1 3 7 7 3 1 1 5 35 1 7 3 1 3 3 1 3 7 1 51 3 3 1 7 5 5 7 1 3 3 13 1 5 7(repeated from line 2)


strings are coupled with the voices throughout this section, and take on pitchesof all three compositional layers.86 With all three voices in action (the vowels ofeach leading part are doubled by at least one other solo voice), a block sonority

86 Nono marks in the sketches: ‘chi canta con archi – [?] altri fiati’ (‘those who sing with strings –all others wind’) and ‘dove canta armonie con archi – dove non solito fiati’ (‘where there issong, harmonies with strings – where there isn’t, only wind’). ALN 14.13/20 R dx sup.

Figure 1. Il canto sospeso, no. 3: overlap of tenor, alto and soprano layers.Numbers indicate the duration of the sections in semiquavers.

PRELUDE: wind (bars 158–76)

PART II: soloists and wind (bars 219–39)

A (2) 60 59 (7)

T 64 64

S (12) 40 40 (36)

(26) 9 (17) 51 (42)

PART I: soloists, strings, wind (bars 177–219)

40 40 40 16 40 (40) 40 (40)Smi portano

a Kessarianìinsieme ad

altri sette

oggi ci fucileranno moriamo da patria

uomini per la

A (56) 60 60 60 60

T (27) 64 64 64 (77)

m’impiccheranno perchè sono patriota

non sentirà

se ne va le campane

A

S (35) 40 40 16 (14)

T 26 (54) 31 34tuo figlio della libertà


TABLE 6

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 3: DETAILS OF TEXT DISTRIBUTION AND

INSTRUMENTATION FOR EACH COMPOSITIONAL LAYER

TENOR

bars text and instrumentationPreludeT1 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 158–66 ob., bsn, tbn.T2 7 5 9 7 1 3 3 1 7 9 5 7 167–76Part IT3 5 7 3 1 9 7 7 9 1 3 5 7 181–9 M’im-pic-cher-an-no (+ voices, vlc., vla)T4 7 1 7 9 3 5 5 3 9 7 1 7 189–99 per-chèT5 1 9 5 3 7 7 7 7 3 5 9 1 199–208 So-no pa-tri-o-taPart IIT6 9 3 7 7 219–22 Tu-o fi-glio (voices only)

5 1 1 5 7 7 3 9 230–5 del-la li-ber - tà (voices, ob.)T7 3 7 1 5 7 9 9 7 5 1 7 3 235–8 ob., tbn., fl. 2, fl. 2/hrn 1, fl. 4/hrn 2/

tbn. 1, trp. 4/tbn. 4, hrn 3/trp. 2/tbn. 3, tbn. 2, fl. 3, trp. 3, trp. 5

T8 7 5 9 7 238–9 merged with layer of Soprano

ALTO

PreludeA1 5 3 1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 158–66 cl., b. cl., hrnA2 3 9 7 4 1 5 5 1 5 7 9 3 166–75Part IA3 9 5 5 1 7 3 3 7 1 5 5 9 185–93 og-gi ci fu-ci-le-ran-no (+ A, S, vla, vln)A4 5 1 3 7 5 9 9 5 7 3 1 5 193–201 cl., b. cl., hrnA5 1 7 9 5 3 5 5 3 5 9 7 1 202–10 mo-ria-mo da uo-mi-ni per la

(A, S, vla only)A6 7 5 5 3 9 1 1 9 3 5 5 7 210–19 pa-tria (A, S, T, vla, fl., trp.)Part IIA7 5 3 1 223–4 se ne va (A, S only)

.......9 5 7 7 5 9 1 3 5 226–33 le cam-pa-ne (A, T, cl., hrn)

SOPRANO

PreludeS1 1 7 1 3 5 3 3 5 3 1 7 1 158–65 fl., trp.S2 7 3 3 5 1 1 1 1 5 3 3 7 165–70Part IS3 3 5 1 1 3 7 7 3 1 1 5 3 177–82 Mi por-ta-no a Kes-sa-ria-nì (+ voices,

vln)S4 5 1 7 3 1 3 3 1 3 7 1 5 182–8 fl., trp.S5 1 3 3 1 7 5 5 7 1 3 3 1 188–93 in-sie-me ad al-tri (+ S, A, vln)S6 3 1 5 7 194–6 set-te (S, vln only)


establishes itself as foreground over the strictly serial layers in the background.With a choice of pitches and durations from all three layers, soloists and stringsthus merge together in their expression of hope for a better, i.e. non-totalitarian,society. Significantly, the warm string sonority is eerily absent again in the muchmore sinister Part II. This part is markedly louder; the joint fate of all threeGreek resistance fighters is rendered by all three soloists in rhythmic unison, thepalindromic units of duration are split apart before coming together again, andthe movement ends with an effective compression of all remaining pitches: agesture of utmost violence marked by flutter-tonguing in wind and brass.

The ‘tecnica degli spostamenti’ is employed with much greater compositionalfreedom in movement 1. Here the pitch structure does not run through as gen-erated by the number square, but serves merely as a reservoir from which otherconstellations are formed. The pitch structure is the same as that of move-ment 4 (see Example 1), but is read through three times, ending with the sev-enth element of the eighth series.87 The square of the duration factors isidentical with that of the pitch structure: 5 10 3 8 1 6 11 4 9 2 7 12, permutation 24 6 8 10 12 1 3 5 7 9 11. A brief look at the beginning of the movement demon-strates the method of composition. The first of 13 sections (bars 1–4) for windand timpani uses the first ten pitches (as far as the F of the ninth element of thefirst series) and five duration values (crotchet divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 7). Each valueis multiplied with the first two duration factors, 5 and 10. Table 7 lists pitch,instrumentation and values. However, as is evident from the annotated score(see Example 5), the order of the pitches does not coincide with that of theunderlying pitch structure (see Example 1). As Motz has shown, their entry isgoverned by another superimposed system of duration which regulates the useof rests. Rests are placed in front of each pitch and follow an independent sys-tem of permutation.88 The duration factors of the rests are marked in parenthe-ses in Table 7 as well as in Example 5. The first pitch to enter, therefore, is no. 5(G), and the last to sound in this section is no. 6 (C). Nono himself describedthis procedure as working with ‘positive and negative’:

87 See Motz, ‘Konstruktive Strenge und kompositorische Freiheit im ersten Satz des Cantosospeso’, 56.

88 This is explained in more detail ibid., 56–63.

TABLE 6 continued

S1b 7 3 3 5 1 1 1 1 5 3 3 7 196–201 fl., trp., vln, tbn., cl.S2b 3 5 1 1 3 7 7 3 1 1 5 3 207–13 fl., trp.Part IIS3b 5 1 7 3 1 3 3 1 3 7 1 5 224–9 non sen-ti-rà (S, A, fl., trp.)S4b 1 3 3 1 7 5 5 7 1 3 3 1 229–35 fl., trp.S5b 3 1 5 7 3 1 1 3 7 5 1 3 235–8 fl., trp., vln I.1/vla 5, vln II.2/vla 1/vla 4,

vln I.2/vln II.3/vla 3, vln II.1/vla 2/d.b. 2, vlc. 3/d.b. 3, vln I.3/d.b. 1, vln II

S6b 1 7 1 3 238–9 vlc. 1 + 2, vla 1–3/hrn, d.b. 2, vln I


Positive was the duration, negative was the rest linked to this duration. The result was aplay with the displacement of the values whereby the beginning and end of the soundswould mess up the mechanics of the serial organization. It was a lot of fun for me to tryout how systematic elements could be totally muddled up.89

The following section, too, seems far removed from serialism. In middle registera ppp G major triad slowly descends on muted violins (bars 5–7). And yet thecompositional method is rigorously followed: the pitches stem from the pitchstructure (ninth and tenth elements), and a single durational unit (2) is multi-plied by the next duration factors: 3, 8, 1. Free compositional choice is particu-larly evident here. The blatantly tonal progression, which could easily have beenconcealed in combination with other pitches from the underlying structure (aswas first intended), is used for maximum contrast and forged into a building-block of structural importance for the ensuing dialectic between wind andstrings that marks this movement as a whole.90 Dynamics, again, are here usedin blocks to emphasize formal divisions rather than underlying serial principles.

89 Nono, ‘Un’autobiografia’, 510. The technique was first used by Nono in Incontri (1955).Stockhausen, too, spoke of the independent use of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ durations, statingthat the idea goes back to Boulez. While composing Schlagtrio (1952), Stockhausen wrote toGoeyvaerts: ‘Very useful to me was something he [Boulez] once told me: he uses “positive”and “negative” rhythmic values, i.e. sounding ones and rests – both as “series”. At the begin-ning of the work I am telling you about [Schlagtrio], the rests and the rhythmic series for the pitches are identical – they are therefore only to be realized as “silence”, to remain unreal. Then thereis a gradual displacement of the two principles and at the end they converge again – the “nega-tive” absorbs the “positive”, moving back to unreality. In the course of the displacement of thesounding structure, rests and sounding values alternate and do not coincide, maintaining theiridentity – obviously.’ Stockhausen, letter to Goeyvaerts (18 May 1952), as cited in PascalDecroupet, ‘Développements et ramifications de la pensée sérielle: Recherches et oeuvresmusicales de Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur et Karlheinz Stockhausen de 1951 à 1958’ (Ph.D.dissertation, University of Tours, 1994), 59.

90 For further details on composition and form see Motz, ‘Konstruktive Strenge und komposi-torische Freiheit im ersten Satz des Canto sospeso’, and Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 35–43.

TABLE 7

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 1: PITCH DISTRIBUTION FOR DURATION

FACTORS 5 AND 10 (BARS 1–5)

Note: Pitches are displaced by rests (duration factors marked in brackets).

bars 1–2 bars 3–4 (5)

A tbn. 1, 5 × 2 (1) C trp. 1, 10 × 2 (4)B trp. 3, 5 × 3 (4) F trp. 3, 10 × 3 (2)G trp. 5, 5 × 4 (2) A timp., 10 × 4 (5)B trp. 2, 5 × 5 (5) C fl. 2, 10 × 5 (3)G tbn. 2, 5 × 7 (3) F fl. 1, 10 × 7 (1)

` ##

#


Between the three movements of the first part which use the ‘tecnica deglispostamenti’ falls the controversial no. 2 for a cappella chorus. The movementis in two parts. The first runs through the untransposed series 15 times, whilethe second is a prolation canon (‘Prolationskanon’). Duration factors are takenfrom the Fibonacci series and effect a polarization of short and long values. Theset of factors assigned to the pitches of the all-interval series is again palindro-mic and permutated with each run. The first part uses the factors 1 2 3 5 8 13 13 85 3 2 1 with the permutation 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 (first number to end). Thefactors are applied to four duration values, layers of which meander through allparts (crotchet divided by 2, 3, 4, 5).91 Once again, the result is a continuousband of sound, moving through 12-note fields with constantly mutating combi-nations of pitch and duration. Within this ‘block topography’,92 short valueseffectively punctuate the sustained values and drive along the articulation of thetext. It is on this level that compositional freedom reigns: the choice of voice,register and text distribution allows for groupings of 2–3 pitches, often span-ning wide intervals reminiscent of Webern’s highly strung vocal lines. Thesemelodic fragments hardly ever coincide with the order of the pre-determinedorganization, but constitute the perceptible and expressive foreground of thecomposition.93 Dynamics, however, are part of the serial background in thismovement.94 While sometimes rather far-fetched (ppp–f on a single semiquaverquintuplet, for example), they do add to the general effect of infinite flexibilityand malleability of the vocal texture – tentative steps towards Nono’s later idealof a ‘suono mobile’.95

With the reprise of the word ‘muoio’ (‘I am dying’) in bar 142 begins theconcluding prolation canon, in which the pitches of the all-interval series arerun through another four times. Duration factors are now reversed, movingfrom the largest to the smallest and back: 13 8 5 3 2 1 1 2 3 5 8 13. The factors arealso no longer linked to the series, but to the layers of duration (see Example 6).The text is also layered: ‘Muoio per la giustizia’ (‘I am dying for justice’) isassigned to the quaver and triplet layers, ‘Le nostre idee vinceranno’ (‘Our ideas

91 For duration factor and pitch distribution see Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, Example 19,p. 45, and De Benedictis, ‘Il rapporto testo musica nelle opere vocali di Luigi Nono’, 235–7.

92 Bailey’s term: ‘Work in Progress’, 289.93 The most detailed analysis of Nono’s use of text in this movement is that by De Benedictis, ‘Il

rapporto testo musica nelle opere vocali di Luigi Nono’, 235–47.94 On the serial organization of dynamics see Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 47–50, and De

Benedictis, ‘Il rapporto testo musica nelle opere vocali di Luigi Nono’, 238. With the emphasison quiet dynamics, the series contains six simple and six compound dynamics (ppp, p, mp, mf,f, ppp / ppp–f, f–ppp, ppp–mf, mf–ppp, p–f, f–p). The series is employed in order to guaranteeequal distribution of dynamics for each pitch. Some repetition is inevitable, however, as eachpitch occurs not 12 but 15 times in this part. The dynamic organization does not apply to PartII of this movement.

95 One reason, perhaps, why Nono eventually decided not to change the dynamics in this move-ment. That a revision was intended has been remarked by Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck,47, note 61.


will triumph’) to the semiquaver and quintuplet layers. The general effect ofthis concluding canon is a contraction and expansion of values, homing in onthe two most essential words, ‘giustizia’ and ‘vinceranno’. Even Stockhausenhad to admit that Nono here does interpret the text.96

In terms of technique, the first two movements of Il canto sospeso are closelylinked to the last two: no. 8, for wind and timpani, and no. 9, for chorus andtimpani. This mirror symmetry provides the work with a strong, unified frame-work. The formal similarities are most obvious between nos. 2 and 9, though inmany ways the latter is more extreme. As in no. 2, the first part of no. 9 runsthrough the series 15 times, and again the movement ends with a prolationcanon. All the texts are set in the first part of the movement; the concludingcanon has no text and the work ends bocca chiusa. Duration factors are againchosen to effect a polarization between short and long values, this time bymeans of prime numbers (1 3 5 7 11 13). Throughout the movement, this polari-zation is underlined by the consistent allocation of the shortest values to thetimpani. These single beats on timpani function as a kind of punctuation mark,as they almost invariably fall at the end of word units. In an extra-musical sensethey have been regarded as a symbol of violence, as well as a sounding ‘remindernot to forget’.97 A surviving sketch shows the ten rows of duration factorsemployed in this movement.98 The sketch also shows that Nono originallyintended to use the three soloists for this movement, together with a slightlydifferent selection of texts.99 The last of these and two other texts were eventuallyset for chorus. The original organization of duration factors, however, remained(see Table 8). The first half of the first series of factors couples the smallest withthe largest number, and pairs the other numbers accordingly. The process isrepeated in the second half of the series with the pairs in reversed order. Alsothe permutation moves from the largest to the smallest contrast: 12 1 11 2 10 3 94 8 5 7 6. The original sequence is reached again after ten runs of this permuta-tion. The factors are applied to three values of duration: crotchet divided by 3,4, 5. The music does not evolve in continuous layers of duration, however;instead, the values are combined into groups of varying density. With the cho-rus divided into 4–11 parts, the vocal texture is much more malleable, and widefluctuations of density determine the movement’s form and expression.100

Another defining characteristic is the use of simultaneous endings. Generally,

96 Stockhausen, ‘Music and Speech’, 57.97 Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 132.98 The sketch is published ibid., 212.99 The original texts, notated on this sketch, are: ‘fra poche ore non sarò più’ (‘in a few hours I

will no longer be’; sopr.), ‘sperando nella vita mi avvio alla morte’ (‘I will go to death with hopefor life’; alto), and ‘vado con la fede in una vita migliore per voi’ (‘I go in the belief of a betterlife for you’; ten.).

100 Density and text distribution in this movement are represented in schematic form in De Bene-dictis, ‘Gruppo, linea e proiezioni armoniche’, 205. The exact distribution of duration factorscan also be seen in this diagram.


the syllables of the text meander through all parts, and are bundled up intodense chromatic blocks of sound which break off simultaneously, mostly tomark the end of a phrase or word unit. It is for this reason that throughout thisfirst part the pitches of the all-interval series are consistently read backwards.The various strains of sound continuously merge into chromatic clusters of var-ying density around the central pitch, A. The series of duration factors, too, areinitially read backwards. Nono begins with the retrogrades of rows 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,but then continues with the original rows 10, 9, 8 . . . 1.101

Dynamics, too, are organized serially, with a choice of two dynamics perduration factor. The chart of dynamics which survives in the sketches reads asshown in Table 9. Again, the choice of dynamics displays a tendency towardsquiet values. The method of rotation is also familiar. The pitches, however, arearranged chromatically, not in the order of the series. Table 10 lists the dura-tions and selected dynamic values for the opening two phrases. How the pitchand duration structure evolves from back to front can be seen in the annotatedscore (see Example 7). As regards the derivation of dynamics, it becomes clear thatthey, too, are read backwards: the order of all compound dynamics is reversed.This is also true for the phrases in which duration factors are no longer readbackwards. The final run of the series in this part, for example, is coupled with thefirst line of the duration factor square.102 Notably, the system here allows for anextreme reduction of dynamics, giving Nono the freedom to interpret his text.Only three different values come into play in this section (see Table 11).

101 Sketches show that the idea of reading the pitch and duration factor series backwards was alater one. A first draft (ALN 14.11/01) combines runs of the original series with the durationfactor series as written, beginning at the top of the square (line 1). Nono here makes use of thefact that the last number of each duration factor series is the same as the first of the next: thefinal E and initial A are merged and consistently given the same duration. The draft breaksoff with the comment ‘proiezioni armoniche come?’ (‘harmonic projection how?’), but waslater used, virtually unchanged, in reverse, for the end of Part I.

102 This is the retrograde of the first run of the series in the first draft, ALN 14.11/01.

TABLE 8

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 9: DURATION FACTOR SERIES

1 13 3 11 5 7 13 1 11 3 7 55 1 7 13 3 3 11 11 1 5 13 77 5 13 1 5 7 1 13 11 3 11 33 7 11 5 3 13 11 1 13 5 1 77 3 1 7 5 11 13 5 1 3 11 13

13 7 11 3 3 1 1 7 5 5 13 1111 13 13 7 5 11 5 3 7 3 1 11 11 1 13 3 13 7 7 3 5 5 11

11 1 5 11 5 1 3 13 7 3 7 1313 11 7 1 3 5 7 11 13 5 3 11 13 3 11 5 7 13 1 11 3 7 5

`


TA

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9

IL C

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SO

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O, N

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13

57

1113

1311

75

31

ppp

ppp

mp

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

pA

ppp

mp

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

pB

pm

pm

ff

ppp–

ff–

ppp

pp–m

fm

f–pp

p–m

pm

p–p

ppp

ppB

mp

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

ppp

pC

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

ppp

pm

pC

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

ppp

pm

pm

fD

ppp–

ff–

ppp

pp–m

fm

f–pp

p–m

pm

p–p

ppp

ppp

mp

mf

fE

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

ppp

pm

pm

ff

ppp–

fE

pp–m

fm

f–pp

p–m

pm

p–p

ppp

ppp

mp

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

pF

mf–

ppp–

mp

mp–

ppp

ppp

pm

pm

ff

ppp–

ff–

ppp

pp–m

fF

p–m

pm

p–p

ppp

ppp

mp

mf

fpp

p–f

f–pp

ppp

–mf

mf–

ppG

mp–

ppp

ppp

pm

pm

ff

ppp–

ff–

ppp

pp–m

fm

f–pp

p–m

pG

` # ` # #


The following prolation canon shows many similarities to that of no. 2. Theseries is run through another three times, now in its original form. As in no. 2,the duration factors are ordered from the largest to the smallest number andback (13 11 7 5 3 1 1 3 5 7 11 13), and apply to the now continuous layers ofduration within which there is some overlap. The triplet layer, for example,reads as shown in Table 12. Dynamics are now derived from the chart as written.The increasing and decreasing density of the polyphony is coupled once again

TABLE 10

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 9: DURATIONS AND CHOICE OF DYNAMICS FOR OPENING

TWO PHRASES, READ FROM BACK (SEE EXAMPLE 7).

‘Non ho paura della morte’ (bars 550–45) ‘Sarò calmo’ (bars 555–50)

pitch duration dynamic duration dynamic

A 13 (× 4) f–ppp 7 (× 5) mf–ppB 11 (× 4) f 1 (× 5) pppA 3 (× 4) pp–mf 5 (× 5) ppB 1 (× 5) p 13 (× 3) ppp–fG 5 (× 5) ppp–f 1 (× 4) pC 13 (× 3) mf–pp 11 (× 4) ppp–fF 11 (× 5) mf 13 (× 3) mpC 5 (× 3) f–ppp 3 (× 3) pF 7 (× 4) p–mp 5 (× 5) fD 1 (× 4) mf 11 (× 4) pppE 3 (× 4) mf–ppp 7 (× 4) mp–pE 7 (× 5) p 3 (× 3) ppp–f

``

##

`

TABLE 11

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 9: LAST PHRASE OF PART I, READ FROM BACK TO FRONT

‘(-ta) migliore per voi’ (bars 594–89)

A 1 (× 3) pppB 13 (× 4) f–pppA 3 (× 3) pppB 11 (× 3) f–pppG 5 (× 3) pppC 4 (× 3) f–pppF 13 (× 4) mpC 1 (× 3) mpF 11 (× 5) mpD 3 (× 4) mpE 7 (× 4) mpE 5 (× 3) mp

``

##

`


with a breath-like contraction and expansion of values. In addition, theextremely slow speed, the final rallentando molto and the surreal bocca chiusasonority work together to make this a truly serene, almost other-worldly, ending.

A heightened concern for density as a structural device is also present inmovement 8. In terms of sound, this movement is one of the harshest. Likemovement 1, it is purely instrumental, but scored for wind and timpani only.Brass predominates, and its association with the military fanfare is alluded to bythe occasional use of note repetition. As in the final chorus, agglomerations ofsound build up, break off and dissolve. With the harsher instrumental sonori-ties, however, the effect is completely different. In Nono’s own words thismovement is ‘a laceration of thought, music, and feeling which I feel is veryclose to Varèse’.103 Nono attended Varèse’s composition class at Darmstadt in1950. After the première of Nono’s Variazioni canoniche, Varèse asked to see thescore of the work and analysed it thoroughly. Nono was clearly impressed:‘Instead of giving me his opinion, he confronted me with problems. He made meunderstand the problems of this score by showing me what I had done, some-times unknowingly.’104 Nono then began to study Varèse and later commentedon the significance of his influence:

The lessons I learned from Varèse, which I regard as fundamental, were completelyignored until a few years ago because I was schematically aligned with the heritage ofeither Schoenberg or Webern. In Il canto sospeso there is a section for solo wind and per-cussion in which I think the influence of Varèse is very strong. And this has been a lastinginfluence: to this day I continue to study his scores, in which I find unique and, to me,very interesting relationships with Scriabin and Schoenberg. The famous interval con-stellation of fifth and tritone, which Scriabin uses in his sonatas, is also a typical chord inSchoenberg and Varèse. The octaves which are present in Varèse, those superimposedoctaves reminiscent of the opening of Mahler’s first symphony where they determine themusical spaces, open up possibilities which now confront me in a decisive way.105

103 Nono, ‘Un’autobiografia’, 512.104 Ibid., 495.105 Ibid., 496.

TABLE 12

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 9: CONCLUDING PROLATION CANON, TRIPLET LAYER

bar 595 597 599 600 601 602 603pitch A B C F G B C Edynamic f ppp–f f–ppp mp–p p ppp ppp pppfactor 13 11 7 5 1 3 7 13

3 1 5 11pitch C B G Fdynamic f pp f–ppp mp

# # # # `

# `


In no. 8 of Il canto sospeso it is the structural use of density, the particularattention to how sounds phase in and out, the instrumentation, with its empha-sis on strident brass sonorities, as well as the characteristic note repetitions thatmost resemble the work of Varèse. Gone, however, are the elements of incanta-tion, the incessant repetition of melodic cells that are also such a strong featureof Varèse’s music. It is as if Intégrales were reduced to its skeleton structure,stripped bare of all remnants of melody and exoticism. Pitch development inthis movement, however, is hardly less static. Once again, the all-interval seriesis used untransposed and is run through 36 times. Various strategies of pitchdisplacement apply, among them the system of preceding rests encountered inno. 1. Duration factors consist of the numbers 1–12, ordered 1 12 2 11 3 10 4 9 5 86 7. The permutation is the same as in no. 9: 12 1 11 2 10 3 9 4 8 5 7 6. As thetenth application of this permutation would have resulted in the sequence 12,11, 10 . . . 1, Nono uses only nine series of duration factors. These are applied tothe pitches of the series as follows: rows 1–9 as written, rows 1–9 in retrograde,rows 9–1 as written, and rows 9–1 in retrograde (4 × 9 = 36). The underlyingstructural idea is to split the relatively homogeneous group of instruments intofour distinct groups and to play through various combinations and densities.The four groups are identified by the letters A–D:

A 3 trumpetsB 2 trumpets, 1 tromboneC 3 trombonesD 6 horns (à 2)(Trumpets may be replaced by flutes, trombones by clarinets and bass clarinet;

timpani are added independently of group divisions.)

Nono also uses four duration values: quaver divided by 3, 4, 5 and 7. Dura-tion values are not linked to a specific instrumental group, however. Their allo-cation changes from section to section. Neither do they evolve in continuouslayers. Instead, Nono works with a system that regulates the density of each level ofduration. This density (or number of parts per level of duration), as also the move-ment’s large-scale structure, is derived from the following simple sums:

While the numeric columns indicate the number of parts for each level of dura-tion, their total determines the number of bars for each of the movement’s12 sections. The columns are reordered to form a balanced three-part structure.


Each column is then allocated a different combination of instrumental groupsand duration levels. Dynamics, too, are allocated at this early stage. Thedynamic series is split into simple and compound dynamics, and sketches revealthree distinct categories:

I ppp, p, mp, mf, f, fffII ppp–fff, fff–ppp, p–f, f–p, mp–mf, mf–mpIII Tutto!

The combination of all parameters results in the three-part structure shown inFigure 2.

The finished movement adheres to this initial plan with astonishing accu-racy. Only the last two sections (consisting of 6 and 12 bars in the sketch shownin Figure 2) are merged into one of 14 bars, beginning with the density of 4 × 3(bar 531). This point of highest density is represented in Example 8. Reorderingthe score according to instrumental group and level of duration shows that

Figure 2. Il canto sospeso, no. 8: formal outline based on sketch ALN 14.02.08/03.


Nono here strictly adheres to the above guidelines for this density. Very clear, too,is the method of pitch displacement, with preceding rests consistently multipliedby factors 1, 2 and 3 throughout the movement.106 Coupled with duration value7, the horns (group D) are the first to enter here. Displaced by one triplet rest,group A follows with duration level 3. Groups B and C are displaced accord-ingly: group B by 2 quintuplet rests, group C by 3 septuplet rests. The displace-ment of entries within the groups is further governed by factors 1 and 2 (seeExample 8). Coupled with the pitches of the all-interval series is the originalduration factor series, 1 12 2 11 3 10 4 9 5 8 6 7. Generally, the use of note repeti-tion and the finely graded combination of duration factors convey an urgentsense of disquiet, while the overall shape of the movement is articulated bywaves of constantly mutating densities.

The central and emotionally most intense part of Il canto sospeso is thesecond, consisting of nos. 5, 6a/b and 7. Stark simplicity is most striking in no. 6a,for chorus and low instruments (two bassoons, four horns, four trombones, cello,double bass, two timpani). The chilling text by Esther Srul (Poland) reads: ‘. . .le porte s’aprono. Eccoli i nostri assassini. Vestiti di nero. Ci cacciano dalla sina-goga’ (‘. . . the doors open. Here are our murderers. Dressed in black. Theydrive us out of the Synagogue’). Like the text, the music is in four sections. Thestructural idea is a canon in contrary motion, representing the clash betweenthe Nazis and the Jews. To this purpose, the pitches of the all-interval series areused as central notes, 1–4 per layer per section (always adding up to 5, except forthe central cross-over, where only four pitches come into play). While the cho-ral layer moves through the series in retrograde, the instruments use the primeform of the series. Neither layer uses the whole series, but together they add upto the chromatic total. The layers cross on the word ‘assassini’, with the tritoneE –A in the instruments. The association SA (or SS) with these pitches is surelydeliberate here.107 The overall form can be summarized as shown in Figure 3.

While the form of no. 6a is comparatively straightforward, the serial organiza-tion of duration and dynamics is difficult to unravel without the help of thesketches. Duration factors consist of the numbers 2 3 5 8 12 17, a modification ofthe beginning of the Fibonacci series: 2 (+1), 3 (+2), 5 (+3), 8 (+4), 12 (+5), 17.A sketch reveals the chart of duration factors shown in Table 13.108 The boxedset shows the order from which all other sets are derived. It is not used initially,but appears again as row 10. The permutation is a variation of that used in nos. 1and 4, now obeying the governing principle of contrary motion: 2 4 6 8 10 12 11 97 5 3 1.109 Three duration values are used: crotchet divided by 3, 4 and 5. At the

106 Nono marks in red: ‘nelle parti spostamenti di pause 1–2–3 / e 3 2 1 | sempre 1–2–3 e 3 2 1’ (‘inthe parts displacements of rests 1–2–3 / and 3 2 1 | always 1–2–3 and 3 2 1’). ALN 14.02.08/03,published in Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 210.

107 The symbolism was first pointed out by Huber, ‘Luigi Nono: Il canto sospeso VIa, b’, 66.108 The sketch is published in Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 203.109 The permutation was first employed in this form in the Polifonica of Nono’s Polifonica–

Monodia–Ritmica (1951). See Rizzardi, ‘La “Nuova Scuola Veneziana”’, 25.

`


beginning of the movement, all instruments enter together, whereas the entriesof the chorus are staggered. Sketches show that the vocal parts were also initiallyconceived to begin together. The decision to stagger the entries of the chorus inorder to achieve a simultaneous phrase ending was taken only after the composi-tion of the choral block. Hence the serial mechanics of this layer are evident onlywhen all parts are moved back to their original position, as is done for the firstphrase in Example 9. It is then easy to see that durations are in fact distributed inthe same fashion as in no. 2.110 Linked to the factors of duration is the organiza-tion of dynamics. As in all movements of a more violent nature, pp is omitted inorder to include fff. With the usual six simple and six compound dynamics, theseries for movement 6a thus works with maximum contrast:

110 For a fuller analysis of durations in no. 6a see Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 172–4.

Figure 3. Il canto sospeso, no. 6a: text division and pitch distribution.

TABLE 13

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 6A: DURATION FACTORS

2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2

3 8 17 12 5 2 3 8 17 12 5 2

8 12 2 8 12 2 5 17 3 5 17 3

12 8 2 17 5 3 17 3 5 12 2 8

8 17 3 3 12 8 2 5 17 5 2 12

17 3 8 5 5 12 2 17 2 12 3 8

3 5 12 17 12 8 3 2 2 5 8 17

5 17 8 2 5 17 8 2 3 12 12 3

17 2 17 2 12 3 12 3 8 5 8 5

2 2 3 3 5 5 8 8 12 12 17 17

2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2

3 8 17 12 5 2 3 8 17 12 5 2


Using the permutation 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 (last digit moves to the front),the chart of dynamics reads as shown in Table 14. The series of dynamics arenot linked to the series of duration factors, but to the individual choral andinstrumental parts. The procedure again allows a choice of two dynamics perduration factor. Despite the great contrasts, dynamics are therefore grouped ina musically sensible way. The choice of dynamics can be followed in Example 9,where the dynamic row (DR) used is indicated at the end of each part. Rows 7–12are generally used for the choral parts, whereas rows 1–6 apply to the instrumentalparts. Only in sections in more than six parts (I, IV) are rows 1 and 2 added tothe choral layer and rows 11 and 12 to the instrumental layer.111

With no. 6b the music of this movement literally turns into its opposite. Lowregister becomes high register. Brass is granted a single utterance by the trum-pets, while high strings determine the instrumental colour throughout (viola andcello are consistently notated in treble clef). The all-interval series is run through11 times, after which an additional reprisal of the pitch A leads into no. 7. Thesyllabic choral texture of no. 6a is abandoned for a melismatic, sung renditionof the text led by the sopranos. Finally, extreme dynamic contrasts are reducedto a softer range of values that exclude compound dynamics. The sudden changeis initiated by the reflective continuation of Esther Srul’s text: ‘Com’è duro direaddio per sempre alla vita così bella!’ (‘How hard it is to say goodbye for ever tolife which is so beautiful!’) Nowhere in Il canto sospeso is the identification of thevoice of the victims with the colour of the strings so evident as in this move-ment. Chorus and instruments no longer move in separate layers, but each ofthe string parts is assigned to one of the choral parts, with which it merges (vlnI/sopr., vln II/alto, vla/ten., vcl./bass). The convergence is underlined by thealmost instrumental bocca chiusa and bocca quasi chiusa sonorities in the chorus,which frame the rendition of the text. The four voices are assigned two durationvalues: crotchet divided by 3 and 5. The inner voices (alto/vln II and ten./vla)move in triplets, the outer voices (sopr./vln 1 and bass/vlc.) in quintuplets. As inthe second part of movements 2 and 9, the order of the series of duration factorsis now reversed, moving from the largest to the smallest number and back: 17 128 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17. The familiar permutation 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 generatesthe number square shown in Table 15.

The idea of contracting and expanding phraseology is again of structuralimportance, though it is not achieved canonically here. Disregarding the textdistribution (the text was added at a later stage), the 11 runs of the series can beseen as interlocking phrase units. Figure 4 represents schematically the structureof the movement with the numbers 1–12 indicating the beginning of each run ofthe series. No choral blocks can be found here. The four voices interlock withfluctuating density (2–4 parts). This is truly ‘suspended’ song. Twice the move-ment builds up to four voices, the first time highlighting the word ‘addio’, thesecond the word ‘bella’. A similar concern for density applies to the small-scaleunit. With the exception of the ninth run, the pitches of the series are distributed

111 The distribution of dynamics is detailed ibid., 177.


TA

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From

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85

32

1fff

fm

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pp

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p–f

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pppp

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p–fff

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ffffff

fm

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5f–

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ffff

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ppp–

ffffff

fm

fm

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mp–

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6m

p–m

ff–

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ppp–

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f–m

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pp–

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–ppp

ppp–

ffffff

fm

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pp

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8pp

pm

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pm

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ffffff

fm

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and coupled with the duration factor series in such a way that the shortest durationsfall together. The result is a play with energy levels creating space for the longervalues. With the permutation of the duration factors, the phrases move fromsymmetric contraction and expansion (from bars 364–70) to a concentration ofshort values at the beginning (see, for example, the fifth run, bars 381–6: ‘persempre’), symmetric expansion and contraction (run 7, bars 392–6: ‘così’) and,finally, a concentration of short values at the end (still evident in run 11, bars407–51, where the last duration factor has been changed from 8 to 3). The move-ment ends on a single long ppp A in the first violins. While this serial play withphrase construction provides a general framework, voice and text distributionagain operates on a higher level, creating overriding pitch relationships withinthe movement itself (compare, for example, ‘per sempre’ and ‘bella’ in thesopranos, bars 381/401–2), as well as in no. 6a. This has been shown by Huber,who sees a conceptual link between the centrally positioned tritone C–F inno. 6b (vla/vln I, bars 387–9) with the pitch constellation of the brass to thewords ‘eccoli i nostri assassini’ (C–G–F , bars 330–7) in no. 6a.112 A more obviousallusion to the ‘assassins’, of course, is the isolated entry of the high trumpets to

112 Also first discussed by Huber is the structural use of the vowels U I E O A from ‘dUro dIrEaddiO vitA’. Huber, ‘Luigi Nono: Il canto sospeso VIa, b’, 72–9. If Stockhausen was trying toseek out a serialization of vowel sounds he should have looked for it here.

TABLE 15

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 6B: DURATION FACTORS

Note: Exceptions are printed in bold typeface.

1 17 12 8 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17

2 12 8 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17 17

3 8 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12

4 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8

5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5

6 2 2 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3

7 2 3 5 8 12 17 16 12 8 5 3 2

8 3 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2 2

9 5 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2 2 3

10 8 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2 2 3 5

11 12 17 17 12 8 5 3 2 2 3 5 3

12 17 [17 12 8 5 3 2 2 3 5 8 12]

#

#


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56

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8

1

01

11

2

36

4–

37

0–

37

4–

37

7–

38

1–

38

6–

39

2–

39

6–

40

0–

40

3–

40

7–

41

1–

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du

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the words ‘addio per sempre’. Loud dynamics accentuate this climax, as thedistribution of dynamics in this movement again allows for some free choice.Sketches reveal the chart shown in Table 16.113 Not only is there a choice oftwo dynamics per duration factor, but the serial organization is obscured fur-ther by means of the retrograde pitch attribution for sopr./ten. and bass/alto.

This sixth movement is the only instance in which, for a very brief moment,the text demands a representation of the aggressors. To this end the musicalmeans are radically reduced and sound symbolism becomes more apparent thanin any of the other movements. Maximum contrast heightens the expressivityof each of the complementary sections. However, no. 6b clearly also functionsas a transition to no. 7, the most transparent and unashamedly lyrical move-ment of the work. No. 7 continues the theme of taking leave: ‘. . . addiomamma, tua figlia Liubka se ne va nell’umida terra . . .’ (‘. . . Goodbye mother,your daughter Liubka is going into the moist earth . . .’). Again the protagonistis a woman. The text is articulated by the solo soprano and supported by thevocalise of the female voices of the chorus (sopr./alto). The high soprano linethus beautifully weaves in and out of similar vocal textures, sung bocca chiusa,bocca quasi chiusa, bocca quasi aperta and normale. As in so many of Nono’s laterworks, the individual thus becomes part of a collective, the personal statementbecomes one of many. On various levels no. 7 continues the ascent into higherregisters as well as the process of reduction. From the leading choral voice of no.6b emerges a single solo soprano, while male voices are eliminated from thesupporting chorus. The orchestration, too, is most delicate, with high strings,flutes, harp and a range of tuned percussion (glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylo-phone, marimba and celesta). The volume is reduced further by the use of onlythree dynamics (ppp, p, mf ). Duration factors, too, relate to the precedingmovement: factors 2 3 5 8 12 17 are replaced with 1 2 3 5 8 12. The process continueswith the duration values. No. 6a uses three values (crotchet divided by 3, 4, 5).Of these, no. 6b uses the outer values (3 and 5), while no. 7 takes up the centralvalue (4 = ). Finally, the movements are audibly linked in that the attaccaentry of no. 7 reiterates the final A of no. 6b in the same register and with thesame dynamic on glockenspiel. One important characteristic of this movement,however, is shared not with no. 6, but with the preceding no. 5. No. 7 is one oftwo movements in which Nono alters the order of the pitches of the all-intervalseries with the objective of creating a reservoir of series with different intervalconstellations. No. 7 uses 12 such series. The series and their interval content arenotated in Example 10 and marked with the letters A–M.114 The example isbased on a sketch that contains the series and their interval content.115 The backof this sketch contains a pitch structure of (13 × 12) + 4 pitch elements fromwhich it is evident that Nono also briefly considered the use of the ‘tecnica deglispostamenti’ for this movement. The first draft of the composition, however, is

113 The sketch is printed in Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 205.114 The letters match Motz’s analysis, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 106–22.115 ALN 14.02.07/08 R sup/inf. Intervals are notated as in Nono’s sketches (2– through to 4+).

v


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based on material that is serial but not 12-tonal. This material, which was laterdiscarded, consists of 12 series in which 2–4 pitches are repeated, i.e. series witha maximum of ten pitches.116 As shown in Example 11, all of these series are dis-tinguished by different interval structures. With the exception of the tenthseries, the repeated pitches of series 7–12 are in retrograde positions to therepeated pitches in series 6–1. Although none of the series is itself 12-tonal, theall-interval series is present in the first pitches of rows 1–6 and the last pitches ofrows 7–12. Each pitch is allocated one of three dynamic values (ppp, p, mf ) inrows 1–6.117 Independently of pitch distribution, rows 7–12 then simply use theretrogrades of the dynamic series 6–1. Using duration factors 1–12, Nono firstcomposed a version of the entire movement with this pitch material before heabandoned it in favour of the 12 series shown in Example 10.118 It is fascinatingto see that, for the most lyrical movement, Nono seriously considered such adeviation from integral serialism. The 12 series that were used later fall betweenthis type of aggregate composition and the extreme objectivity of the all-intervalseries. Although now strictly 12-tonal, they, too, allow for a much more subjec-tive choice and combination of intervals. The first series (Example 10, staff A) andits corresponding series of duration factors are derived from the all-intervalseries by means of mirror symmetric permutation of the two hexachords (seeFigure 5). The interrelations between the 12 series are complex and have beendiscussed in great detail by Motz.119 The series are matched with the square ofduration factors shown in Table 17, derived by means of the familiar permuta-tion 2 4 6 8 10 12 1 3 5 7 9 11. A sketch formerly in the possession of LucianoBerio displays both duration factors and dynamics, as well as the method of

116 See sketch ALN 14.09/01 R sx. Numeric representations of this material and possible clues forits derivation are found on sketch ALN 14.02.07/06.

117 The dynamic sometimes changes when the pitch is repeated.118 Sketches ALN 14.09/01-03. The initial draft is in ten sections: two sections a1 (rows 1/2), two

sections a2 (rows 3/10 and 4/9), two sections a3 (rows 5/8 and 6/7), two sections a2 (rows 7/6 and8/5) and two sections a1 (rows 9/10). The sections combine original and retrograde forms, andduration factors follow the repetition patterns of the respective pitch series. The structural idea ofcombining solo soprano with soprano and alto voices is already present, but contrary motionis not yet a defining principle.

119 Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 112–15.

Figure 5. Il canto sospeso, no. 7: generation of pitch series A and duration factorseries a from the all-interval series.

A B� A� B G C F� C� F D E E�1 2 3 5 8 12 12 8 5 3 2 1

A C B� G A� B E� F� E C� D F

1 12 2 8 3 5 1 12 2 8 3 5


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reading the square.120 Dynamics seem to have been added at a later stage anddo not follow any obvious serial organization. Instead of numbers, Table 17 useslower-case letters to correspond with the pitch series.

The layout of the movement itself is in 12 sections. Each section employs 1–3voices. Although less obviously so than in no. 6b, each of the voices is matchedwith particular characteristic instrumental colours: the solo soprano is coupledwith the first flute and first violins, the choral sopranos with second flute andsecond violins, the altos with the viola. The two high vocal parts are furtherassociated with high harmonics on double bass and cello, and the percussioninstruments are employed for the shorter values throughout. As can be seenfrom Table 18, the leading voice of the solo soprano is present in all 12 sectionsand simply runs through the pitch series with their corresponding durationseries (A/a, B/b, . . . M/m). The other two voices render the same set of seriesfrom the back, starting with the retrograde of series M and ending with the ret-rograde of series A. The corresponding series of duration (and dynamics) areread accordingly, i.e. also from the back (←M/←m, ←L/←l, . . . ←A/←a).The combination of the various building-blocks, now much more varied than inthe first draft, is summarized in Table 18. Values attributed to the vocal parts aremarked in bold. In addition, the part of the solo soprano shows the distributionof the text. Exceptions are underlined, or in square brackets if replaced by rests.

None of the vocal parts is itself continuous, but together they create analmost continuous and intensely lyrical vocal band. As always, the art of thecomposition lies in the orchestration and in the distribution of registers, whichhighlights pitch correlations between the various layers of material. When look-ing at the vocal parts alone, it becomes evident that the same pitches are almostalways put in the same register to create the smoothest of doublings and transi-tions and thus a maximum of continuity. Chromatic relationships are alsofavoured, particularly in the three-part sections. Section V (bars 438–44), forexample, highlights two expanding chromatic fields, linked by the familiar tri-tone E –A (see Figure 6). Another recurring feature is the emphasis on pitchcorrelations at the beginning and end of sections. Section III (bars 426–32), forexample, begins with C (alto) / E (solo sopr.) and ends with C (solo sopr.) / E(alto) in the same register; section IV begins with A (sopr.) and ends with A(solo sopr.), also in the same register; and section VII begins with G (solosopr.) and ends with F (alto), now an octave apart. The beguiling lyricism ofthis movement, with its clear preference for minor and major thirds, is alsoachieved through the conscious choice of intervals.

If no. 7 has so far been regarded primarily as a continuation of processes ini-tiated by nos. 6a and 6b, it is clearly also a companion piece to no. 5, withwhich it shares the delicate orchestration, the vocal lyricism and the use of dif-ferent pitch series. The central second part of Il canto sospeso is thus neatly bal-anced, beginning with the only movement for a single solo voice (tenor),moving on to the gripping drama of nos. 6a and 6b, and concluding with the

120 See ibid., 179–80, 207. For reasons of clarity I have separated the two squares.

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elegiac and almost other-worldly calm of no. 7. No. 5, however, also representsthe centre of the work as a whole, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Nonohere chose a text which seems to assert Adorno’s reservations regarding poetryafter Auschwitz. It is by the 14-year-old Polish farm-boy Chaim, and reads: ‘. . .se il cielo fosse carta e tutti i mari del mondo inchiostro non potrei descrivervi lemie sofferenze e tutto ciò che vedo intorno a me. Dico addio a tutti e piango . . .’(‘If the sky were paper, and all the seas of the world were ink, I could notdescribe my suffering and all that I see around me. I say goodbye to all of youand weep’). The sentimentality that could easily result from a statement of suchemotional directness is counteracted once again by means of the most rigorous

TABLE 18

IL CANTO SOSPESO, NO. 7: SCHEMATIC SUMMARY

no. 7 voice pitch duration (text) instr. colourI solo sopr. A 1 12 2 8 3 5 1 12 2 8 3 5 (a) d.b. harm.II solo sopr. B 12 8 5 12 8 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 (b) vln I

sopr. ←L 2 5 2 5 12 3 12 3 1 8 1 8 (←l) vcl. harm.alto ←M 5 5 3 3 8 8 2 2 12 12 [1 1] (←m) fl. 2

III solo sopr. C 8 12 5 2 1 3 12 5 8 1 3 2 (c) fl. 1 flutter/vcl. harm.Ad-di-o

alto ←K 12 2 3 5 1 2 8 5 1 12 8 3 (←k) vlaIV solo sopr. D 12 2 3 5 1 2 8 5 1 12 8 3 (d) fl. 1/vcl./vln I harm.

Mam- masopr. ←I 8 12 5 2 1 3 12 5 8 1 3 2 (←i) vln II sord.

V solo sopr. E 2 5 2 5 12 3 12 3 1 8 1 8 (e) vln 1ad-

sopr. ←G 1 12 2 8 3 5 1 12 2 8 3 5 (←g) vln IIalto ←H 12 8 5 12 8 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 (←h) vla

VI solo sopr. F 5 5 3 3 8 8 2 2 12 12 1 1 (f) fl. 1 harm.di-o mamma

VII solo sopr. G 5 3 8 2 12 1 5 3 8 2 12 1 (g) fl. 1/vcl. harm.alto ←F 1 1 12 12 2 2 8 8 3 3 5 5 (←f) d.b. harm./fl. 2

VIII solo sopr. H 3 2 1 3 2 1 5 8 12 5 8 12 (h) vln Itu-a figlia Liub-ka

sopr. ←E 8 1 8 1 3 12 3 12 5 2 5 2 (←e) vln IIalto ←D 3 8 12 1 5 8 2 1 5 3 2 12 (←d) vla

IX solo sopr. I 2 3 1 8 5 12 3 1 2 5 12 8 (i)se- ne va

sopr. ←C 2 3 1 8 5 12 3 1 2 5 12 8 (←c) vln II, fl. 2alto ←B 3 2 1 3 2 [1] 5 8 12 5 8 8! (←b) vln II, fl. 2

X solo sopr. K 3 8 12 1 5 8 2 1 5 3 2 12 (k) fl. 1/vln Ise-ne va nel-l’u-mi-da ter-

sopr. ←A 5 3 8 2 12 1 5 3 8 2 12 1 (←a) vln IIXI solo sopr. L 8 1 8 1 3 12 3 12 5 2 5 2 (l) fl. 1 harm.

-raXII solo sopr. M 1 1 12 12 2 2 8 8 3 3 5 5 fl. 1 harm.


organization of material. Apart from the organization of pitch, the movement isin many ways similar to no. 3. Four palindromic series of just three durationfactors (1, 2, 7) are applied to three values of duration (crotchet divided by 4, 5, 6).The permutation is the same as in no. 3 (every second number). All the series,therefore, are palindromic:

(a) 1 2 7 1 7 2 2 7 1 7 2 1(b) 2 1 2 7 7 1 1 7 7 2 1 2(c) 1 7 1 7 2 2 2 2 7 1 7 1(d) 7 7 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 7 7

Each series adds up to 40. Multiplication by the values of duration results inthree units of different length: 10 crotchets for the semiquaver layer, 8 crotchetsfor the quintuplet layer, and 6.4 crotchets for the sextuplet layer. The three con-tinuous voices are layered symmetrically, with the longest layer (4) beginning andending the movement, and the entry and exit of the other two (5, 6) being stag-gered. Ten units of duration per layer are coupled with five pitch series and theirretrogrades. The series and their interval structure are shown in Example 12.121

Apart from the first (the all-interval series), the common denominator is themirror-symmetric position of the tritones, which remains the same through-

121 On the derivation of series A–D from the all-interval series see Motz, Konstruktion undAusdruck, 80–1.

Figure 6. Il canto sospeso, no. 7: pitch constellation in the vocal parts (bars438–44).


out.122 Each of the additional series also favours a specific interval (marked boldin Example 10). The five series are run through in the most straightforwardmanner in the central quintuplet layer, the voice assigned to solo tenor, vibra-phone and marimba (see Figure 7). The overall shape and division of this voice(4 + 4 + 2) is clearly linked to the structure of the text. Much in the fashion ofthe Renaissance polyphony that Nono studied at great length throughout hisapprenticeship with Maderna, two canonic voices (one in augmentation, theother in diminution, both with a 2 + 4 + 4 division) are then added to the tenor.These two outer layers (crotchet divided by 4, 6) make use of the same series ofduration factors and thus form a true prolation canon. As regards pitch, theforms of the series used in the sextuplet layer are the inversions (and transposedinversions) of those used in the semiquaver layer (see Figure 8).

The instrumentation of these two voices is less exclusive than that of theleading tenor. In total Nono uses five solo strings, wind quintet plus bass clari-net, three trumpets and two trombones, the vibraphone and marimba alreadymentioned, and – for the first time in Il canto sospeso – two harps. Throughoutthe movement, the harps play the shortest values (factor 1) of the semiquaverand sextuplet levels and beautifully carve out the symmetry of the palindromicphrases, particularly when series d is in play and four short values are the central

122 As Rizzardi has shown, Nono had used such a constant once before. The Monodia of Poli-fonica–Monodia–Ritmica (1951) uses 21 series. Of these, nos. 1–3, 5, 17–18 and 20–1 are simi-larly marked by a mirror-symmetric position of the tritones. See Rizzardi, ‘La “Nuova ScuolaVeneziana”’, 29–30.

Figure 7. Il canto sospeso, no. 5: tenor layer.

Figure 8. Il canto sospeso, no. 5: the two outer layers.


focus of the phrase (at the beginning of the movement, for example). All otherinstruments render factors 2 and 7. Contrary to movement 7, none of thepitches is ever doubled here, not even with harmonics. Flute, horn and thesecond trombone are linked to the sextuplet layer only. All other instrumentsare allocated pitches from both voices. The result is a transparent texture fromwhich the leading part of the tenor, vibraphone and marimba emerges withgreat clarity and continuity.

Dynamics are used neither serially nor to underline the movement’s canonicstructure. Five static dynamics are employed (ppp p mp mf f ) and dynamic tableshave been provided in full by Bailey.123 In correspondence with the number ofduration factors, only three dynamics are used per series. Their distribution isclearly linked to form and content. In all three voices, dynamics gradually getlouder in the first four units, decrease in the next four, and arrive at their softestin the last two, to the tenor’s words ‘Dico addio a tutti e piango . . .’ (‘I saygoodbye to all of you and weep . . .’). As in no. 7, much of the expressive lyri-cism of this movement is due to the sensitive forging of the vocal line with itssubtle use of rests, as well as the lucid transparency of the orchestration.124

Should one want to pinpoint an influence on the richer and more sensuous lyri-cism of no. 7, with its preference for the interval of the third, the use of high-floating vocal lines, ethereal harmonics of flutes and strings combined withbell-like percussion, it would most certainly have to be the music of Dallapiccola.In contrast, the lyricism of no. 5, with its emphasis on the interval of thetritone, the single vocal line and the sparser, strictly soloistic orchestration, is farmore akin to late Webern. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the German cli-mate at the time no. 5 was felt to represent the emotional and idealistic contentof these texts in the most pure and satisfying way. In contrast, Massimo Milalater openly defended the sensuous lyricism of no. 7:

This long and truly free-floating female vocal line transmits such excruciating pathos thatit is not surprising that it was felt by some to be embarrassing. It is not easy to find thecourage to express one’s emotions today. Heinz Joachim regards this piece as less success-ful than the preceding movements and describes it as ‘a very long soprano solo whichgives way too much to lyrical expression’. What a fortunate mistake in today’s musicalclimate! In reality parts V, VI and VII, together with the third, represent the climax ofthis rediscovery of communication to which Il canto sospeso owes its high esteem.125

At the centre of the work, however, stands no. 5. This most transparentmovement retraces the structure of the work as a whole. Mirror symmetry, theoverriding 4 + 4 + 2 division, the increasing and decreasing tension and a coda

123 Bailey, ‘Work in Progress’, 302.124 The structural use of rests to separate individual word cells was pointed out to me by Angela

Ida De Benedictis, who compares them to a ‘rhyme scheme’, emphasizing the end of eachunit of text. A large part of Motz’s analysis of this movement also deals with the formationand expressive qualities of the solo vocal line (Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 87–92).

125 Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 308.


receding into silence are all characteristic elements of the overall shape of Ilcanto sospeso. Sketches show that Nono initially had 12 movements in mind:4 + 3 + 5.126 As it became more and more apparent that this was going to be a‘freedom Mass that did not allow the radiant joy of a Gloria’,127 Nono abandonedthe idea of a grand finale, gave up the idea of a mirror symmetry of 4 + 3 + 4 move-ments, and settled for nine movements in three parts, each with fewer constituentmovements than the last (4 + 3 + 2). As already seen, the relationships betweenmovements are manifold. The most dramatic and emotionally intense movementsare joined together in the central part. The mirror-symmetric arrangement aroundno. 5 also adds to the balance of the work as a whole. One of Nono’s sketchesregarding the overall form of the work treats no. 6b as a movement in its ownright.128 The formal outline then coincides with the 4 + 4 + 2 division of no. 5. Theaudible experience of the form, however, is yet another. Overall the tensionincreases as far as no. 6a, and then decreases again from the beginning of no. 6b.The proportions of this division come close to the Golden Section and represent afurther structural link to the numbers of the Fibonacci series. The schematic repre-sentation shown in Figure 9 sums up the intricate formal relationships.

In addition to the large contrasts – between extreme registers and dynamics,between solos and tutti, vocal and orchestral textures, and between the polar-ized instrumental groups – a fundamental and indeed very expressive character-istic of Il canto sospeso is its stoic staticism. Slow speeds throughout give thework its intensely reflective quality.129 At no time is there the feeling that any ofthe chosen texts is treated lightly or fleetingly. On the contrary, the slow motion,with its subtle Webernian speed fluctuation, acts as a kind of magnifyingglass, directing the focus onto both the content and the extremely refined useof technique and sound colour. Another unifying element is the consistent use ofthe all-interval series on A. Despite the various methods of pitch displacementand the occasional use of added series, this series acts as a kind of underlyingtonality, whereby its outer tritone, A–E , is perhaps the single most importantpitch constellation. This tritone not only frames the series, countless 12-notefields as well as the work as a whole, but, at the dramatic climax, is revealed as asounding symbol for the oppressors. Interval-conscious composition is furthermade possible by means of the techniques of displacement and the instrumenta-tion (which is often employed to emphasize pitch correlations independent ofthe serial organization), as well as the art of combining the various building-blocks, ranging from whole compositional layers (nos. 3, 4, 5 and 7; canonic layersof duration in nos. 2 and 9) to 12-note fields (nos. 2, 6b, 8 and 9), individual

126 First drafts of the overall form of the work are found in the sketches ALN 14.02.01/01–04.Two of these are published in Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 187–8. An initial selection oftexts indicates up to 15 movements (ALN 14.01.01/06–07).

127 Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 302.128 See Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck, 188.129 The fastest speed is found in no. 6a ( = 86); among the fastest values are the note repetitions

in no. 8, where the slowest speed indication is also found (; = 46); and the slowest movementoverall is no. 7 ( = 40–66).

o

o

`


parts (no. 6a) and pitch elements generated by means of the technique of muta-tion (no. 1). The freedom of combination (ars combinatoria) is coupled with theexpressive use of register. Narrow ambitus deliberately creates a sense of confine-ment from which the repeated flight into extreme heights (in both the vocal andorchestral dimensions) is indeed sensed as an escape and an expression of hopefor a better world – ‘a world which will shine with light of such strength andbeauty that my own sacrifice is nothing . . .’ (Anton Popov, no. 2). Il cantosospeso, after all, is a memorial not only to all those who died at the hands of theNazis, but specifically to members of the various European resistance move-ments, united in their struggle for a better society, dying for their political ideals.

Among the most interesting documents on ‘neo-realism’ in Italian post-warliterature and its links to the Italian Resistenza is Italo Calvino’s 1964 preface tohis first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947). Nono owned this editionof Calvino’s Resistenza novel and underlined parts of the preface. Highlightedby Nono is the aspect of ‘renewed freedom of speech’ and the immense urge forexpression that followed.130 Calvino, who had fought in the Partisan war andalso briefly joined the Communist Party, here reflects:

The explosive charge of freedom that animated the young writer was not so much hiswish to document or to inform as it was his desire to express. Express what? . . . Characters,landscapes, shooting, political slogans, jargon, curses, lyric flights, weapons, love-making

130 Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin, 1964), ALN.

Figure 9. Formal outline of Il canto sospeso.


were only colours on the palette, notes of the scale; we all knew too well that whatcounted was the music and not the libretto. Though we were supposed to be concernedwith content, there were never more dogged formalists than we; and never were lyricpoets as effusive as those objective reporters we were supposed to be . . . Actually theextra-literary elements stood there so massive and so indisputable that they seemed a factof nature; to us the whole problem was one of poetics; how to transform into a literarywork that world which for us was the world.131

Calvino’s point of view helps to explain Maderna’s equally formalist and some-what obscure philosophical reflection on expression, with which Nono wouldprobably have agreed at the time: ‘Expression can mean abstraction – because: toexpress means to bring forth, i.e. to abstract or, better, to isolate a part of thewhole and to transfer it into another dimension.’132 Unlike Calvino and Maderna,Nono had not joined the Partisans during the war. This, perhaps, was one reasonfor his great admiration of the work of Cesare Pavese, with whom he may haveshared the feeling of remorse at not having fought. The fact that Nono did nothave to face the struggle with real-life experiences of violence and death, however,may have provided him with the kind of detachment and objectivity necessary forthe artistic treatment of a subject of this kind.133 In the last instance, it is the highdegree of abstraction of Nono’s serial language, coupled with the urge and cour-age to express the seemingly inexpressible, which distinguishes Il canto sospeso asan anti-fascist work of art of lasting impact and significance. Moving and expres-sive, yet free of sentimentality, it successfully takes on the difficult task of com-memorating all those who died for their anti-fascist resistance.

ABSTRACT

Taking into account the sources now available at the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice, thisarticle first looks at Nono’s serial masterpiece Il canto sospeso (1955–6) in its historicalcontext, both in Germany and in Italy. Having outlined the political circumstances andaesthetic premisses, the article goes on to provide a detailed analysis of the serial tech-nique employed. Particular attention is paid to a technique of pitch permutation thatexplains the pitch structures of several movements, hitherto not fully understood. Each ofthe nine movements is examined in view of a better understanding of the work’s expressivequalities and in order to show the underlying formal and compositional relationships.

131 Calvino, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, trans. William Weaver (Hopewell, 1976), Preface,vi–vii.

132 Maderna, ‘Espressione’, Nicola Verzina, Bruno Maderna: Étude historique et critique (Paris,2003), 63. Verzina dates the short text to 1952–3 because it was found among notes for theballet Das eiserne Zeitalter, on which Maderna was working at the time.

133 Calvino’s preface describes the author’s struggle to free himself from such experience: ‘I triedto narrate the partisan experience in the first person, or with a protagonist who resembled me. . . I moved awkwardly. I could never completely stifle the sentimental and moralistic vibra-tions. There was always a false note somewhere . . . As soon as I started to write stories inwhich I did not appear, all went smoothly: the language, rhythm, shape were precise, func-tional . . . I began to realize that the more anonymous and objective the story was, the more itwas mine.’ Calvino, The Path, Preface, xix–xx.


Example 1. Il canto sospeso, nos. 1 and 4: pitch structure generated by the ‘tec-nica degli spostamenti’.


Example 2. Il canto sospeso, no. 4: section I and beginning of section II (bars240–6), annotated with duration factors in wind and percussion. Boxes indi-cate elements of the pitch structure that contain more than one pitch.


Example 3. Il canto sospeso, no. 3: pitch structures generated by the ‘tecnicadegli spostamenti’.


Example 3 continued


Example 4. Il canto sospeso, no. 3: beginning notated in layers.


Example 5. Il canto sospeso, no. 1: opening, bars 1-6. Four units of durationfactors (5, 10, 3, 8) and exposition of dramatic contrast between wind and strings;displacement of pitches by means of ‘negative’ durations (superimposed rests) inbars 1–4.


Exa

mpl

e 6.

Il c

anto

sosp

eso,

no.

2: c

oncl

udin

g pr

olat

ion

cano

n (b

ars

142–

57).


Example 7. Il canto sospeso, no. 9: beginning (bars 545–59).


Example 7 continued


Example 8. Il canto sospeso, no. 8: bars 531–2, notated in groups. Rests dis-placing the group entries are marked in square brackets, those displacing theentries within groups in parentheses.


Example 9. Il canto sospeso, no. 6a: first choral phrase (six syllables per voice),beginning simultaneously.


Example 10. Il canto sospeso, no. 7: series and interval structure as notated inNono’s sketches.


Example 11. Il canto sospeso, no. 7: non-12-tonal pitch material later discarded.


Example 12. Il canto sospeso, no. 5: series and interval structure.

carola nielinger - 'the song unsung' - luigi nono's il canto sospeso

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