Luigi Nono and The Darmstadt School - Form & Meaning in Early Works 50-59

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Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School: Form and

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Christopher Fox
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Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School:

Form and Meaning in the Early Works
(1950-1959)
Christopher Fox
Three works from the first decade of Nono's career - - Variazioni canoniche, Polifonica-MonodiaRitmica and Il canto sospeso - - are discussed both analytically and within the context of the
evolving aesthetic of the 1950s avant-garde and the 'Darmstadt School'. Particular attention is
given to Nono's developing serial practice in these works and to Nono's use of existing musical models to locate his work both politically and within history The role of the Darmstadt
Ferienkurse fiir neue Musik as a forum within which modernist thinking was reinstated in European musical culture after the Second World war is discussed. The article concludes with an
account of the aesthetic disputes between Nono and $tockhausen between 1958 and 1960
which marked the effective dissolution of the 'Darmstadt School'.
KEY WORDS:
1950s, Darmstadt, serialism, form and meaning.
Friedrich Hommel und Wilhelm Schliiter gewidmet

In the early 1950s a group of young composers began to establish reputations, both collectively and individually, as the leading European exponents of new music. Since these reputations were initially based on the
notoriety of performances of their music at the newly established Courses
for International New Music in the German city of Darmstadt, it was not
entirely surprising that these composers became known as the "Darmstadt
School'. 40 years later it is Boulez and Stockhausen whose names are most
immediately associated with Darmstadt, but it was the controversial
premiere of Luigi Nono's Variazioni canoniche during the 1950 Darmstadt
courses which symbolised the advent of a new musical direction. It was
Nono who proposed the name 'Darmstadt School' (with its conscious echo
of 'Second Viennese School') to emphasise the collegiality of the most
111
112 ChristopherFox
advanced composers associated with the courses. From 1950 until 1960 his
career was inextricably linked with Darmstadt: most of his works were premiered during the courses - - Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica in 1951, the Epitaffio No 1: Espafia en el corazgn in 1952, La Victoire de Guernica in 1954, Incontri
in 1955, Cori di Didone in 1958, Diario polacco "58 in 1959-- others like Il canto
sospeso were premiered elsewhere but had been commissioned by Darmstadt. Just as importantly, Nono was present at the courses each year as one
of the guiding creative spirits shaping the evolution of avant-garde music.
It was Nono too who effectively dissolved the'School '1 with his 1959 Darmstadt lecture 'Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik heute'2; its fierce
attack on the newly fashionable Cageian aesthetics and the nature of
compositional intention and musical freedom3 ruptured his close friendship with Stockhausen.
The cultural conditions in which the Darmstadt School began to formulate their musical aesthetic were perhaps unique in European history.
Europe's history is not short of catastrophic moments when old orders
were swept a w a y - - 1789, 1848, 1917--but in all those moments the tabula
rasa on which the future was to be written was created in revolutionary feryour. Ideologies were defined not only in opposition to existing hegemonies (monarchy, imperialism, capitalism) but also as the projection of
progressive political aspirations (individual freedom, democratic self-determination, socialism). In 1946, when the first Darmstadt courses were
held, there was no such ideological certainty; the only wish that was held
with universal fervour was that Europe might achieve a political order in
which there could be no repetition of the institutionalised hatred which had
precipitated the Second World War.
The Darmstadt courses were born into a world of social upheaval and
political complexity. Buildings, institutions, populations were in tatters;
enmities between the Soviet and western Allies were dividing Europe; at its
best de-Nazification translated into a new internationalism, at its worst into
pragmatic accommodations. The prevailing mood in Germany was probably close to that described in 1947 by the journalist Janet Flanner:
"The new Germany is bitter against everyone else.., and curiously self-satisfied... People feel
no responsibility for the war, which they regard as an act of history, and.., consider the troubles and confusions of the peace the Allies' fault. "4
For such people the occupying Allied armies needed only to support local
efforts to return to business as usual, but reformist projects existed too. In
Darmstadt the conjunction of a progressive Social Democrat mayor, Ludwig Metzger, an enlightened cultural officer with the US Army, Everett B.
Helms, and a gifted arts administrator, Wolfgang Steinecke, led to the e s tablishment in 1946 of a series of summer courses intended to reintroduce
German musicians to the canon of European m o d e m music s. Over the fol-
Form and Meaning in Early Nono 113
lowing years a new generation of composers, first from Germany and then
increasingly from further afield as well, came to Darmstadt for their first
encounter with works by Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Var6se and the
Second Viennese School, composers whose 'degenerate' works had been
banned by the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
By the turn of the decade the first works of these younger composers began to find their way into Darmstadt's concert programmes and in these
works it is possible to trace the attempts of a new generation to make sense
of, and locate themselves within, the Modernist tradition. Because Darmstadt was such an important site for the rediscovery of unheard works by
Sch6nberg, Webern or Var~se, the early music of the Darmstadt School
(much of which is now also too little heard) provides us with a unique opportunity to measure the responses of these young composers to specific
new stimuli and, as a result, to hear the evolution of post-war European
sensibilities with particular clarity.
The present article does not attempt to give a complete historical account
of Nono's first decade as a publicly performed composer nor attempt noteto-note analyses of early Nono scores, since outline accounts of the development of Nono's career can be found in standard introductory texts and
detailed analyses abound in the German and Italian literature. Instead,
what I hope to demonstrate, through discussion of a number of Nono's
works from the 1950s, is the nature of Nono's contribution to the new music of the this time. Set against the music of his 'Darmstadt School' colleagues, Madema, Stockhausen and Boulez - - music which variously
(although not necessarily respectively) abounds in utopian, idealist and
formalist imagery - - Nono's work is striking for its commitment to contemporary social issues and for the clarity with which it constructs a network of meaningful cultural and historical relationships. Most
importantly, I want to argue that the formal practices of Nono's serial music from this period are an integral part of the expressive purpose of that music, indeed that the clarity of Nono's serialism is inextricably bound up
with the music's expressive clarity.
Nono scholarship in the English-speaking world is still in its infancy6; on
the continent m especially in Italy and in the German-speaking countries-things are different. The book-length study edited by Jiirg Stenzl 7, which
draws together Nono's collected writings, interviews and a series of analytical essays, appeared in Germany as long ago as 1975, while the volume devoted to Nono in the Musik-Konzepte series, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger
and Rainer Riehn s, allowed Nono scholarship in Germany to begin to
debate the implications of the string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima, a
debate which has yielded some of the most thoughtful writing on recent new
music to be found anywhere. More recently, Enzo Restagno's book on
Nono 9, including some of the same material as Stenzl and Musik-Konzepte 1~
114 ChristopherFox
as well as additional essays and a fascinating autobiographical interview

with Nono, was published in Italy in 1987.
In Britain we lack a generation of senior composers for w h o m Nono was
a mentor. In Germany Helmut Lachenmann and Nicolaus A. Huber are
both considerable composers and teachers of other composers in their own
right; both have also paid tribute to Nono as their teacher and as a composer on whose music their own work (and, by extension, that of their own students) is contingent. Both have also made significant contributions to the
body of literature on Nono's music. Lachenmanrt acted as Nono's amanuensis at the end of the 1950s, preparing the German texts for Nono's last
two Darmstadt lectures; his essay 'Luigi Nono oder der R/ickblick auf die
serielle Musik" is a splendidly partisan account of the ideological significance of Nono's aesthetic 11. Huber's richly detailed analysis of the sixth
movement of Il canto sospeso is included in the Musik-Konzepte volume on
N o n o 12.
Amongst British composers, David Bedford studied with Nono but

while he has played a considerable part in the developing involvement of
composers and composition in children's education he has not been a
teacher of composers; Michael Finnissy, who went to Italy at the beginning
of his career in the hope of studying with Nono, had to be content to study
with Roman Vlad instead. As a result there has never been a group of musicians in Britain who felt the same aesthetic indebtedness to Nono as have
many of their German and Italian counterparts, and there are few if any
British works of the last 40 years which can claim to owe their existence to
precedents established in Nono's works.
At the same time the history of new music in Britain in the last 50 years
has created a peculiar dislocation between present sensibilities and the music of the Darmstadt School. While British music was regularly played during the Darmstadt courses in the 1950s, British composers were never at the
centre of the aesthetic and technical discourses which preoccupied the
Darmstadt School and, after 1962, British composers and Darmstadt left
one another alone until the 1980s, when Brian Ferneyhough and a new generation of British composers became key figures in the courses is. There is
too a long-standing mistrust in the contemporary British music establishment of continental music in general and of formally experimental music in
particular. Music like Nono's, which has at various times involved explicit
political statements, live electronics, formal innovation, and the need for
lengthy rehearsal, and yet resolutely eschews sensationalism, could not be
less likely to meet the approval of Britain's music institutions!
This article is then a plea on behalf of a body of work which may be part
of the standard English language historical accounts of post-war music, but
which is rarely part of the critical discourse around that music and almost
never part of that most important discourse, regular live concert perform-
ance. In the wake of the catastrophic transformation of Europe initiated by

the revolutions of 1989 in the former Soviet bloc, it may be that this music
which so boldly engaged with the most vital social and political issues of its
day has important lessons for musicians today. I want to argue that Nono's
music from the 1950s, uniquely amongst the avant-garde music of that
period, addresses a dilemma which continues to confound performers, composers and critics: how is it possible to make work which is both formally
9adventurous and yet also capable of communicating its ideas urgently and
compellingly? Current musical thinking holds that audiences do not respond to new forms; half-digested post-modernist philosophies suggest
that old forms can slip on new meanings like a clean T-shirt: the result is the
tawdry populism of "audience-friendly' 'new' music.
The particular circumstances of the post-war era meant that continental
European composers and their audiences understood only too well the historical significance of musical language. One must therefore understand
the instrumental works with which Nono began his career as being as political in intention as the more explicit, text-based works which would follow.
The Variazioni canoniche ~ Nono's first publicly performed work m could
be heard as no more than an extended contrapuntal study, at times Sch6nbergian, elsewhere Webernesque, sometimes reminiscent of Var~se. But
the decision to write atonally, the decision to cast the music for orchestra
and to structure it in four movements, and perhaps most important of all,
the choice of the specific twelve-note subject for variation all had (and can
still have) political significance.
Nono's musical studies had given him a field of musical reference which
was both deep and wide-ranging, extending back in time to Machaut, Dunstable and the Burgundian School (Bruno Maderna, who was Nono's guide
in many of these studies, was fascinated by puzzle canons, for example 14)
and across musical cultures (Brazilian folk music, for example, would
influence Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica). The conductor and publisher Hermann Scherchen, whom Nono met in 1948, reinforced this sense of music
history as a continuous tradition with insights into the world of pre-war
modern music. Consequently Nono was able to (and felt bound to) place
his works within history in a way that few of his contemporaries could
match. It is notable in his interview with Enzo Restagno that Nono connects
the isorhythmic variation in Josquin's Missa di Dadi with later variation
techniques in Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Sch6nberg is and thus
hardly surprising that, from its very title, his own first work is so explicitly
located within this history.
The Variazioni canoniche are subtitled sulla serie dell'op. 41 Arnold SchSnberg ('on the series of Arnold Sch6nberg's op. 41'), making the work's historical connections even more explicit. Everything we know about
SchSnberg - - his sense of the historical inevitability of his compositional
116 ChristopherFox
project, its debt to the past and its potential for the future - - demonstrates
that he also saw himself as part of a great lineage through European musical history (as Friedrich Hommel has said, 'Sch6nberg thought of himself
as a prince among composers '16) and that this lineage rightfully led to serial
music. Nono's evocation of Sch6nberg is a declaration of alliance with
serialism and, at the same time, a rejection of the other musical directions
being considered in the post-war years, principally neo-classicism and free
atonality 17.
The choice of the series of op. 41, the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1944),
has a double significance. The Ode is a political work: Byron's denunciation
of the tyrant Napoleon could obviously be read as a denunciation of contemporary tyranny but Byron's concluding invocation of George Washington as 'the Cincinattus of the west' also provided Sch6nberg with an
opportunity to declare his own allegiance to the USA. Of more musical significance is the particular character of the twelve-note series on which the
Ode is based. In 1958 the first volume of the Darmstiidter Beitriige zur neuen
Musik included Nono's essay on serJali.~m, 'Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik'is, in which Nono analysed serial works by Sch6nberg, Webern,
Boulez and Stockhausen. It is significant that the Sch6nberg scores which
Nono chooses are not those, like the Fourth String Quartet or the Violin Concerto, in which the thematic identity of the series is emphasised from the
very outset, but rather works, like the Variationsfor Orchestra, in which the
series offers many faces. In discussing Sch6nberg's serial practice in the
Variations he shows how the series yields one set of intervallic possibilities
at the beginning of the work and yet later is transformed in such a way that
the B-A-C-H motto can predominate. He goes on to consider Webern's
approach to twelve-tone technique in his orchestral Variations, Op. 30, and
focuses on Webern's use of serial 'ambiguity" (Doppeldeutigkeit)19,where a
single pitch-class can have dual serial identities. He also draws attention to
the way in which Webem's series is made up of three identical tetrachords,
each consisting only of a minor second and minor third.
The series of the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparteis a similarly ambiguous construction (see figure 1). It consists of six semitone dyads (figure la), arranged as two 034 trichords framing two 014 (the inversion of 034) trichords
(figure lb) so that each hexachord consists of the set 014589 (figure lc).
This ambiguity allows Nono to compose music of considerable subtlety,
whose serial origins are rarely audible. The series appears only once in its
entirety, as a saxophone melody in the final Lento section (see figure 2) and
even on this appearance the repetition of earlier notes blurs the outline of
the series.
What is more striking is the individuality of Nono's timbral and textural
invention and the way in which the four sections of the work are characterised. The opening Largo vagamente is predominantly made up of interlock-
'
'
Figure I series from the Ode to NapoleonBuonaparte

~ 60-64,
Figure 2 Nono,Variazionicanoniche,saxophone,mm 244-248

reproducedby kind permissionof SchottMusicPublishers,London.
ing two- or three-note motivic cells, the second section, Andante moderato, is
dominated by percussion and explosive string unisons, the third is a short,
aggressive Allegro violente, while the final Lento contains the most sustainedly lyrical writing. Gianmario Borio has suggested that the succession and
characterisation of the sections echoes that in Sch6nberg's Ode: both works
open slowly (Largo in Nono, Grave in SchSnberg) and Nono's Allegro violente is an abstract instrumental equivalent of the description in the Sch6nberg of 'war and the triumph of irrational brutality "2~ The percussion
writing may suggest the influence of Var~se but generally the orchestral
writing has a limpid clarity which reminds one more strongly of Mahler
than of any of his Viennese clisciples; the use of octave doublings is espedally Mahlerian and of course flies in the face of Second Viennese serial orthodoxy.
The Variazioni canoniche were premiered in Darmstadt on 27 August 1950
by the city's Landestheater Orchestra under Nono's mentor, Hermann
118 ChristopherFox
Scherchen, and had a rather mixed reception. Only a week earlier the same
forces had given the German premiere of Sch6nberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 4021- - a performance charged with the particular significance of
its subject-matter for a German audience - - and the European premiere of
Var~se's Ionisation. Both these compact and powerfully immediate works
must have cast a shadow over the reception of Nono's Variazioni; Hans
Werner Henze, whose Second Symphony (1949) was played in the same concert, wrote later that the Variazioni hit their first audience "hard (so hard that
they whistled as if in pain... ),.22
Nono might not have had a popular success but he had achieved the succ~s de scandale on which many subsequent Darmstadt reputations have
been launched and the following year he returned with another new instrumental work, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica for six instruments and percussion, again premiered by members of the Landestheater Orchestra under
Scherchen. In the fourth volume of Die Reihe, "Young Composers', Udo Unger made a detailed analysis of Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica 23in which he devotes particular attention to the interlocking development of rhythmic and
pitch cells at the very start of the work. In his essay on the instrumental
works of the 50s in Restagno's book, Gianmario Borio also concentrates on
this opening section24but neither Borio nor Unger is prepared to nail twelve
notes to his analytical mast and name a definitive serial source for the work.
However, measures 8 and 9, the first continuous sequence of pitches in the
piece, do constitute a statement of all the intervals (or their inversions) up
to the tritone (see figure 3), a prototype version of the all-interval sets which
became central to Nono's serial thinking in subsequent works.
r2"m
".
FI,4r
'
~a~
eJ a r l f ~ t ~
~orn
l | l m ~
"
z.
;~,--
','
o4
Figure 3 Nono, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica, nun 8-9

reproduced by kind permission of Schott Music Publishers, London.
Two aspects of Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica are worthy of further note. The

first is the boldness of its formal planning: the work is, exactly as its title
suggests, in three sections, the first a polyphonic development in which

short motives gradually coalesce into longer figures, the second a monody
orchestrated wie einer Klangfarbenmelodie, the third a study in changing
rhythmic densities for the percussion instruments (with a handful of piano
chords too). The second is the way in which the music gradually expands its
frame of reference. The constitution of the ensemble for Polifonica-MonodiaRitmica (flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, horn, piano and percussion - - the latter consisting only of suspended cymbals and various
drums, apart from seven measures for xylophone in Ritmica) is closer to
that of a dance band than to any classical music model and, despite its Webernesque opening and atonal pitch organisation, the music's heart is revealed to be a Brazilian rhythm (see figure 4a) from a song to the sea
goddess, Jemanja2s. This figure, announced in measures 59 to 62, provides
a rhythmic Urgestalt throughout the second, Allegro, section of Polifonica
(see figure 4b) and is then subjected to a sort of deconstruction in Monodia
and Ritmica (see figure 4c).
The musicof the Darmstadt School is often anathematised as ahistoric,
divorced from the currency of musical experience. That may be true of
works like Boulez's Structures I but Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica demonstrates that 'Darmstadt' was also capable of assimilating many different
facets of musical language and regenerating them in new and exciting
ways. I would argue, however, that while both the Variazioni canoniche and
Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica confront the central problem of serial composition after Webern-- how can the series have an explicit role in the music's
formation of meanings if it is not to have a thematic function?-- they fail to
resolve it. Both these works, and others of the period 1950-55, sidestep the
problem by projecting other musical ideas, other ways of musical forming,
onto serially-derived pitch material.
In Il canto sospeso, however, the problem is solved by the choice of a series
whose interval structure can be both a neutral pitch-source and an integral
part of the music's expressive imagery. Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica had begun to explore the implications of all-interval sets and in Incontri (1955) and
the works which follow, Nono made repeated use of the series which
presents all the intervals within the octave in expanding order, the so-called
'wedge' series (see figure 5). As in the Variazioni and Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica, Nono only gradually reveals his sources, but when he finally does so
in the fourth movement of Il canto sospeso it is in the most audacious way imaginable. The fourth movement, for orchestra only, simply introduces the
notes of the series one by one, until all twelve are present, and then removes
them one by one. All are in the same register so the effect is of a progressively widening chromatic cluster, a wedge driven into the heart of the work.
This pitch wedge is then reinforced by equivalent formations in dynamics
and attack densities - - the music gets louder and attacks come closer
120 ChristopherFox
Figure 4a Nono, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica, 'Jemanja' rhythm
,a
r
FI,
! 9 , - ~
I:
1o
_.@-
~---fz
mLO
~./aU'.O O ~
I"
v
~.
. . . .
g~,~....-
~ .
-. . . . .
"
.p ,~,am'1
l~'aao
Figure 4b Nono, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica, m m 59--68,pp. 8-9

,.,.,
..
J.--~'~'w.
Figure 4c Nono, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica, m m 15-18, p. 19

#'
together-- before they subside and pitches are replaced by silence (see figure 6), a metaphor for the deaths described in the texts of//canto sospeso and
for the end of music, 'the song broken off' of the work's title.
Figure 5
Nono, II canto sospeso: series
9b
cat D
Eb
mp
Figure 6
80
c.
e~ D
Eb
"p
Nono, // canto sospeso, W: w e d g e formations
If the listener is in any doubt as to the meaning of this movement then the
words of the solo tenor in the following movement must surely make it
clear:
"se il cielo fosso carta e tutti i mari de m o n d o inchiostro n o n potrei descrivervi le mie sofferenze e tutto cio che r e d o intorno a me"
('If the sky were paper, and all the seas of the world were ink, I could not describe m y suffering
and all that I see a r o u n d me.")
Nowhere in serial music is the intervallic formation of the series itself used
so tellingly.
In the first part of the bipartite sixth movement the wedge image recurs
in a more halting form, cut short in the voices and fragmented in the orchestra. As figure 7 shows, the voices present the first 10 notes of the retrograde
of the series but with the intervals inverted; the orchestra has the principal
form of the series until the tritone between order numbers 6 and 7 is
reached; this is succeeded by the tritone between the first and last notes of
the series. As the choir progressively increases the number of its pitches,
from one to four, the orchestra reduces its pitch collection from four to one.
This formal division echoes the division of the text, whose four sentences
are each set to just one of these four pitch coUections.
Just as the Variazioni canoniche and Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica had drawn
some of their expressive power from their evocation of existing musical
models, so too II canto sospeso is located within a particular musical tzadi-
122 Christopher Fox
$28
OrcheStra
""~"
~O
$~
ra
sso, . _ ~
Figure 7
~S2
lss
--
sss
Pitch collections in Il canto sospeso, Via
tion, specifically that of Baroque sacred music. In two of the vocal works
which preceded Il canto sospeso, the Epitaffio Nos. 1 and 3 on texts by Lorca
and the t~luard setting, La victoire de Guernica, Nono had made extensive use
of spoken delivery both for soloists and chorus, using the same notational
conventions as Sch6nberg had adopted for sprechstimme in Moses und Aron,
A Survivor from Warsaw and the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte. While spoken
texts are often easier to understand than sung texts, sprechstimme is nevertheless an almost exclusively Modernist device and therefore has no place
in Il canto sospeso.
Like a Baroque cantata or mass setting, Il canto sospeso alternates instrumental, choral and solo movements and the outline description of the work
below proposes a number of ways in which it alludes to Baroque and classical liturgical forms.
I
II
Orchestra
Chorus (unaccompanied)
Liturgical cantata or Passion setting: CHORALE
Mass setting: CREDO (the text can be read as a statement of belief:
"Muoio per la giustizia. Le nostre idee vinceranno...' (I am dying for
justice. Our ideas will triumph.)26)
III Soprano, contralto, tenor soli and orchestra
Liturgical cantata: ARIA (although there are three voices the vocal
line is always divided between them with one voice leading and the
others shadowing it)
IV Orchestra
V
Tenor solo and orchestra
Liturgical cantata: ARIA
Via Chorus and orchestra
Requiem Mass setting: DIES IRAE/TUBA MIRUM (the text is 'le
porte s'aprono. Eccoli i nostri asassini.' (The doors open. Here are our
murderers.); the music is dominated by loud brass)
Passion setting: TURBA chorus
VIb Chorus and orchestra
Requiem Mass setting: LACRIMOSA'
VII Soprano solo, chorus (women's voices only) and orchestra

Mass setting: BENEDICTUS (the text is 'addio mamma, tua figlia
Liubka se ne va nell' umida terra' (Goodbye mother, your daughter,
Liubka, is going into the moist earth)
VIII Orchestra
IX Choir and timpani
Liturgical cantata: CHORALE Mass setting: AGNUS DEI
The conventional demonology of post-war music history remembers only
Boulez's castigation of neo-classical Stravinsky and Sch6nberg; Nono was
no more a supporter of neo-classicist composition than other members of
the 1950s avant-garde, as the interview with him in Enzo Restagno's book
makes clear27.Recently Gianmario Borio has suggested that, while 'Boulez,
Stockhausen, Nono and Maderna baulked.., at parody, imitation and quotation and all other forms of revival of the past, serial composition.., was
driven by notions such as purity, order and objectivity which were part and
parcel with neoclassicist aesthetics'.28 To this I would add that Nono understood that the 'order' of serialism could also be a powerful expressive tool,
particularly when used within musical forms of which audiences already
have subjective knowledge - - Nono was no neo-classicist but Il canto sospeso is, in the broadest sense, a neo-classical work.
The texts for Il canto sospeso were drawn from a collection, published in
1954, of letters written by people condemned to death for their resistance to
Nazism and Fascism and are profoundly moving in their own right, varying in emotional intensity from extraordinary courage, to despair, to sorrow, to hope. Much has been written about Nono's treatment of these texts
in the work as a whole and in the densely polyphonic choral movements, II
and IX, in particular, with much of the debate centring on the issue of the
comprehensibility of the texts in Nono's settings (see figure 8).
Undoubtedly Nono, like Stockhausen, had been influenced by the ideas on
information theory introduced into the Darmstadt courses by Professor
Werner Meyer-Eppler who gave courses there in 1950, 1951 and 1953. In
Darmstadt in 1958 Stockhausen gave a lecture entitled'Sprache und Musik "29
in which he discussed recent music involving voices, analysing sections of
Boulez's Le marteau sans maftre, Nono's Il canto sospeso and his o w n Gesang
derJiinglinge. He suggested that the fragmentation of the text into individual phonemes in the choral movements of Il canto sospeso extended serial
practice into the setting of texts by separating the sonic components of
speech from their function as the carriers of semantic meaning. He also
questioned the nature of a listener's understanding of these movements: if
they could not hear the words how significant was the choice of text?
By the time Nono came to reply to Stockhausen, in his last Darmstadt lecture, 'Text - - Musik - - Gesang', delivered in 1960, the Darmstadt School
124
Christopher Fox
oc'o~|.
Coro
!:
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._
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Figure 8 Nono, // cantosospeso,IX,p. 86

reproducedby kind permissionof SchottMusic Publishers,London.
was no more. Nono's increasing frustration with the tendency for the
explanation of techniques always to take precedence over thinking about
content was already evident when, at the end of 'Die Entwicklung der
Reihentechnik', he laments that the 'narrow' concentration on technical
issues had meant that discussion of aesthetics had been ignored. 3~
und Musik', which also emphasised technique at the expense of meaning,
must have appeared to Nono as another symptom of the same reluctance to
shift debate from the 'how' to the 'why' of the new music. John Cage's sensational debut in the 1958 courses and the wave of pale European imitations
it spawned had also contributed to Nono's disillusionment with the "Darmstadt' project. He regarded Cage's supposed freeing of sounds as 'spiritual
suicide '31 and said as much in 'Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik
heute', the devastating critique of Cage presented during the 1959 courses.
Since Boulez, Stockhausen and Maderna had all incorporated elements of
chance (variously dressed up as 'aleatory" composition, performer choice
and "open" form) in their newest pieces, Nono's attack on Cage could only
be understood as an attack on them too.
"Text m Musik m Gesang' must be understood in the context of this
breakdown in the avant-garde fraternity. Nono concentrates on the most
antipathetic section of Stockhausen's analysis, ignoring Stockhausen's
obvious admiration of the music, and summarily dismisses it with perhaps
rather more invective than reason. This closing rebuff to his former
colleague and friend comes at the end of a lengthy historical account of the
inter-relationship of text and music, in which a discussion of the Finale
from Beethoven 9th Symphony and the use of Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme in Sch6nberg leads to analysis of Nono's own La terra e la compagna
and II canto sospeso alongside polyphonic works by J.S. Bach (the Kyrie and
Gratias agimus from the B Minor Mass), Mozart (the Requiem), Giovanni
Gabrieli (the motet O magnum mysterium) and Gesualdo (I1 sol, qual or p~u
splende from Book IV of the collected five voice madrigals). Nono justifies
his approach to the texts of II canto sospeso by comparison with these earlier
works. Thus Mozart's overlaying of different phrases from the Requiem
text is cited as a precedent for the interleaving of three different sentences
in the third movement ofll canto sospeso (figure 8 reproduces Nono's examples); the result, he argues, is an 'intensification' of the original texts since it
draws three separate experiences into a shared expression and at the same
time creates new 'symbiotic" meanings.
More recently, Ivanka Stoianova has continued the discussion with a fascinating analysis of the different types of text-setting in II canto sospeso in
which she has shown that there is a continuum of comprehensibility in the
text-setting ranging from the 'voice-text unison' of the fifth movement,
where the text is set syllable by syllable to a single vocal line, to the "delinearisation of text" in the third movement and the 'simultaneous superimposition' of many voices and different parts of the text in the second and ninth
movements. 32
In the end, 'Text ~ Musik - - Gesang" leaves the reader with a sense of
Nono's frustration at Stockhausen's failure to understand the work's true
significance, that, as Nono says, the expressive purpose of the work is 'to
give voice to the legacy of these letters'. 33Il canto sospeso is a public musical
memorial to the millions who died under Fascism and, as I have attempted
ChristopherFox
126
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Figure 9a Mozart, Requiem with Nono's annotations
Sopran
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Tenor
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o
o
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a
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insieme ad altri sette

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patriota
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Figure 9b Textual interleaving in II canto sospeso, M

to d e m o n s t r a t e , it is d e a r l y c o u c h e d i n h i s t o r i c a l l y - r o o t e d f o r m s of p u b l i c
m u s i c a l e x p r e s s i o n . W h e r e Le marteau sans maftre a n d Gesang der Jfinglinge
a r e e s s e n t i a l l y p r i v a t e w o r k s (as R o b i n M a c o n i e o b s e r v e d , t h e ' y o u t h s ' i n
FormandMeaningin EarlyNono 127
Stockhausen's fiery furnace are represented b y just one voice!34), Il canto

sospeso engages directly w i t h the subject of the mid-20th century; to discuss
such a w o r k only in t e r m s of technical innovation a n d textual c o m p r e h e n sibility belittled the scale of N o n o ' s achievement. Furthermore, in the
w o r l d into w h i c h II canto sospeso w a s projected, continental E u r o p e in 1956,
it w a s surely u n n e c e s s a r y for e v e r y w o r d of the text to be heard. N o n o ' s
texts are not s o m e Brechtian Lehrstfick, in w h i c h e v e r y line includes s o m e
vital ideological nuance, b u t a litany of suffering to w h i c h m o s t m e m b e r s of
the audience w o u l d h a v e b e e n able to a d d verses of their own.
The w o r k s that followed Il canto sospeso m i g h t equal its expressive
a c h i e v e m e n t b u t n o n e w o u l d surpass it. With Intolleranza N o n o ' s w o r k
b e g a n to m a k e a uniquely i m m e d i a t e use of the possibilities of the tape
m u s i c studio (closer to cinema veritd t h a n to musique concrete), possibilities
that he w o u l d continue to explore until they too were s u p e r s e d e d b y the rich
a n d m y s t e r i o u s s o u n d - w o r l d s accessible t h r o u g h the live electronics of
Freiburg. But, while these later w o r k s m a y exceed in length a n d formal
complexity a n y t h i n g f r o m the first decade of N o n o ' s career, the early w o r k s
can still s p e a k to us; as M a d e r n a said, ' L o o k at the first things he
w r o t e , . . t h e y are of a terrifying brilliance, so precise, so cJear'. 35
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to the staff of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt for the generousity with which they have made the Institute's archives available to me.
Notes
1. The collegialityof the 'School' had already been tested in 1958 when Boulez temporarily
allied himself with the Donaueschingen Festival, withdrawing at a late stage from that
year's Darmstadt courses to allow himself more time to complete work on his Donaueschingen commission Poesiepour Pouvoir. The replacement Boulez nominated for Darmstadt was John Cage.
2. 'Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik heute' appears in a number of collections. It
was first published in a slightly condensed form in the Darmstiidter Beitriige zur neuen
Musik (Vol. 3) 0Vlainz, 1960); Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik (1975), edited by
J/irg Stenzl, includes a complete transcription by Helmut Lachenmann of the lecture. An
English translation appeared in The Score,No. 27 (1960), p. 41. Nono's original Italian text,
entitled 'Presenza storica neUamusica d'oggi" appears in Nono (1987), edited by Enzo Resta~'lo.
3. Wolfgang Steinecke,the then Director of the Darmstadt courses, was so distressed by this
internecine strife between the young composers who Darmstadt had so carefully nurtured that he actively sought a 'father-figure' to take over the direction of the course and
tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade first Messiaen and then Varbse to take on such a role.
Steinecke's untimely death in a car accident in 1961 brought this phase of Darmstadt's
history to a close.
4. Quoted in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Europe in Ruins', Granta33: "Whatwent Wrong?"
(London, 1990) p. 120.
128 ChristopherFox
5. For a fuller account of the Darmstadt Courses' history see Antonio Trudu, La "Scuola' di
Darmstadt (Milan, 1992).
6. But so too is Nono performance: a striking feature of the 1995 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which gave British audiences their first opportunity to hear works
from across the Nono canon, was that most performances were by continental European
artists; those British performers-- Ensemble Exposd, Roger Heaton, the Arditti Quartet,
Barrie W e b b - - who did give Nono performances are all artists whose careers have flourished abroad rather than at home.
7. Jurg Stenzl (ed.), Luigi Nono. Texte -- Studien zu seiner Musik, (Zurich, 1975).
8. Heinz-Klaus Metzger und Rainer Riehn (eds.), Musik-Konzepte 20: Luigi Nono (Munich,
1981).
9. Enzo Restagno (ed.), Nono, (Edizioni di Torino, Turin, 1987).
10. For example, Stenzl's essay on Nono's music-theatre works appears in both MusikKonzepte ('Azione scenica und Literaturoper', pp. 45-57) and Restagno ('Drammaturgia
Musicale', pp. 169-184).
11. Helmut Lachenmann, "Luigi Nono oder der Rfickblick auf die serielle Musik' in Stenzl,
op cit., pp. 313-324.
12. Nicolaus A Huber, 'Luigi Nono: I1 canto sospeso Via, b', Musik- Konzepte 20: Luigi Nono,
pp. 58-79.
13. See my 'Verbfindet mit den progressivisten Elementen. Britische Musik bei den
Ferienkurse' in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, ed. Fox, Knessl, Stephan, Tomek, Trapp
(Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 529-535, for an extended account of the history of British music in
the Darmstadt courses.
14. See Restagno, op a't., pp. 11-13, for a fuller account of Nono's studies with Maderna.
15. ibid., p. 12.
16. Friedrich Hommel, former Director of the Internationales Musik institut Darmstadt, in
an interview with the author, broadcast in 'Music after Zero Hour', BBC Radio 3, June 16
1995.
17. The Darmstadt concert programme in the summer of 1950, for example, offered the complete string quartets of Bartok and the Berg Chamber Concerto, alongside a number of
works by composers like Searle, Racine Fricker, Fortner and Krenek which sat in various
positions on the fence between neo-classical and atonal composition.
18. Darmstfidter Beitriige zur neuen Musik (Vol. 1) (Mainz, 1958), pp. 25-37; the essay is also
printed in Stenzl, op cit., pp. 21-33.
19. Stenzl, Op cit., pp. 26-30.
20. Gianmario Borio, 'Nono a Darmstadt. Le opere strumentali degli anni Cinquanta', in
Restagno, op c/t., p. 81.
21. Paul Griffiths, on p. 47 of his Modern Music, the avant garde since 1945 (London, 1981),
identifies A Survivor from Warsaw as the source of the series for Nono's Variazioni, although the revised version of the book, published as Modern Music and after (London,
1995), corrects this mistake.
22. Hans Werner Henze, 'Hinweis auf Luigi Nono' in Stenzl, op cit., p. 326.
23. Udo Unger, 'Luigi Nono', in die Reihe Vol. 4 (Vienna, 1958), pp. 5-12.
24. Borio, in Restagno, op c/t., pp. 83-5.
25. In the interview with Restagno Nono explains how he was introduced to Brazilian folk music by the Brazilian pianist and composer, Eunice Catunda (see Restagno, op cir., p. 22-3).
26. The description of II canto sospeso in terms of the Mass is largely drawn from Massimo
Mila's 1960 essay, 'Nonos Weg - - zum 'Canto sospeso', in Stenzl, 0p cit. pp. 380-393; he
describes the work as a 'Freedom Mass', p. 384.
27. See Restagno, op cit., pp. 28-9 where Nono discusses Stravinsky.
28. Gianmario Borio, 'Avantgarde and classicism: An Antithesis?' in Canto d'Amore, ed.
Boehm, Mosch, Schmidt (Basle, 1996), p. 371.
29. 'Sprache und Musik' was published in the first volume of the Darmst~ter Beitr~'gezur
neuen Musik, pp. 57-81 and in die Reihe, Vol. 6 'Music and Speech' (1958),pp. 40--64(in the
1964 English translation).
30. Nono, 'Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik', in Stenzl, op cit., p. 33.
31. Nono, 'Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik yon heute', in Stenzl, op cit., p. 40.
32. Ivanka Stoianova, 'Testo-musica-senso. 'I1 canto sospeso", in Restagno, op cit., pp. 128135.
33. Nono, 'Text-- Musik-- Gesang', in Stenzl, op cit., p. 60.
34. Robin Maconie, The Works ofKarlheinz Stockhausen (London, 1976), p. 96.
35. Raymond Fearn, Bruno Maderna (London, 1990), p. 319.
References
Borio, G. (1987) Nono a Darmstadt. Le opere strumentali degli anni Cinquanta. In
Nono, edited by E. Restagno, pp. 81 & 83--85. Turin: Edizioni di Torino.
Borio, G. (1996) Avant-garde and classicism: An Antithesis? In Canto d'Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914--35, edited by G. Boehm, U. Mosch &
K. Schmidt, p. 371. Basle: Kunstmuseum Basel.
Enzensberger, H.M. (1990) Europe in Ruins. Granta 33: "What went Wrong?, p. 120.
London: Granta.
Fox, C. (1996) In Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, edited by R. Stephan, L. Knessl,
O. Tomek, K. Trapp, C. Fox, pp. 529-535. Stuttgart: Daco Verlag.
Fearn, R. (1990) Bruno Maderna, p. 319. London: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Griffiths, P. (1981) Modern Music, the avant garde since 1945, p. 47. London: J.M. Dent
& Sons.
Henze, H.W. Hinweis auf Luigi Nono. In Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik,
edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 326. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag.
Huber, N.A. (1981) Luigi Nono: I1 canto sospeso Via, b. In Musik-Konzepte 20: Luigi
Nono, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, pp. 58-79. Munich: edition text + kritik.
Lachenmann, H. (1971) Luigi Nono oder der Mickblick auf die serielle Musik. In
Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik, edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 313--324. Zurich:
Atlantis Verlag.
Maconie, R. (1976) The Works ofKarlheinz Stockhausen, p. 96. London: Oxford University Press.
IvIfla, M. (1960) Nonos Weg n zum 'Canto sospeso'. In Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu
seiner Musik, edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 380-393. Zurich: Atlantis Veflag.
Nono, L. (1960) Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik. In Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu
seiner Musik, edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 21-33. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag.
Nono, L. (1960) Geschichte und Gegenwart. In Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner
Musik, edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 34-40. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag.
Nono, L. (1960) Text-Musik-Gesang. In Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik,
edited by J. Stenzl, pp. 41--60. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag.
130 ChristopherFox
Restagno, E. (1987) La Vita. In Nono, edited by E. Restagno, pp. 11-13, 22-23 & 2829. Turin: Edizioni di Torino.
Stockhausen, K. (1958) Sprache und Musik. Darmstiidter Beitr~'ge zur neuen Musik,
pp. 57-81. Mainz: Schott.
Stockhausen, K. (1964) Music and Speech, In die Reihe, Vol. 6: 'Speech and Music',
edited by H. Eimert & K. Stockhausen, pp. 40-64. Permsylvania: Universal Edition.
Stoianova, I. (1987) Testo-musica-senso. ']1 canto sospeso'. In Nono, edited by E. Restagno, pp. 128-135. Turin: Edizioni di Torino.
Spies, M. (1984) Luigi Nono: La Terra e la campagna. Melos 3/1984, 19-67.
Trudu, A. (1992) La "Scuola' di Darmstadt. Milan: Ricordi.
Unger, U. (1958) Luigi Nono. In D/e Reihe, Vol. 4: 'Young Composers', edited by
H. Eimert and K. Stockhausen, pp. 5--12 Vienna (Pennsylvania, 1960): Universal
Edition.

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1999, Vol. 18, Part 2, pp. 111-130

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