Music & Letters, Vol. 94 No. 4, ß The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1093/ml/gct111, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

Review-Article

THE POLITICS OF THE NEW MUSIC

BY BEN EARLE*

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LUIGI NONO’S TIME HAS COME. There are CDs and documentaries, andçin Germanyç
even performances of his music. Remarkably, given the uncompromising radicalism of
both its score and its politics, the ‘azione scenica’ Intolleranza 1960 (Venice, 1961) seems
well on the way to achieving repertory status in German opera houses. Nono is also
the focus of a medium-sized academic industry whose most prestigious results to date
are the critical editions of selected compositions (more are on their way) in which both
of his publishers, Schott (in Mainz) and Ricordi (in Milan), have seen fit to invest.1
Academic work on Nono shows a marked philologicalçone might say ‘positivistic’ç
bent. Of the four volumes so far issued under the auspices of the Archivio Luigi Nono
in Venice, twoçincluding the one presently under reviewçare editions of his letters.
In addition, Nono’s correspondence with the critic Massimo Mila has been published,
as well as a door-stopping two-volume collection of his prose and interviews.2
Scholars of his music, meanwhile, have taken advantage of the availability of Nono’s
sketches in the archive (run by his widow Nuria Schoenberg Nono on the Giudecca) to
produce painstaking explorations of the various numerical and other pre-compositional
schemes that played such an important role in his creative process. There is a growing
sketch-based analytical literature in Italian and Germançand (this is a recent develop-
ment) in English too. If there is currently no monograph in English on Nono, it will
surely not be long in coming.
But what is the significance of all this activity? With respect to Nono’s two principal
commitmentsçon the one hand to the new music, on the other to the politics of the revo-
lutionary left (for him the two were inseparable)çsuch an emphasis on philology, or on
matters of abstract formal construction, can only suggest that if Nono’s time has indeed
come, it is because the causes he believed in so passionately are now lost, or considered

*Ben Earle, University of Birmingham. Email: b.n.earle@bham.ac.uk.

1
So far published are editions of Il canto sospeso (London: Eulenburg, 1995), A floresta e¤ jovem e cheja de vida, ed.
Maurizio Pisati and Veniero Rizzardi (Milan: Ricordi, 1998), Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco n. 2, ed. Andre¤
Richard and Marco Mazzolini (Milan: Ricordi, 1999), and La fabbrica illuminata, ed. Luca Cossettini (Milan:
Ricordi, 2010). Available online at 5www.schott-musik.com4 (accessed 12 Aug. 2013) are editions of the original
version of Polifonicaçmonodiaçritmica, ed. Veniero Rizzardi, and of Intolleranza 1960, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis.
A print version of the latter is advertised as in preparation.
2
See Luigi Nono, Carteggi concernenti politica, cultura e Partito Comunista Italiano, ed. Antonio Trudu (Florence, 2008);
Massimo Mila and Luigi Nono, Nulla di oscuro tra noi: Lettere 1952^1988, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero
Rizzardi (Milan, 2010); and Luigi Nono, Scritti e colloqui, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, 2 vols.
(Milan and Lucca, 2001).

664
entirely harmless. The incipient repertory status of Intolleranza 1960 already suggests as
much. Calls for a revolution in musical language or for the overthrow of the bourgeois
state were never intended to be treated dispassionately. The present volume of corres-
pondence between Nono and his pupil Helmut Lachenmann (rounded out by a series of
texts by Lachenmann relating to Nono and his music) positively draws attention to its
scholarliness.3 Different colours, fonts, or typefaces are employed depending on whether
words were originally typed or written (or written in different colours, in which case an
orgy of pernicketiness is unleashed (p. 158)); the number of underlinings of specific
words is faithfully noted when it cannot be reproduced (p. 60); more importantly (and
somewhat perversely), while the introduction and critical apparatus are in Italian, the
original language used by the correspondents is always preserved, which is mostly
Germançor Nono’s idiosyncratic version of that language, whose grammatical and
other inaccuracies are generally left uncorrected. Lachenmann rarely writes in Italian

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after the early 1960s, while Nono seldom writes in Italian at all. Given that a German-
only edition of this same correspondence has since appeared,4 one imagines Italian
readers may feel at something of a disadvantage.
The text does Nono’s posthumous reputation a greater disservice (beyond this
evidence of academic embalming) in the way that, alongside plentiful evidence of his
kindness and generosity towards a struggling young composer, it shows the Italian
acting on occasion in a remarkably unpleasant manner, and also supplies gossipy
material of a kind that, in its obvious attractiveness to commentators, will serve only to
obscure the historical significance of his achievement. As Nono’s disciple in the late
1950s and early 1960s (his ‘slave of honour’, as the critic Mario Bortolotto put it (pp. 53,
70)), Lachenmann found himself thoroughly embroiled in various composers’ squabbles.
Nono expresses the standard disdain for Henze (p. 65), while Stravinsky’s Agon is fit
only for snobs (p. 10), but his principal bugbear is the new ‘Bismarck’ Stockhausen and
his hangers-on (whom he calls the ‘Koelner Clan’: this includes the ‘empty’ Henri
Pousseur (pp. 54^5)). Lachenmann appears to have relished a parti pris stance in
relation to these figures. Reporting to Nono in late 1963 on a composition course he
had just attended in Cologne, he describes Stockhausen treating him as if ‘he were a
kind of ‘‘spy’’ of Nono’s’ (p. 112). Nono was not amused. The Italian rounded on his
pupil, telling him not to be so stupid, and reprimanded him too for taking Pousseur’s
harmonic theories seriously. ‘Are you [a] new Hindemith? . . . Are you washed up
already?’ (p. 114). Yet Lachenmann remained loyal to his master. In papers read before
German audiences during the 1960s, he assures listeners that Stockhausen is a mere
‘Musikant’ (a derogatory term implying a dilettante characterçsee pp. 225^8), and
Boulez a purveyor of tinkling inanities to delight the bourgeoisie (pp. 223^4, 245^6 ).
Only Nono composes a music that is truly avant-garde: one that awakens spirit (Geist)
to a consciousness of the needs of the historical moment (pp. 221, 222).
Lachenmann’s role in the Nono story centres on the years either side of 1960, when
he studied with him privately in Venice for two six-month periods on a German
grant, prepared the rehearsal score of Intolleranza 1960, and made German versions of
the two papers with which Nono manoeuvred himself into the position of Darmstadt

3
Alla ricerca di luce e chiarezza: L’epistolario Helmut Lachenmann^Luigi Nono (1957^1990). Ed. by Angela Ida De
Benedictis and Ulrich Mosch. pp. 298. Archivio Luigi Nono Studi IV. (Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 2012. E35. ISBN
978-88-222-6181-6.)
4
See Rainer Nonnenmann, Der Gang durch die Klippen: Helmut Lachenmanns Begegnungen mit Luigi Nono anhand ihres
Briefwechsels und anderer Quellen 1957^1990 (Wiesbaden, 2013).

665
apostasy, ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute’ (1959) and ‘Textç
MusikçGesang’ (1960). The first of these is one of Nono’s most sustained expressions
of his aesthetico-political beliefs. Republished by Lachenmann under the rubric ‘In
Nonos Namen’, in a collection of his own essays,5 its paternity has been called into
question. The editors of the present volume triumphantly publish Nono’s first Italian
draft in order to squash such scurrility (pp. xiv^xv, 44^7). Transcription of these manu-
script pages in fact proves only that Nono was the originator of the material presented
at the beginning and very end of ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’.6 It remains possible
that much of the rest was indeed primarily the work of Lachenmann. But again, we
risk here being dragged down to the level of new music squabbles. More pressing is
the need to consider the content of this document. Even a sharply critical assessment
is surely preferable to attempts at scholarly point-scoring.
Much is always made of Nono’s communism: he joined the Partito Communista

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Italiano (PCI) in 1952 and from 1975 sat on its central committee. Yet what Nono/
Lachenmann’s text teaches usçthis may come as a surprise to some commentators on
the composerçis that communism and Marxism are by no means necessarily one
and the same. By the measure of any Marxism worth its salt, ‘Geschichte und
Gegenwart in der Musik von heute’ is a text at once idealistic and mystificatory.
Nono’s early idealism is part-and-parcel of the intellectual tradition in which his
thought is rooted. As Perry Anderson has explained, the widespread allegiance
garnered by the PCI among Italian intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s can be traced
to the party’s accommodation to the thought of the Neapolitan philosopher, historian,
and literary critic Benedetto Croce.7 Nono’s denigration of l’art pour l’art and the absolut-
ization of the ego that accompanies it in favour of work that ‘intervenes consciously
and decisively in the process of liberalization [sicç later versions correct this to ‘liber-
ation’] taking place in society’ (p. 45) may have a certain existentialist, Sartrean ring
about it. Sartrean overtones become particularly strong when Nono/Lachenmann
speaks of historical ‘responsibility’.8 Yet Nono’s principal thesis, that art equates to
freedomçit being understood that man is free only when he acts on the basis of a con-
sciousness of historical developmentçfits happily within the terms of Croce’s idealist
historicism.9 Neither Nono nor Croce pays attention to the manner in which individual
consciousness (‘freedom’) is constitutively shaped by socio-economic forces outside its
control. What could be more ideologicalçmore ‘bourgeois’çthan to imagine that
marks on manuscript paper might contribute materially to the progress of working-
class liberation? From a Sartrean perspective, what is lacking in ‘Geschichte und
Gegenwart’ is any consideration of the class composition of the audience implied by
the employment of such highly developed musical means as (for instance) integral seri-
alism.10 For a declaration by an avowed communist (insofar as Nono was indeed its

5
See Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, ed. Josef Ha«usler (2nd edn., Wiesbaden, 1996 ), 311^16.
6
The first two pages of Nono’s draft can be viewed in facsimile in Nono, Scritti e colloqui, i. 55^6.
7
See Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London and New York, 2009), 327^8.
8
See Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 313; and compare Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (London and New York, 2001), 15; the latter was originally published as ‘Que’est-ce que la litte¤rature’, in
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, II (Paris, 1948), 55^330.
9
The key text for the latter is Benedetto Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari, 1938), available in English
as History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia Sprigge (London, 1941). The best account in English of Croce’s intellectual
development is David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1987).
10
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (London, 1965), 208^10; the original text here is Jean-Paul
Sartre, ‘Pre¤face’ in Rene¤ Leibowitz, L’Artiste et sa conscience: Esquisse d’une dialectique de la conscience artistique (Paris,
1950), 9^38.

666
author), it is striking that ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’ should confine its most pointedly
political comments to an observation of the role played by certain ancient Chinese
texts (championed by John Cage) in propping up a long-extinct imperial hierarchy.11
All is not quite as it seems. In the Italian version of the same text, ‘Presenza storica
nella musica d’oggi’,12 Nono smuggles in a genuinely political angle. Having noted the
separation of spirit and material in the work of recent composers (especially Cage
and his followers), whereby spirit takes a passive role and the material is attributed ‘ex-
pressive possibilities in itself ’, Nono observesçthe clause is missing in the German
text given by Lachenmannçthat such ‘dualism [is] typical of a social conception now
on the wane’. We rejoin the text of ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’ with the declaration
that what is required instead of a dualism of spirit and material is a reciprocal inter-
penetration of these two dialectical poles.13 It is tempting to link this argument with
the suggestion (found at the end of Nono’s original draft, but absent from both

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‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’ and ‘Presenza storica’) that the goal of genuine human
action is the establishment of ‘new human capacities-demands [sic] on new founda-
tions’ (p. 46 ). Would the composition of a new music involving reciprocal interpenetra-
tion of spirit and material somehow correspond to the establishment of socialism? The
mind boggles. One writer of the period who would have remained unimpressed by
speculation of this sort was Georg Luka¤cs. It is in the latter’s theory of reification,
dating from the 1920s, that we find the demonstration (on which Nono’s comments
about dualism depend) that the bourgeoisie has an essentially ‘contemplative’ attitude
to historical reality.14 More recently, Luka¤cs had seized upon Theodor W. Adorno’s no-
torious 1955 essay ‘Das Altern der neuen Musik’ to suggest that the loss of angst noted
by the latter in the products of the Darmstadt School (directly related to the spiritual
weakness diagnosed by Nono/Lachenmann) amounted to ‘an admission of defeat’ by
the Western powers in the Cold War. For Luka¤cs, what should succeed this no longer
authentic strain of modernism was not its dialectical reinvigoration, which from
Luka¤cs’s perspective would have connoted a reinvigorated bourgeoisie, but rather a
‘critical realism’: in musical terms, this presumably would have meant symphonies on
the model of Shostakovich.15
The name conventionally associated with Nono’s thought is that of the Italian com-
munist leader and Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. As Anderson explains,
Gramsci’s celebrated notion of ‘hegemony’ was interpreted in an idealizing manner
by the PCI to justify a programme whereby the party would work for a cultural and
moral ascendency in Italian society. Once this was achieved, it was assumed,
state power would pass peacefully into the PCI’s hands.16 Nono evidently regarded his

11
See Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 312.
12
This is the title given to the piece for its appearance in the journal La rassegna musicale, 30/1 (1960), 96^103. The
work of translating Lachenmann’s German into Italian was done not by Nono himself but by his compositional
colleague and friend Giacomo Manzoni. See Mila and Nono, Nulla di oscura tra noi, 23.
13
Compare Nono, Scritti e colloqui, i. 50 with Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 314.
14
See Georg Luka¤cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London,
1971), 128^30; originally published as Geschichte und Klassenbewutsein: Studien u«ber marxistische Dialektik (Berlin, 1923).
15
See Georg Luka¤cs,The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London,1963), 81; origin-
ally published as Wider den miverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg, 1958). Adorno’s essay first appeared in Der Monat, 80
(1955), 150^8, then in an expanded version in his collection Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Go«ttingen,
1956 ), 136^59.
16
Anderson, The New Old World, 328^9.

667
compositional activity to be at one with working-class aspirations. As becomes clear
from his correspondence with Lachenmann, the Italian set great store by his friend-
ships with the working-class Venetians he encountered in his local trattoria, the ‘Trat-
toria Altanella’ run by the Stradella family (pp. 117^18). But this is where the mystifica-
tion begins. How do we get from class struggle to Darmstadt? Nono/Lachenmann
does not explain why ‘progressive’ historical consciousness in composition (presumably
as exemplified in Nono’s own music) is politically preferable to Cage’s ‘reactionary’ ab-
dication of the ego, except at the implied level of some kind of mere analogy. For what
if both composers’ work was in fact equally irrelevant to the cause of working-class lib-
eration (which would not seem an unreasonable judgement)? The moral here, that it
was best not to enquire too closely into the intellectual foundations of Nono’s political
beliefs, is one that Lachenmann himself discovered to his cost late in 1961, in the most
highly charged exchange of their correspondence.

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Confronted by the younger man over the totalitarianism of the Berlin Wall (its con-
struction began that summer), Nono replied that Lachenmann was ‘too sentimental’.
He should learn not to be so ‘anti-historical’ and remember that the Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands was banned in West Germany, just as it had been under the
Nazis (pp. 85, 86^7). The possibility of a reasoned explication for the East German
state’s abominable treatment of its own citizens need not have been beyond Nono’s in-
tellectual capacities. As Fredric Jameson has noted, the history of ‘counter-
revolutionary strategy’, involving ‘long-term systemic threats which transform demo-
cratic revolutions into states of siege, including ever larger surveillance and police
activity and the classic development of the Terror . . . can be observed at least as far
back as the French Revolution’.17 Lachenmann was surely owed an argument along
such lines. Instead, when he pressed Nono further, he was rewarded with a postcard re-
production of a photograph of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, with soldiers pointing guns
at a child with its hands up, on which the Italian had scribbled ‘Still your heroes?’,
and an arrow pointing to the soldiers (p. 90).
It is noteworthy how, at the end of the 1960s, when Nono’s political activism was at its
most strident, especially in support of Third World struggles against US imperialism,
Lachenmann sought to downplay this side of the Italian’s work. In a 1969 paper,
‘Luigi Nono oder Ru«ckblick auf die serielle Musik’, also available in Musik als
existentielle Erfahrung (pp. 247^57), but given in the present volume in an earlier form
(for a broadcast), Lachenmann lays out arguments of a kind familiar from the work of
Adorno.18 ‘In my opinion’, Lachenmann writes,
a serious critique of Nono’s music should try to defend it from his own ambitions, in which
artistic and political problems today run the risk of reciprocally playing each other down.
The mere setting to music of slogans and ideological programmes can never have a socially
altering effect; the direct way to influence and shake people upçand that is art’s best chance
todayçis via their aesthetic taboos. For thereçquite unconsciously, thereby incorruptiblyç
is precipitated the ideal which in the end legitimates their social behaviour. The idea of art

17
See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and New York, 2009), 398.
18
Compare, for instance, the essay ‘Commitment’, trans. Frances McDonagh, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and
Politics (London, 1977), 177^95; originally published as ‘Zur Dialektik des Engagements’, Die neue Rundschau, 73/1
(1962), 93^110, and then as ‘Engagement’ in Adorno’s collection Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt am Main, 1965),
109^35.

668
and beauty as means to transcendental pleasure is not an accidental ornament of human exist-
ence, rather it is the irrational standard for all individual actionsçeven rational onesç
however questionable they may be, in respect to which, so far as the individual is concerned,
and in the end quite honestly, it is a matter of ‘goodness, truth and beauty’. In order to
confirm this irrational standard to oneself, one enjoys art. When one enjoys art, one enjoys
oneself. If art has a social justification and function today, then it is to communicate and to
reflect new aesthetic realities, and thus if needs be to cut the old ground away from under
the individual, such as to force him to take upon himself that responsibility which he had pre-
viously pushed onto such irrational authorities (pp. 268^9).

Any philosophical explication of the alleged political potency of Nono’s music is prefer-
able to none at all. Yet such a frankly abstract and speculative account was surely of
little use to a mass political movement like the PCI, which in 1976 would poll 34 per
cent in the Italian general election, entering government in a fateful ‘Historic Com-

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promise’ with Christian Democracy. The alliance between late modernism and the
PCI in the 1960s produced an astonishing artistic floweringçabove all in cinemaçto
which Nono made his own remarkable contribution. But this alliance, born of the
pursuit of a supposedly Gramscian consensual hegemony, was also politically cata-
strophic. As ‘a revolutionary of the Third International’, Anderson writes, Gramsci
‘had never thought capital could be broken without force of arms’.19 Meanwhile, the
unrelentingly high cultural tone of artists like Nono resulted in ‘a gap so large between
educated and popular sensibilities that the country was left more or less defenceless
against the counter-revolution of Berlusconi’s television empire’.20
To return to ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’, but more particularly to Lachenmann’s
elaborations of its position, there remains a simple question to be asked. How is it
that purely instrumental works of Nono from the 1950s, such as Incontri (1955), Varianti
(1957), or Composizione per orchestra n. 2: Diario polacco ’58 (1959), can be heard as
‘committed’, whereas music such as Boulez’s Le Marteau sans ma|“ tre (1952^4) or Stock-
hausen’s Gruppen (1955^7) cannot? There is no simple answer. Nono’s ‘committed’
works of the periodçthe first and third of the Tre epitaffi per Federico Garcia Lorca
(1951^3), La victoire de Guernica (1954), Il canto sospeso (1955^6 ), Intolleranza 1960 (1960^1),
and Canti di vita e d’amore. Sul ponte di Hiroshima (1962)çare primarily such on account
of the texts they set. As Lachenmann puts it, a composer of ‘such engaged beliefs’
could never have remained satisfied with purely instrumental composition (p. 247). A
more positive response is possible, yet it creates a significant difficulty. If, as
Lachenmann repeatedly insists (pp. 231^2, 235, 243^4, 248^9, 257), Nono’s music
retains a human expressivity, a pathos, a living inner core that the work of the other
Darmstadt composers lacks (Boulez is ‘bourgeois’, remember, and Stockhausen a ‘dilet-
tante’); if, as we might say, Nono’s music of the 1950s and early 1960s retains an ability
to convey a sense of human suffering appropriate to the texts he sets, then this (as
Lachenmann acknowledges; see pp. 263^4, 267) is on account of the Italian’s retention,
in celebrated passages like the soprano solo in the seventh movement of Il canto sospeso,
of traditional, even ‘tonal’ elements such as a melodic espressivo, redolent of the angst of
a pre-Darmstadt modernism.

19
Anderson, The New Old World, 328.
20
Ibid. 330.

669
 It is this retrospective aspect of Nono’s work, one assumes, that is meant to corres-
pond to notions of ‘historical consciousness’ in composition, or the ‘reciprocal inter-
penetration’ of spirit and material. But Nono’s fidelity to the idiom he had established
by the mid-1950s quickly came into conflict with the strident imperative of the period,
subscribed to by Nono himself, that a composer must always be searching, moving
forward (as exemplified by his comment that the ‘Koelner Clan’ were not innovators,
‘but a typical restoration’, p. 54). Writing at the end of the 1960s, Lachenmann desper-
ately attempts to square this circle by suggesting that Nono, in remaining stylistically
stationary, was in a sense moving forward, since all those around him were moving
backwards (p. 264). At the same time, the task for the composer of Air (1968^9) and
Pression (1969^70) had become explicitly one of going beyond Nono via the elimination
of his ‘tonal remnants’ (p. 269). But how did one ‘go beyond’ the Darmstadt of the
1950s? Henze’s question ‘Where is forward?’ (‘Wo ist vorne?) may have infuriated

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Lachenmann (p. 269); nevertheless it was the right question.
The enduring fascination of this moment in musical historyçover and above
current doxa regarding the stylistic ‘pluralism’ of the Darmstadt Schoolçlies in the
manner in which, in their different ways, these composers of the 1950s registered the
end of musical modernism, an event that occurred in parallel (perhaps not coinciden-
tally) with the completion of larger social processes of modernization (read: industri-
alization) in the ‘advanced’ countries of Western Europe and the USA.21 As Adorno
had pointed out in the very Philosophie der neuen Musik to which German composers of
the 1950s paid such careful attention, Schoenberg’s bringing to a halt of the dialectic
of musical progress in the totally organized work had produced a situation in which
aesthetic necessity no longer existed. ‘[F]or the late Schoenberg what he composes
with is no longer utterly decisive. A composer for whom the procedure means all and
the material nothing is able to make use of what is obsolete.’22 In spite of Adorno’s
early recognition that the new music had in fact already moved beyond its end in the
compositions of Schoenberg’s American period, a reduction of musical material to
texture or timbre aloneçnotably in Lachenmann’s musique concre'te instrumentaleçkept
alive the ‘progressive’ pretensions of late modernism into the 1960 and 1970s. In 1971,
Lachenmann could declare to Nono that he was ‘the only composer in German who is
going forwards’ (p. 136 ). But by 1980, even he had begun to make etiolated references
to ‘obsolete’ musical traditions in his work.
The later Nono took a different course. In his 1991 memorial address ‘Von Nono
beru«hrt’, Lachenmann suggests that the artless ‘non-music’ of the Italian’s later years
was ‘an expression of ultimate radicality’.23 The two men had quarrelled in 1971: after
a performance of Lachenmann’s Kontrakadenz (1970^1), the enraged Nono apparently
told his ex-pupil, ‘You’re on your own! No one wants to listen to your music!’, and
stormed out of the pub in Munich in which they were sitting (pp. xxi^xxii). At the
root of their quarrel, Lachenmann explains, was a question: ‘What happens to all the
inner powers, energies, and longings which resist doctrinal monopolization by an
image of humanity, however the latter may be preached and however it may be
justified?’ That is to say, Lachenmann’s ‘existentialism’ retains an openly metaphysical

21
Useful here is Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London and New York, 1992), 34^9.
22
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London,
2006 ), 94; originally published as Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tu«bingen, 1949).
23
See Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, Contemporary Music Review, 18/1 (1999), 17^30 at 28, 29; available in
the original German in Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 295^305.

670
element, which the Nono of the early 1970s could only regard ‘as constituting a flight
from historical necessity’.24 By the time the two composers were reconciled (and
resumed their correspondence) in the mid-1980s, Nono had followed the trajectory of
the philosopher Massimo Cacciari out of Marxism and into an ‘anti-foundational
subjectivism’,25 which took its cue from Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Nietzsche. For
Lachenmann, the teacher had come round to the pupil’s way of thinking.26 But
coming from a member of the central committee of the PCI, there could hardly have
been clearer evidence of philosophicalçand politicalçcollapse.

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24
Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, 24.
25
Anderson, The New Old World, 345.
26
Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, 25.

671