Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Simon Reynolds
The word “nono” means “ninth” in Italian, but to an English speaker, it cannot help
sounding like an insistent refusal: “no, no!” That fits the composer Luigi Nono with
freaky aptness, given that his life and work turned around a double negation of the
status quo. Nono was a fearless explorer of new techniques of composition with
tape and electronics, first embracing them on his 1960 piece Omaggio a Emilio
Vedova; he was also a ferocious, life-long opponent of injustice and exploitation.
In 1952, Nono joined the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista Italiano,
or PCI). He was a vocal supporter of liberation movements throughout the
developing world and gave many of his pieces dedications or titles in tribute to
guerrilla leaders. “Y entonces comprendió,” for instance, bore a dedication to
“Ernesto ‘Che’ Guavara and all his fellow combatants in the Sierra Maestras of the
world” – a reference to the high mountains in which the Cuban revolution was
hatched.
Speeches and texts by anti-colonialist icons such as Patrice Lumumba of the
Congo make up the libretto of various Nono works. Others feature the actual
voices of revolutionary leaders or anonymous crowds of protestors. The most
striking example of the latter is “Non consumiamo marx,” a delirious audio-collage
of fury and defiance that documents demonstrations against the 1968 Venice
Biennale, regarded by student radicals as “a fortress of bourgeois art.” The piece
was originally released in 1969 as one side of Musica-Manifesto N.1, an LP
recently reissued on vinyl by Die Schachtel.
Nono saw works like “Non consumiamo Marx” and “Contrappunto dialettico
alla mente” as sonic acts of solidarity with all those struggling for liberation,
whether on the other side of globe (F.A.L.N. guerrillas in Venezuela, the Viet-Cong)
or closer to home, like the workers from northern Italy’s industrial cities who
inspired “La fabbrica illuminata.” In the 1968 essay “Music and Power,” Nono
described composing as “something to which I am committed in a way that is no
different from participating in a demonstration or a clash with the police, or, as
could be the case tomorrow, in the armed struggle.”
Although the price he paid for his stance wasn’t anywhere near what
happened to his friend, the Chilean protest singer Víctor Jara (murdered by
Pinochet’s thugs in 1973), the strident statements that Nono made both in and
around his work did meet resistance. In 1961, neo-fascists attempted to disrupt the
premiere, in Nono’s hometown Venice, of “Intolleranza 1960,” using what the New
York Times stiffly described as “stench bombs,” the shouting of “unprintable
names” and whistles. The political content in Nono’s work also led to conflicts with
his publishing company and disinvitations from institutions like the Prix Italia.
The Italian Left saw culture as a battle ground in a way that lent weight and edge to
Nono’s interventions.
In response, Nono tried to bypass the official channels of high culture and engage
directly with both student youth and the workers. He put out recordings via I dischi
del Sole, a Milan imprint that specialized in folk and political song, and the popular
music label Ricordi. And he staged performances and playbacks of his work in
non-concert hall contexts like factories and union buildings.
Nono staked out his “militant modernist” path in a controversial lecture
delivered in 1959 at Darmstadt in West Germany, during its renowned annual
convocation of composers and students, the International Summer Courses for
New Music. Titled “Historical Presence of Music Today,” the lecture breaks both
with Nono’s erstwhile friends in the European avant-garde, such as Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and with the John Cage school of indeterminacy then taking hold in
America. Stockhausen’s mystic exaltation of science and space, Cage’s embrace
of Eastern spirituality and surrender to the operations of chance, were both
evasions of the present and therefore ultimately complicit with capitalism and the
post-colonial order. For Nono, the purity these composers sought was neither
possible nor desirable: the conscious composer must respond to the historical
moment in all its messy urgency. To do any less would be to fail the test of your
time.
Nono’s own historical moment was a post-WW2 Italy emerging from the
wreckage of a disastrous experiment with fascism. Buoyed partly by its
unimpeachable role in the Resistance and by post-war hopes of renewal, the
Communist party grew steadily in strength, expanding its electoral reach from 19%
of the populace in 1946 to just shy of 35% in the 1976 general election. By that
point, Nono was a member of the central committee of the PCI. For a sense of
what that might mean at that time and in that place, try to imagine Steve Reich
sitting around the same decision-making table as Howard Dean during the George
W. Bush presidency. For the PCI wasn’t just the largest opposition party in Italy – it
actually controlled local government in large swathes of the country, in particular
the industrial cities of Northern regions like Emilia-Romagna. Thanks to the Italian
style of coalition government, nearly 60% of the Italian population lived in areas
where the local administration included Communists. As the narrowly still dominant
Christian Democrats inched towards a “Historic Compromise” – the hitherto
unthinkable idea of power-sharing with Communists at the level of national
government – America grew deeply worried.
Communism had become a sort of counter-mainstream in Italian life, a serious
rival to Catholicism. The Party was a culture that enfolded its members’ lives – you
might send your kids to Communist summer camps, for instance. At the same time,
during the turbulent ’70s – a period known as the “Years of Lead” – a ferment of
extra-parliamentary left-wing groups emerged. Some were workerist, some
autonomist, and a few embraced outright terrorism, but all shared impatience with
the PCI, which they found culturally staid and overly cautious.
Influenced by the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Left saw culture
as a battle ground in a way that lent weight and edge to Nono’s interventions.
“Hegemony,” Gramsci’s key concept, referred to the output of media and cultural
institutions, but also a wider “common sense” of values and norms that conditioned
a people’s sense of what was possible and “natural.” Before they won power,
radicals had to conquer hegemony: changing minds and hearts, consciousness
and desires, they could displace one consensus-reality with another. As Gramsci
wrote, in a passage quoted in the liner notes to Nono’s Canti di vita e d’Amore LP,
“one must speak of the struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new morality which
must stand in close relation to a new concept of life, until a new way of seeing and
feeling the truth arises and thus a world which is congenial to ‘possible artists’ and
‘possible works of art.’”