the adorno–nono complex

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Spaces of Resistance: the Adorno–Nono Complex

WESLEY PHILLIPS

twentiethcentury music / Volume 9 / Special Issue 12 / March 2012, pp 79 99DOI: 10.1017/S1478572212000217, Published online: 27 March 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1478572212000217

How to cite this article:WESLEY PHILLIPS (2012). Spaces of Resistance: the Adorno–Nono Complex. twentiethcentury music, 9, pp 7999 doi:10.1017/S1478572212000217

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twentieth-century music 9/1–2, 79–99 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013doi:10.1017/S1478572212000217

Spaces of Resistance: the Adorno–Nono Complex

WESLEY PHILLIPS

AbstractThe historical and theoretical resonances between the work of Theodor Adorno and that of Luigi Nono havehitherto remained underexplored. In this article a debate is constructed between the two figures concerning thepolitics of space in advanced music in order to question a frequently held opposition between ‘autonomous’ and‘political’ art. Nono can be seen to interweave German and Italian traditions of historical materialism, respondingsimultaneously to the issues of both reification and imperialism. This is drawn out by way of Adorno’s evolvingattitude towards the younger generation at Darmstadt, via his revised understanding of the relationship betweenmusic and painting. Conversely the solidarity Nono maintained with contemporary spaces of resistance while notcompromising his musical language promises to expand Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

In a conversation about Luigi Nono German music critics Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer

Riehn noted in 2003 that Helmut Lachenmann ‘has often asked us why [Theodor] Adorno

never discussed Nono’. Riehn reflects that Lachenmann, Nono’s former student, is mistaken,

insofar as Adorno was ‘forcefully engaged’ with the Varianti (1957), which he mentioned

publicly in 1966. ‘As to the Adorno–Nono complex’, Riehn continues, ‘I always wanted to

have a conversation with [the soprano] Carla Henius, who was friendly with both Nono and

Adorno, and to ask her [about it], as she had dealings with the two men. But sadly she has

passed away.’1

This ‘Adorno–Nono complex’ is the theme of the following investigation. Although the

two men are known to have met, no record survives of any debate of the kind that they

might well have had with one another, given both their historical-biographical relationship

(since each contributed to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse during the 1950s) and their theoretical

relationship, in that they both made a notable contribution towards a historical materialist

aesthetics. The changes in their respective work over time render this project ever more

fraught, but at the same time intriguing. A debate will be reconstructed between the critical

theorist and the composer – sometimes real, sometimes virtual – with regard to the politics

of space in the post-war avant garde. The contention of this article is that the relationship

under consideration promises to mediate the ‘autonomous’ versus ‘committed’ models of

art, frequently presented as an insoluble dualism.

Our task breaks down into three moments, reflecting the three commonly categorized

stages of Nono’s œuvre: the serialism of the 1950s, the electronic works up to the mid-

1970s, and the later work continuing up to the composer’s death. One example will be

taken to represent each period: Il canto sospeso (1956), A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida

| 79

1 Wagner, ‘Nono und der musikalische Fortschritt’, 146–7. All translations in this article are by the author unless

stated otherwise.

http://journals.cambridge.org


(1965–6), and Prometeo (1984). The first section is inevitably the lengthiest, for the reason

that the historical-biographical and theoretical must be treated together: Nono ceased con-

tributing substantially to Darmstadt in 1960 and Adorno died in 1969. This initial section

will seek to understand Il canto sospeso both as a response to Adorno’s ‘Das Altern der

Neuen Musik’ (The Ageing of the New Music, 1954–5) and as an anticipation of his con-

cepts of reification, expression, and mimesis. It will be argued that Nono combines German

and Italian traditions of historical materialist thought by resisting both reification and

imperialism. This reading will proceed by way of a perceivable turn in Adorno’s attitude

towards the ‘young generation’, discernible from his reconsideration of the relationships

between music and painting. Roughly speaking, Adorno’s post-war lectures and essays on

music can be put into two categories, falling either side of this realignment: Philosophie der

Neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music, 1949), ‘Zum Verhaltnis von Malerei und Musik

heute’ (On the Relationship between Painting and Music Today, c1950), Versuch uber Wagner

(In Search of Wagner, 1952) and ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ (1955–6) belonging to the

former group; ‘Wien’ (Vienna, 1960), ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1961), ‘Wagners

Aktualitat’ (The Relevance of Wagner for Today, 1963), ‘Uber einige Relationen zwischen

Musik und Malerei’ (Some Relationships Between Music and Painting, 1965), and ‘Die

Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’ (The Function of Colour in Music, 1966) belonging to

the latter. Coincidentally or otherwise, this readjustment is contemporaneous with Adorno’s

‘forceful engagement’ with Nono’s 1957 Varianti.

The second section will examine the relationship between Nono’s musical and extramusical

(i.e. political) senses of space and time. Nono’s incorporation of documentary spaces of

resistance leads to a dissonance, but not an incoherence, with his musical material. This

successful integration is read both as a critique of Adorno’s ‘absolutist’ conception of musical

material and as a post-Adornian model for an art of resistance. In the final section Prometeo

will be presented as a continuation of the composer’s interest in the utopian significance

of the artwork, recalling the etymological meaning of utopia as ‘no-place’. Nono’s ‘tragic’

sense of this problem corrects and expands Adorno’s vision of an autonomous art.

Adorno at DarmstadtAdorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, albeit with intermittent returns to the USA there-

after, in order to help establish the new branch of the Institute for Social Research at

the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.2 By this time the summer course at Kranichstein

Castle near Darmstadt, inaugurated by Wolfgang Steinecke in 1946 and known from 1948

as the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik, was already up and running. Given that

the young generation (including Goeyvaerts, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono) began to take

control of the summer courses from the early 1950s, Adorno could not have encountered

2 Detlev Claussen reminds us that the return happened in stages: ‘Not until 1949–50 did [Adorno] take his first trip

back to Germany following the end of the Nazi regime, and he returned to America more or less directly. In 1952–3

he spent almost a year at the Hacker Foundation in California’ (Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno, 176).

80 | Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the Adorno–Nono Complex



Darmstadt at a more formational moment. By 1958, Nono could identify (and was indeed

the first to do so publicly) a ‘Darmstadt school’, recognizing the collective achievements of

recent years. Importantly, in the context of what follows, Nono compares the school ‘to the

field of the plastic arts, to what was achieved in the Bauhaus of Weimar and Dessau in its

day’.3

Adorno contributed to the Ferienkurse nine times between 1950 and 1966.4 His first

substantial contribution in 1951 proves to be crucial when coming to understand his initial

reception of the young generation. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, then a spokesman for the younger

generation on theoretical matters, has since claimed, along with others, that ‘Das Altern

der Neuen Musik’, given as a lecture in 1954 and published the following year, was most

probably informed by a performance and discussion of Goeyvaerts’ Sonata for Two Pianos,

and not Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, one of Adorno’s stated targets.5 Adorno had taken

exception to Goeyvaerts’ concept of musical material only to extend this to all and any serial

technique.6 What is striking, of course, is that the verdict of ‘Das Altern’ predates the flour-

ishing of the young generation from the mid-1950s onwards. Adorno had deemed the new

music to be old before it had yet come to maturity. In his generally negative assessment

of Adorno’s ‘engagement’ with post-war music, Marcus Zagorski identifies a ‘predictable

element’ in Adorno’s critique of Materialfetischismus.7 ‘Das Altern’ reads like a mere restate-

ment of the thesis of Philosophie der Neuen Musik, a book that, despite appearing in West

Germany in 1949 and being read by young and old alike, originated in the 1930s. It is as if,

in order to remain the leading intellectual on advanced music, Adorno had to demonstrate

the continuing veracity of his thesis of the 1930s and 40s. As Metzger sensed, and as

Adorno’s staggered return to Europe also suggests, the critical theorist’s premature verdict

on the young generation can be seen as theoretically overdetermined – locked into the

categories he had theorized already back in the 1930s – and underdetermined by actual,

practical encounters with the music itself.

Youth, age, temporalizationThe relationship between the older and younger generations became intertwined in Adorno’s

mind with the theoretical question of the obsolete and the new. The young generation shared

Adorno’s insistence on an advanced musical material, and his feeling that anything less was

3 Nono, ‘Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik’, 30.

4 Details of the contributors to each course are provided in Borio and Danuser (eds), Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 3.

5 See Toop, ‘Messiaen / Goeyvaerts, Fano / Stockhausen, Boulez’, 142–3.

6 Following Morag Grant’s usage, ‘serial’ is used advisedly here so as to avoid, on the one hand, any restriction to the

post-Schoenbergian sense of twelve-note music and, on the other hand, the pejorative senses of both ‘integral’ and

‘total’ serialism in English-language discussions of the European and Cagean traditions of the post-war avant garde.

Aware of the categorical distinctions between serial techniques, Adorno nevertheless retains a largely negative assess-

ment of all of them during in the early fifties, standing against anything ‘serial’. See Grant, Serial Music, Serial

Aesthetics, 5–6.

7 Zagorski, ‘ ‘‘Nach dem Weltuntergang’’ ’, 681–5.

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the Adorno–Nono Complex | 81



tainted by association with the recent political past. But the Philosophie der Neuen Musik was

at the same time a bone of contention with many of the younger generation (though Ligeti

would remain more receptive). Adorno had contrasted the restoration of Stravinsky with

the progress of Schoenberg, in whose atonal expressionism (c1910) objective construction

was treated with subjective freedom. Schoenberg nevertheless remained, in spite of his later

innovations in twelve-note technique, a bourgeois anachronism on account of his retention

of other parameters from the tradition, notably with regard to development and rhythm.

The model was instead Webern, who, it was reckoned, had begun to extend his teacher’s

technique to all parameters, paving the way for total serialism or totally organized music.

In 1953 Nono, Stockhausen, Boulez, and others gave a presentation marking Webern’s

seventieth birthday. This was followed by a special Webern issue of Die Reihe, the periodical

of the young composers. Of course the situation is more complicated where Nono is con-

cerned: while belonging to the ‘post-Webern’ school at this point, he also remains uniquely

indebted to Schoenberg, an indebtedness that went beyond the music, since he had married

the composer’s daughter, Nuria.

Adorno would have heard Nono’s first published compositions before writing ‘Das

Altern der Neuen Musik’, works that are not perhaps as compelling as those he composed

later in that decade. The 1951 Ferienkurse included the premiere of Polifonica–Monodia–

Ritmica (1951) under the baton of Hermann Scherchen. In 1954 Adorno attended the

course that heard La victoire de Guernica (1954). Adorno leaves us to assume, therefore,

that these examples are not exempt from the charge of Materialfetischismus. Indeed, Nono

is included amongst the enfants terribles in Adorno’s contemporaneous essay ‘Neue Musik

heute’ (New Music Today, 1955): they include ‘Boulez in France, Stockhausen in Germany,

and Maderna and Nono in Italy. Objective construction is now supposed to encapsulate all

elements mathematically, in particular rhythmic ones; the aim, to put it drastically, is the

liquidation of composition in each composition.’8

One of the charges levelled by ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ is that of a confusion of

preformed material with musical experience. This criticism is both philosophical and

music-critical in nature. In philosophical terms, if the conception is too determinate –

worked out in advance – then the work is over before judgement (critical listening) has

been called upon. Free judgement not only takes time but is equally a form of temporaliza-

tion. Adorno connects this aesthetic principle to music in particular. The author discerns in

both the later Webern and the young composers the attempt to outdo Schoenberg in the

sphere of development and rhythm. But in abstractly negating all previous forms (thematic

development and variation) they are alleged to have liquidated temporalization altogether.

Adorno pushes the two critiques, philosophical and musical, together: non-temporalization

is but a consequence of the over-reliance on preformed material. This pre-war tendency has

continued into the music of the younger generation, whose music is accordingly not new

but old. Hence ‘young people no longer trust in their youth’.9 Since Adorno addresses ‘the

8 Adorno, ‘Neue Musik heute’, 398–9.

9 Adorno, ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’, 156 (trans., 191).




new music’ as such, there are two levels of ageing: that of the individual works and that of

the conception of music on which they rely. New music itself is ‘falling into contradiction

with its own idea’.10

For Adorno, the problem of temporalization remains acute with respect to music, insofar

as he insists that, of all the arts, music ‘has time as its problem’, and that ‘Zeitkunst, the

temporal art, is equivalent to the objectification of time’.11 This is why he focuses on what

is happening to development and, moreover, why he is concerned with the relationship

between ‘the temporal art of music’ and the ‘spatial art of painting’.12 Two essays on this

relationship, dating from around 1950 and 1965 respectively, illuminate the adjustment in

Adorno’s stance on space in the new music during this period.

In the earlier text Adorno holds that new music has slipped into a pastiche of modern

painting, resulting in a form of stasis. Once again, he has in mind the visual and spatial

senses of ‘drawing up’ the composition, including, of course, latter-day pointillism, of which

Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica remains an early example. The reference of musical ‘pointil-

lism’ to painting was, ever since Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie, explicit: Reginald Smith

Brindle, for instance, commented on the ‘almost static atmosphere’ of the opening of

Polifonica.13 But in Adorno’s thinking of the time the ‘static’ is treated purely pejoratively:

The basis of this serialism is a static idea of music: the precise correspondences and

equivalences that total rationalization requires are founded on the presupposition

that the identical element that recurs in music is indeed actually equivalent, as it

would be in a schematic spatial representation.14

The sense that Adorno was not ready to listen to the young generation was concretized in

Metzger’s response, which, appropriately enough, appeared in the ‘Young Composers’ issue

of Die Reihe : ‘Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik’ (The Ageing of the Philosophy

of New Music, 1958). Metzger accused Adorno of not keeping pace with the concept of

new musical material in a manner that his philosophy of new music would itself demand.

Adorno was to take Metzger’s critique to heart, and by 1961 was confessing that ‘informal

music’ is but an expression for ‘Metzger’s term – an a-serial music’.15

One reason why Adorno takes Metzger seriously is that they share an identification of

musical time as being the crux of the matter. But Metzger takes Adorno to task on his

conflation of space with stasis, and then stasis with non-temporalization. The performance

can remain experientially non-identical to the score whilst at the same time borrowing

something distinctively spatial from it. Metzger cites Adorno’s own phrase only to turn it

against its author: ‘There are indeed cases in present-day production in which a ‘‘schematic


11 Adorno, ‘Uber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei’, 628 (trans., 66).

12 Adorno, ‘Zum Verhaltnis von Malerei und Musik heute’, 142 (trans., 415).

13 Brindle, The New Music, 18.

14 Adorno, ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’, 151–2 (trans., 188).

15 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 495 (trans., 272).




spatial presentation’’ takes on an unusual value.’16 This somewhat vague ‘unusual value’, we

shall suggest, finds particular meaning (going beyond Metzger’s own preferences) in Il canto

sospeso (1956).

Nono with and against AdornoThe Italian music critic Massimo Mila regarded Il canto sospeso as a practical riposte to ‘Das

Altern der Neuen Musik’. Nono ‘denies the historical pessimism of Adorno, whereby, due

to his rigid sociological determinism, the barbarism of the new [Darmstadt] school is

unavoidable’.17 Where Mila posits a simple opposition between Adorno and Nono, a dialectic

should be proposed. Nono’s work takes on the genuine criticisms of Adorno’s polemic in a

manner that might even be seen as anticipating Adorno’s subsequent repositioning. This

reading must proceed by way of Nono’s talk ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von

heute’ (History and the Present in the Music of Today, 1959), even though it dates from

slightly later and was essentially ghost-written by his pupil, Helmut Lachenmann.

Judging from a letter to his pianist friend Eduard Steuermann reporting back on the 1955

course, Adorno held Nono the man in high esteem, but Nono the composer, and indeed

Nono the intellectual, in less high esteem. Again, the context is the relationship of the elder

statesmen to the youth, whom Adorno now charges with ‘paranoia’:

Of course, to paranoia also belongs the moment of unresponsiveness, something

found in the otherwise very likeable and originally gifted Nono, with whom Rudi

[Kolisch], Horkheimer, and I attempted to hold a very fundamental discussion. But

that got no further than the question of what we had against the youth, against

which, incidentally, Rudi too politely and too weakly argued for us to preserve

something of our experiences.18

Adorno goes on to describe the premiere of Nono’s Incontri as ‘dry and very weak’ and yet

‘like the earlier things’, perhaps anticipating the overall warming to Nono that becomes

clearer after 1957, the year Adorno’s violinist friend Kolisch commissioned and premiered

Nono’s Varianti.19 During a series of three lectures on ‘Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’

(The Function of Colour in Music) at the 1966 Ferienkurse, Adorno recalls the Varianti

in relation to Kolisch and his ‘crisis of strings’ thesis.20 Adorno and Kolisch were taken

with Nono’s deconstruction of the violin’s ‘beautiful tone’ and his expansion of its possible

timbres. Together with other, later essays, these lectures display Adorno’s tentatively new

position on music’s relationship to painting. Referring to the 1966 lectures, Alistair Williams

has spoken of ‘Adorno’s conviction that sound colour becomes a crucial part of structure

16 Metzger, ‘Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik’, 74 (trans., 73).

17 Mila, ‘La linea Nono’, 301 (French trans., 58).

18 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie, 247. I am indebted to Adrian Wilding for the translation of

this passage.

19 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie, 248.

20 Adorno, ‘Die Funktion der Farbe’, 304–5.




when music, as he puts it, has ‘‘cut its connecting cables’’ (Verbindungsdrahte), by which he

means when it has dispensed with established methods of organizing components such as

pitch and rhythm.’21 Frustratingly, Adorno does not explicitly identify this expanded con-

ception of form as a valid response to the problem of stasis, even though stasis is explicitly

related to painting in his earlier texts. The non-connection of colour to time is surprising,

given that, as Williams notes, Adorno’s lectures were informed by Ligeti’s essay ‘Form in

der Neuen Musik’ (1966), in which the new form is defined as ‘the product of an imaginary

spatialization of the temporal process’, and that Ligeti’s Atmospheres, a work with profound

temporal implications, appears in the ‘Funktion der Farbe’ lectures.22

Nono and Adorno seem to have missed each other on crucial occasions. First and fore-

most, it is doubtful that Adorno attended the Cologne premiere of Il canto sospeso, which

took place in October 1956 after Nono had missed the deadline for Darmstadt in the same

year. At best Adorno may have heard recorded extracts in 1957 when Stockhausen gave his

‘Musik und Sprache’ (Music and Speech) lecture, which Nono took to have misrepresented

the work. This would account for Adorno’s acquaintance with at least its programme, as

we shall see. Secondly, Adorno did not attend the 1959 course, the occasion of Nono’s

‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’ polemic. And finally, it is not clear that Nono heard Adorno’s

1961 lectures on an informal music, given that Nono had cast himself adrift with the just-

cited talk (though he surely knew of Adorno’s subsequent essay). Steinecke’s death in 1961

further hastened the departure from Darmstadt of Nono, whose interest was instead turning

to the possibilities of music theatre, international politics, and new technologies.23 Inciden-

tally, Adorno dedicated the written text of ‘Vers une musique informelle’ to the memory of

Steinecke, and this was followed by a warm obituary given at the 1962 Ferienkurse, once

again suggesting a new acknowledgement of the course’s value.

Two of Adorno’s references to Nono appear in the essay ‘Wien’ (1960), in which he

attempts to reconcile young and old by way of a continuing Viennese modernist tradition.

The first remark declares Nono and Bruno Maderna ‘the principal exponents of Italian

modernism’. In the second remark the allusion to Il canto sospeso is unmistakable:

The fact that [the most recent composers] compose settings for revolutionary texts,

the diaries of anti-fascists under sentence of death, or surrealist shock verses, is

appropriate to the music, just as the dreamlike convulsions of [Schoenberg’s]

Erwartung can be said to fit what is admittedly a comparatively harmless text.24

On the face of it, Adorno places little importance on the programmatic content and context

of Il canto sospeso. The letters, written by anti-fascists facing execution, are valuable as

examples of expression rather than for their confrontation of the listener with the gravity

of the historical event. But Adorno’s emphasis on expression is by no means dismissive of

the work’s historical significance. Expression names the artwork’s mimetic relation to a

21 Williams, ‘New Music, Late Style’, 196.

22 Ligeti, ‘Form in der neuen Musik’, 795.

23 Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 59.

24 Adorno, ‘Wien’, 449 (trans., 219).




reified society. Being mimetic (in Adorno’s particular sense of the term, defined below), the

artwork is non-identical, and to that extent constitutes an act of resistance to the identical,

including the perpetuation of fascism. For Adorno, advanced music does not stand in inher-

ent need of a programmatic text, since advanced music constitutes a historically mediated

‘language’ of its own.25

Expression and mimesis are two of the most important categories of Adorno’s unfinished

Asthetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). Art ‘is modern art through its mimesis of the

hardened and alienated’.26 Mimesis and expression are not thereby behavioural or psycho-

logical categories but, rather, social and even ontological ones. The artwork embodies a

dialectic of rational construction and mimetic expression.27 In three texts dating from the

1930s, Walter Benjamin defined mimesis as original appropriation, a prototype being child

development.28 Mimesis is the freedom of becoming where reification is the imposition of

stasis, mirroring the above opposition between youth and ageing.

One of the critiques of Adorno from other traditions of Marxism is that this opposition

between freedom and ‘the totally administered society’ obscures other more immediate

problems and opportunities. Reification – society becoming a thing as the consequence of

the exchange principle in the commodity – seems to be the most fundamental problem for

the first generation Frankfurt School, according to which fascism, imperialism, and exploita-

tive labour conditions become subsidiary problems or symptoms. Luigi Nono, who joined

the Italian Communist Party in 1952, saw these latter problems as the fundamental ones. As

Carola Nielinger has demonstrated, these issues remained pertinent to the politics of Italy

after the war. Her article ‘The Song Unsung: Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso’ seeks to correct

the antinomic reception of Il canto sospeso: either totalitarian serialism or sentimental historical

memory. Nielinger concludes that for Nono and Maderna, as for Italian neo-realism,

abstraction and expression are not opposed but rather complementary. For Maderna,

‘Expression can mean abstraction – because: to express means to bring forth, i.e. to abstract

or, better, to isolate a part of the whole and to transfer it into another dimension.’29 Extend-

ing Nielinger’s insight, without endorsing her portrait of Adorno, Nono can in fact be seen

to combine a German ‘critical’ tradition of resistance to reification with an Italian ‘activist’

tradition of resistance to imperialism (we know that Nono read Antonio Gramsci, for in-

stance). This serves to situate Nono fascinatingly within both the German language Marxist

aesthetics debates of the 1930s, which included Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukacs, and

their resumption in the ‘art and life’ debates of the 1960s up to the present day.30

Given that Stockhausen’s Darmstadt presentation (‘Musik und Sprache’) focused on the

settings of Il canto sospeso, Adorno may not have been familiar with the instrumental move-

ments of the work, which is scored for soprano, alto, tenor, mixed chorus, and orchestra.

25 See ‘Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verhaltnis’.

26 Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 39 (trans., 21).

27 Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 72–3 (trans., 44–5).

28 See, ‘On Astrology’ (1932), ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ (1933), and ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), in Benjamin,

Selected Writings, vol. 2.

29 Cited in Nielinger, ‘ ‘‘The Song Unsung’’ ’, 136.

30 See Taylor and others (eds), Aesthetics and Politics.




No. 4 follows the concluding line of no. 3, falling into silence: ‘Your son is leaving, he will

not hear the bells of freedom . . . ’. Strings enter with extremely long durational values. But

so as to pre-empt sentimentality, small instrumental groups and solo instruments, including

percussion, interrupt those strings violently. Dialectically, these interruptions serve to heighten

the erstwhile static character. Nielinger is attentive to this ‘stoic staticism’, a ‘fundamental

and indeed very expressive characteristic of Il canto sospeso’. We can say that the work is

simultaneously an exponent of pointillism, each instrument sounding few notes, and an

Aufhebung of pointillism, in that Nono’s polarization leads to a paradoxically moving stasis.

A surprising sense of unfolding is eked out, arguably anticipating Nono’s later use of the

fermata. As we shall see, Nono will subsequently deny any characterization of Il canto

sospeso as pointillist on the grounds that pointillism equates with socially reactionary atomism.

But this defence can itself be read as a symptom of the fraught, mimetic treatment of stasis

that is at play. This is achieved through the combination of existing Klangfarbenmelodie with

a new understanding of duration, something that will resonate with Adorno’s aesthetic

theory.

Reification and mimesisEvidence of a thaw in Adorno’s relationship to the younger generation is most readily found

in ‘Vers une musique informelle’:

I have been favourably impressed by works of the Kranichstein or Darmstadt School

such as Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße, Gruppen, Kontakte, and Carre, as well as Boulez’s

Marteau sans maıtre, his Second and Third Piano Sonatas and his Sonatina for Flute.

I was also deeply moved by a single hearing of Cage’s Piano Concerto played on

Cologne Radio, though I would be hard put to define the effect with any precision.31

Adorno had already heard the Boulez Second Sonata at the time of giving ‘The Ageing of

the New Music’. The piece was then deemed ‘legalism’.32 Now he is ‘favourably impressed’.

Diary evidence unearthed by Zagorski indicates that Adorno in 1960 may not have been any

more favourably impressed with Boulez than he was (with Goeyvaerts?) in 1955. There is

truth in Zagorski’s notion that Adorno sought to appear aktuell, up to date, without mean-

ing it,33 which would contradict any notion of a genuine turn. However, there is little doubt

that at one level Adorno accepted the necessity of the avant-garde project. For instance,

both Nielinger and Zagorski capture Adorno’s earlier conflation of serialism with reifica-

tion. But even in Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947) it is clear that

resistance to reification is possible only by means of working through it, not by opposing

it romantically.34 Art is the myth of myth. As Adorno will say in Asthetische Theorie, the



33 Zagorski, ‘ ‘‘Nach Dem Weltuntergang’’ ’, 695.

34 Zagorski, ‘ ‘‘Nach Dem Weltuntergang’’ ’, 689.




artwork is not mimetic in spite of rational construction, but rather by virtue of it; otherwise,

there is no ‘mimesis of the hardened and alienated’. The advanced artist must remain

mimetic and technically advanced. By the late fifties, we find Adorno contemplating the

possibility of a new mimesis through the current (and aged?) state of musical material.

Unlike most manifestos, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ is ‘not able to provide any pro-

grammes’.35 Rather, an informal music is pursued through the negation of existing, failed

approaches, notably serial and aleatory techniques. It is worth noting, therefore, that how-

ever many correspondences we may find between post-war music and Adorno’s music

theory, the latter cannot in principle accept any example as having lived up to the concept

of an informal music. Informal music is a regulative idea, ‘a little like Kant’s perpetual

peace’.36 The text’s idealism is both its strength and its weakness. That said, all three of the

main problems identified across ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ and ‘Vers une musique

informelle’ (preformed material versus free experience, becoming versus stasis, history versus

nature) are addressed in several of Nono’s works. To return to no. 4 of Il canto sospeso,

Nono fetishizes neither the quasi-mathematically derived series nor natural-acoustic Being.

Perhaps we should caution against Nielinger’s ‘stoic staticness’, insofar as stoicism invokes a

moral attitude that fails to grasp the critical-rational status of resistance that is dialectically

expressed in its mimetic comportment. This mimesis constitutes what Adorno elsewhere

terms a new form of ‘apperception’, requiring conscious engagement on the part of the

listener.37 Fundamentally, the social and political significance of the stasis derives from

Nono’s Gramscian ‘organic intellectual’ sense of time as constituting an extramusical problem.

Mimetic stasis resists only as a resistance to reification, or the ‘detemporalization of time’,

as Adorno writes in Negative Dialektik (1966).38 The ageing of the new music is somehow

symptomatic of the ageing of the world. Perhaps this is why half of Adorno’s writings are

devoted to music.

With Il canto sospeso, not only are Adorno’s complaints about the crossover from

technique to experience misplaced, but the composer anticipates the ‘mimesis of the hard-

ened and alienated’ as a response to the problem of ageing. Becoming – in other words,

temporalization – may be achieved by way of mimetic stasis, the temporalization through

space suggested by the same Metzger whose ‘a-serial’ music would later be endorsed by

Adorno. Fundamentally, such a reading of Nono is not unwarranted once we consider the

role of Lachenmann. There are two items of evidence to consider here: (1) Lachenmann’s

discussion of Il canto sospeso, and (2) his ghost-writing of the German ‘Geschichte und

Gegenwart in der Musik von heute’, read out by Nono at Darmstadt.39

Adorno eventually signals the mimetic approach to stasis in ‘Wagners Aktualitat’. In the

pre-war monograph Versuch uber Wagner Adorno had taken the line from the Transforma-

tion Scene of Parsifal: ‘You see, my son, time here becomes space’, to emblematize Wagnerian


36 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 540 (trans., 322; translation modified).


38 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 324 (trans., 331).

39 Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 132, n. 84.




‘phantasmagoria’ or reification.40 Once again Adorno radically revises his stance, avowedly

in response to Darmstadt: ‘In the most recent music, which draws so near to painting and

the graphic arts, the trend toward the static becomes quite marked – here, too, something is

fully realized that Wagner had envisioned earlier [. . .]. Colour itself became architectonic.’41

In the context of the contemporaneous Darmstadt talk ‘Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’,

Adorno’s remark invokes a new possibility, not limitation, in new musical spatialization.

Of course the ‘integral’ serialism of Il canto sospeso would already guarantee its failure in

Adorno’s ears. Yet he surely underestimated Nono’s inventive use of the technique. The

composer uses the all-interval ‘wedge’ series, ‘generated by jumping between chromatic

scales in opposite directions from a nodal pitch’. ‘From such raw materials’, David Osmond-

Smith notes, Nono ‘could stamp out the shapes – often bristlingly architectonic – to which

his immersion in the visual abstraction of post-war painting made him feel akin’ (the refer-

ence is surely to Nono’s comrade Emilio Vedova, who painted the sets for Intolleranza

1960).42 The ‘elementary’ nature of Nono’s material gives him more freedom rather than

less, since there is no pretence towards games that remain forever hidden. Jeannie Maria

Guerrero has even shown how Nono transcends the preformed row through systematic

interruption (sospeso can also mean ‘interrupted’), meaning that the interruption is not

itself preformed but rather, in Adorno’s terms, mimetic. ‘Even back then’, Nono later

explains, ‘I was not writing what the press called totally organized music [. . .]. [C]omposing

was never for me merely the concretization of preformed structures. Improvisatory moments

always played a part; I left decisions open until the last instant.’43

In ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute’, the text formulated for him by

Lachenmann, Nono faults the ahistorical concept of musical material that he now associates

with Joseph Schillinger and John Cage (or at least, Cage’s followers). But it is likely that in

doing so Nono was lamenting the influence of his former friend, the increasingly mystical

Stockhausen, to whom the moral-political leadership of Darmstadt seemed now to have

fallen. At stake were two opposing visions of the advanced artist: one socially conscious,

the other ‘pseudo-subversive’.44 In a line that could have come from Adorno’s pen Nono

states, ‘The proposition ‘‘I am space, I am time’’ comes as a kind of moral stimulant which

spares the individual the problems of historical responsibility.’45 Nono’s emphasis upon the

historical basis of music chimes with Adorno. Each denies the meaning of sound outside of

its relations to other sound and (for Nono, at least) to other non-sound: relations that

change in time and place.46 In another theoretical correspondence Adorno’s attack upon

40 Adorno, Versuch uber Wagner, chapter 6, 107–20 (trans. 74–85).

41 Adorno, ‘Wagners Aktualitat’, 553–5 (trans., 593–4).

42 Osmond-Smith, ‘Break-Out from the Concert Hall’, 3.

43 Nono, ‘Gesprach mit Hansjorg Pauli’, in Luigi Nono: Texte, 200; quoted in Guerrero, ‘Serial Intervention in Nono’s

Il canto sospeso ’.

44 Lachenmann, ‘Von Nono beruhrt’, 299 (trans., 22).

45 Nono, ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’, 36 (trans., 42).





‘unconstrained musical nominalism’47 can be found in ‘Text–Musik–Gesang’ (Text–Music–

Song, 1960), the talk in which Nono corrects Stockhausen’s claim that the Italian had

atomized the phonetic material of Il canto sospeso according to a serial principle.48 In 1971

Nono would attack atomism in social terms: ‘for me, it has always been clear that a human

being can realize himself only in his relations with other people and with society.’49

Given this theoretical context, it is surprising that it should be Stockhausen and not

Nono to whom Adorno will extend the greater sympathy with regard to the problem of

musical time: ‘My first reaction to [Stockhausen’s] Zeitmaße, in which I relied exclusively

on my ears, involved me in a strange interaction with his theory of a static music which

arises from a universal dynamics as well as with his theory of cadences.’50 Adorno refers

here to Stockhausen’s essay ‘. . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . .’ (. . . how time passes . . . , 1957),

which sets out the above-mentioned critique of anachronism in the parameters of develop-

ment and rhythm: ‘most people who today write pitches in this system [of Schoenberg] are

not aware that they are giving form to time-proportions.’51 And yet here, as in ‘Musik und

Sprache’, Stockhausen surely pursues a positivist mysticism of sound that is anathema to

Adorno. It is on this point that the ‘stases’ of Nono and Stockhausen may be differentiated.

Stockhausen will, in 1961, define his ‘moment form’ as ‘a vertical slice dominating over any

historical conception of time and reaching into timelessness’.52 Of course this is not to say

that Stockhausen should be taken at his word, or that his work cannot be interpreted

against the composer’s intentions.

For Lachenmann, ‘It is particularly in a work like Il canto sospeso that one can see the

beginnings of the gap (now a gulf) between composers like Stockhausen and Nono’.

Lachenmann recalls that his teacher had been accused of giving up on the avant-gardist

path: ‘as a West German composer put it in 1960 [. . .] Nono had ‘‘ground to a halt’’.’53

Could this West German composer have been Stockhausen himself ? Lachenmann neverthe-

less turns this ‘grinding to a halt’ from a limitation into a quality:

Structural purification of a new, terse expressiveness which is almost archaic in

quality, and thus liberated from its conventional reification – this was what Nono

had ‘ground to a halt’ in. Or, perhaps one should say [. . .] Nono in the late fifties

had remained clinging to a rough, inhospitable landscape of naked signs from which

others were striving to find their way to more homely surroundings – forwards,

backwards or sideways [. . .]. In those days Nono did not move further on – he

went deeper.


48 What impressed Stockhausen about the work, in fact, was that, ‘[w]e are dealing [. . .] with an autonomous musical

serial structure in all parameters’ (Stockhausen, ‘Musik und Sprache’, 49; trans., 53).

49 Nono, Il Canto Sospeso, ix.


51 Stockhausen, ‘. . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . .’, 14 (trans., 11).

52 Worner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, 46–7.

53 Lachenmann, ‘Von Nono beruhrt’, 296–7 (trans., 19).




Nono’s student does not refer to wilfully mystical depth here. Rather, ‘the processes of

structuring and differentiation were ultimately determined by their function of driving

music into space’.54 Such driving of music into space becomes a temporalization through

space.

Lachenmann confirms in the same essay that his concept of reification comes from

Lukacs.55 Clearly it is senseless to suppose that Nono was seeking to enact the future ideas

of his student. At issue is more likely an elective affinity – something in the air – whereby

Nono’s intellectual and political concerns tallied with a stream of German as well as Italian

radical cultural theory. We recall that Lachenmann has remained curious about why

Adorno had so little to say about Nono, that ‘the Adorno–Nono complex’ remains un-

finished business. Lukacs forms a part of this complex, since it is he who put the concept

of reification on the map (the term was not used by Marx). The commodity form ‘degrades

time to the dimension of space’, he states in History and Class Consciousness.56 This charac-

terizes ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ also. But, under the influence both of Darmstadt and

of his editing of Benjamin’s writings for Suhrkamp, Adorno changes his verdict from the

late 1950s onwards on the relation between the arts of time and space, now suggesting that

music may paradoxically find its salvation in painting, yet without being painting. Some-

thing of this relation can be sensed in Adorno’s use of the term informel, a movement in

post-war painting throughout Europe, including Adorno’s Frankfurt.57

The essay ‘Uber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei’ (On Some Relationships

between Music and Painting) now makes clear a double possibility: ‘The convergence of

music and painting [. . .] opens up the possibility of crass infantilism, at least in music; it

is possible to stave off this element only to the extent that it reflects it within itself, as an

expression of decay, and composes it out, so to speak.’58 However negatively, Adorno

acknowledges the productive possibility of the spatial in music, if we take ‘expression of

decay’ in Adorno’s own, full sense of the term to refer to the mimetic relation to ‘ageing’

already grasped (according to this reading) in Il canto sospeso. Against his previous verdict

Adorno now considers the productive aspects of music’s spatiality in terms of colour and

ecriture.

If the disadvantage of ecriture is its syncretism (since all the arts can be understood in

terms of this single principle, again taken from the writings of Benjamin), then its advantage

is an acknowledgement of the external space of music. Ecriture is three-dimensionally con-

structivist. In an exceptional passage from ‘Uber das gegenwartige Verhaltnis von Philosophie



56 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 89.

57 Adorno mentions the Frankfurt informel painter Bernard Schultze, but unfavourably. His preferred moment of

modernist painting is Picasso’s synthetic Cubism; the later essay on music and painting is dedicated to Picasso

collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Moreover, the term ‘musique informelle’ was chosen by Adorno ‘as a small

token of gratitude towards the nation for whom the tradition of the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage

to produce manifestoes.’ Hence, the name does not refer to the specific manifesto of art informel (namely Tapie’s

An Other Art). See Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 495 (trans., 272).

58 Adorno, ‘Uber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei’, 631 (trans., 68; my emphasis).




and Musik’ (On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music, 1953) Adorno

writes that musical space ‘springs from the collective implications of all music, the character

of something that embraces groups of human beings, which is gradually carried over

to the sound as such’.59 Adorno’s thinking on this theme is much informed by Ernst

Kurth’s Musikpsychologie (1931, second edn 1947). Kurth found that music gives rise to a

‘strongly felt [. . .] analogy’ to the ‘outer’60 – music constitutes an ‘enigmatic [. . .] spatial

presentation’, but that the ‘localization’ of the sound ‘has nothing to do with’ the ‘inner’

musical space.61 However, he takes this opposition of inner and outer to be absolute, mean-

ing that external, social space takes place only in the inherent musical material itself, in

keeping with his musical modernism. As a result Adorno’s evaluation of musical space

remains restricted, even from a Kurthian perspective. In ‘Vers une musique informelle’ we

thus read:

The site of all musicality is a priori an interior space and only here does it become

constituted as an objective reality. [. . .] It is precisely the most subjective aspects

of music, the imaginative, associative element, the idea content and the historical

substance that is present in all music that point back to externals, to the real world.

Music negates psychology dialectically.62

In Adorno’s thinking, Kurth’s opposition becomes one of autonomy and heteronomy: the

‘real world’ is mediated into the musical material by way of ‘imagination’. For Nono, on

the other hand, the opposition is itself internalized into the work, as an externalization

itself. Nono repeatedly asserts the relationships (by no means consonant) between inherent

musical space, external performance space, and the social spaces introduced through the

texts and voices. This experimental pursuit of a new music theatre continues through the

1960s and beyond.

Young and full of lifeIn tracking this transition to the 1960s, the best-documented examples would include

Nono’s first political azione scenica, Intolleranza 1960. Importantly, this work employs

a whole section of no. 4 from Il canto sospeso, contradicting any sudden break with the

Darmstadt era, including Nono’s interest in the static. For the purposes of the foregoing

argument our representative work from this period is A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida

(The Forest is Young and Full of Life, 1965–6), for soprano, three reciters, B@ clarinet,

copper plates, and eight-channel tape, which lasts for around forty minutes. The texts,

selected by Giovanni Pirelli, document liberation struggles from around the world. It is

dedicated to the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, and its title comes from the

59 Adorno, ‘Uber das gegenwartige Verhaltnis von Philosophie und Musik’, 166 (trans., 150).

60 Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 120.

61 Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 128.





words of an Angolan freedom fighter: ‘they cannot burn the forest because it is young and

full of life’.

An immediate and crucial difference from Il canto sospeso is that these are explicitly con-

temporary struggles. Nono regarded fascism as an ongoing danger. But some within the

economic miracle of West Germany may have mistaken Il canto sospeso for a cathartic fare-

well to a past problem. After all, where Il canto sospeso was well received on its Cologne

premiere (with its ‘bourgeois’ audience, as Metzger was at pains to point out), the 1960s

works were received with far more difficulty, the performance of La fabbrica illuminata

(1964) even being censored by Italian radio for its protest against factory working condi-

tions.63 The work opens with the words of a repair mechanic from Bergamo: ‘As Marx

said, we are in prehistoric time.’ A second difference to Il canto sospeso is that Nono’s spaces

of resistance now exceed the European context, given the international struggles cited.

Beginning in Cologne, Nono’s exploration of electronic music was no celebration of

technology for its own sake. The composer was attracted to magnetic tape for its capacity

both to bring the contemporary world into music and to take music out of the concert

hall back into the world, including the factory.64 Moreover – and this aspect has not aged

at all – the acerbic sonorities of the tape medium remain appropriate to an anti-sentimental

realism. In A floresta we can say that Nono carves out a barren landscape from which sites

of political struggle rise and fall. That which sounds the most bereft of life promises to be

full of life. This promise is to be understood in terms of hope, and not expectation. As with

Il canto sospeso – and, above all, Al gran sole carico d’amore (1975) – promise is combined

with mourning. A floresta in no way regards its revolutionary spaces as utopias. It is their

present activity of resistance that might rather be termed utopian.

In one respect this electronic work of music-theatre (the speakers were originally actors

from the Living Theatre company) cannot be compared with the non-electronic and serial

Il canto sospeso. This is not to say that A floresta is harmonically ambivalent: the harmonic

context is given in its separation of the material around fourths and fifths, combined with

micro-intervallic variations in the soprano. But the main continuity lies in its polarization

of duration through the dramatization of timbral relations, constituting a newly spatialized

time. Indeed, the tape medium allows Nono to polarize further still, not being limited to the

all-too-human confines of live instrumental production; or, rather, it is precisely the cross-

over between the live instruments and the recorded ones that presses the new technology

back to the human-social context. The reworked instruments and voices, combined with

the copper sheets and the Flatterzunge of the clarinet, realize this contrast between a quasi-

spatial continuum and the convulsive movements of protest.

What is new, therefore, is the interaction of that inherent spatialization (the mimetic

stasis considered above) and the real spaces of resistance introduced programmatically (a

written programme that, as ever with Nono, accompanies the performance as a crucial

aspect of it). Resistance to reification is brought into conjunction with resistance to impe-

rialism and oppression. Against Adorno, Nono knows the socio-representational limits of

63 Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 63.

64 See Osmond-Smith, ‘Break-Out from the Concert Hall’, 4.




‘absolute’ music. With Adorno, Nono upholds that ‘absolutist’ moment of the Zeitkunst

as a crucial element of his overall music theatre. Nono’s upholding of the potential for

both spaces of music, inner and outer, can be sensed in his slightly earlier ‘Notizen zum

Musiktheater heute’ (Notes on Music Theatre Today, 1961).

Criticizing the single perspective of stage action (‘I see what I hear and hear what I see’),

Nono cites Moses und Aron as a work of anti-opera, the ‘burning bush’ scene especially, in

which the singers are hidden or dispersed. Nono refers to both the external production and

the musical structure here: ‘Schoenberg has to find a new spatial dimension of the tonal

[Raumdimension des Klanglichen] and introduce an element whose focus until now has

been centred in the orchestra and on the stage.’65 Anticipating Prometeo, Nono refers to an

electroacoustic cori spezzati. For A floresta Nono arranged the loudspeakers spatially to

achieve this new idea of space. What results is another level of spatial interaction, between

the polarized, static-eruptive music and its movement about the performance space. But

this does not confuse matters, since the effect is one of pulling the listener’s attention out

of the stage, out of the concert hall, and into a world of concrete problems, problems that,

according to Nono’s music theatre, this engaged consciousness might begin to address.

Nono’s avant gardism thus differs from that of Adorno, for whom the task of art is to

negate the existing space and not to propose solidarity with any new one. For the critical

theorist the artwork shows ‘that the world could be other than it is’.66 This ‘other’ remains

perpetually negative, and the neglect of concrete spaces, in art as well as in political situa-

tions, remains a problem with the critical theorist (examples of architecture are scarce in

Aesthetic Theory, for instance).

When, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that the modern artwork is ‘the determinate

negation of a determinate society’, he is playing on a double sense of ‘determinate’: logical

and political. Society is determinate (already determined) in the sense of being fixed, or

even ‘ageing’ into ‘a new barbarism’. But the all-too-unified world is determinately negated

by the disruptive ‘unity’ of the advanced artwork, albeit as ‘semblance’. What is paradoxi-

cally unified in the artwork is that which has become disenchanted: experience (Erfahrung).

As Adorno knew well, Hegelian logic states that ‘determinate negation’, unlike ‘abstract

negation’, gives rise to something new in the process of mediation. This ‘something new’

would be the alternative objectification to reification. Hence Nono’s critique of formalism

at the end of the 1950s leads him to a music theatre that brings these possible objectifica-

tions (all too ‘empirical’ for Adorno) into aesthetic experience itself. Yet, equally true to

Adorno, Nono is aware that this remains an aesthetic experience – semblance – and not an

immediately revolutionary act. Nono even outdoes Adorno by acknowledging the positing

as well as negating character of determinate negation: the critique of reification must

suggest other spaces for life if that critique of reification is not to be merely abstract, if it is

really to resist the determinate society.

65 Nono, ‘Notizen zum Musiktheater heute’, 64.

66 Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, 208 (trans., 138).




In a final, biographical encounter between the two men, Adorno’s attitude to Nono’s

direction in the 1960s would become all too clear. Nielinger tells us that, ‘When asked for

a letter of support in the context of the ill-fated premiere of Henze’s Das Floß der Medusa in

1968, Adorno responded positively at first but changed his mind after having heard that

such letters had already been written by Nono and [Peter] Weiss.’67 Whereas in the early

fifties we find Adorno pitted against the youth of Metzger and Nono, by the late sixties we

find Adorno and Metzger, who had dismissed Nono’s use of political texts in 1962, pitted

against Nono. Again, Adorno’s dismissal cannot simply be accounted for in terms of the

artist’s political commitments, insofar as Nono’s musical language remained dissonant,

and because Adorno cannot really have dissented from many of those concerns (Adorno

refers to Vietnam and South Africa in his lectures of the 1960s).68 What is strange is that

whereas the ‘Adornian’ Metzger would outline a ‘turning point’ in Nono’s development in

1981 (back to the avant-garde fold, perhaps) we can just as easily discern a new direction

within an ongoing, political investigation into art, space, and utopia.69

A tragedy about dwelling todayWhat has subsequently been regarded as a ‘late turn’ concerns Nono’s musical politics: ‘I

had the need to think anew my whole work and my whole existence as a musician today

and as an intellectual in this society, to discover new possibilities of knowledge and crea-

tion.’70 Nono had become wary of the ‘ideological’ and had avowedly turned inwards. But

Osmond-Smith reminds us that Nono’s work of the eighties onwards ‘continued to resonate

with the perception that social evolution is achieved by subverting subjective priorities’.71

Nono’s ‘turn’ has been attributed equally to his friendship and collaboration with the

philosopher Massimo Cacciari. During the 1960s Cacciari had been an active trade unionist.

By the 1970s, however, he had moved towards a more generalized critique of capitalist

modernity that bore some similarity to Adorno (the centrality of Weberian rationalization,

for instance). Cacciari nevertheless avoided the critical theorist, opposing ‘negative thought’

to any form of dialectics, including negative dialectics. Coming, along with his friend

Manfredo Tafuri, from a background in architectural theory, Cacciari investigated the

nihilist ‘project’ of ‘the metropolis’, founded upon a rationalist determination of space.

Urban spaces have come to be determined by exchange relations alone, the Venetian philos-

opher observed, in a manner that ideologically conceals real social divisions. The ideal place

without content was a ‘no-place’, in line with the dialectical-idealist ‘utopia’. Cacciari’s

response was an ‘architecture of nihilism’,72 that which attempts to articulate the contem-

porary, near-impossibility of dwelling as ‘non-dwelling’.73

67 Nielinger, ‘ ‘‘The Song Unsung’’ ’ 92.

68 See Adorno, Metaphysik, 160, 202 (trans., 101, 130).

69 See Metzger, ‘Wendepunkt Quartett?’.

70 Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 97–8.

71 Osmond-Smith, ‘Break-Out from the Concert Hall’, 4.

72 Much of this material can be found in English in Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism.

73 Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, 111.




With Cacciari’s thinking about Prometeo in the early 1980s – as well as in it, since he

compiled its texts, including Benjamin’s ‘Uber den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘On the Concept

of History’, also known as ‘Theses on History’, 1940) – the project of determining place as

geometrical space is traced through a history of the performance spaces of European music.

In a conversation with Nono, included in the programme for the Venice premiere of

Prometeo, Cacciari makes the following remarks:

In parallel to the cemeteries, asylums, and prisons are built the theatres and concert

halls [. . .]. The concentration and homogenization of space, the disappearance of

the multi-spatial possibility of the musical event, is closely related to the obvious

reduction of polyvocity, of the multivocal possibility of ‘directions’ in listening:

[. . .] listening and the space of listening coincide, are apprehended together. All

this during what one could perhaps call ‘the bourgeois era’ of listening.74

However, just as possible as reading the later Nono out of Cacciari’s philosophy is reading

it, along with the early and middle-period works, in relation to Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

What sounded striking about Fragmente-Stille in 1981 was its fragility: a departure from

the strident theatrical-political works. But this was, in a sense, a strident fragility. The way

in which Nono invited the musicians to determine the weight and length of each fermata,

for instance, was new – or rather, said the detractors, old: a return to subjectivist expression.

But this is once again Lachenmann’s ‘terse expressiveness’. The fermata is not ornamental,

externally imposed upon the material’s unfolding, but rather of that unfolding. Here lies

the affinity to Il canto sospeso and A floresta. Nono’s fermata – the term comes from the

Latin firmare, to stop – is a coming-to-a-standstill. Hence, in their interpretation, Nono

asked the Arditti Quartet to play the fermatas ever longer.75 At stake is not contemplative

slowness but rather a quasi-spatial immersion into the material. The composer now radicalizes

some of the insights of his earlier ‘Notizen zum Musiktheater’ essay: the ‘use of a non-

geometrized space [. . .] runs up against the dissolution of normal time, of the time of

narration and of visualization’.76

This inner spatialization comes into its own when brought into play with the possibilities

of outer spatialization – in Prometeo. Music, on account of its spatial ambiguities, can offer a

different experience of space. The singers, speakers, chorus, solo strings, solo winds, glasses,

orchestral groups, and live electronics are arranged around the audience. But, unlike the

former works, the estrangement of inner and outer, of the musical space and the space of

the music, is refused reconciliation. The editor of Nono’s writings in French suggested that

‘the music composes the space’.77 But this is too phenomenological. How can such space be

composed in an already composed space, namely (in the case of the Venice premiere) the

deconsecrated San Lorenzo? The harmonic material of Prometeo is polarized between close

74 Bertaggia, ‘Conversation’, 133. The original Italian text appeared in the concert programme of the Prometeo premiere:

Verso Prometeo (Venice: Ricordi, 1984).

75 Arditti, ‘Nono’s Fragmente-Stille . . . ’, 7.

76 Bertaggia, ‘Conversation’, 138.

77 Laurent Feneyrou, cited in Pape, ‘Nono and His Fellow Travellers’, 60.




intervals, including micro-intervals, and expansive ones – the ‘promethean’ fifth being a

constant – amidst similarly polarized pitch and dynamics. Nono exploits height and depth.

Similar figures are repeated in different instrumental groupings, again recalling Il canto

sospeso, but this time moving across the physical space from different sources. There is a

polarization of the ‘smallest transition’ within the musical material and its external transi-

tion about the performance space. In other words, the mimetic stasis of the music resonates

dissonantly with its environment, comprising a peculiar spatio-temporal experience. The

fermata dwells on the performance space as its incontrovertible reference, only for the

listener to be confronted with the space of its non-dwelling: an instance of the presently

reified world. Heard in relation to A floresta, this ‘tragic’ non-reconciliation corresponds to

a heightening of the utopian task, not its renunciation.

In Cacciari’s thinking, an expression of non-dwelling hints at the possibility of dwelling

anew: a new space. The thinker relies upon the post-active nihilisms of both Benjamin and

Heidegger. Cacciari is interested in the figure of the wanderer – Robert Musil’s ‘man with-

out qualities’ – because only the wanderer may circumvent the no-place of utopia. Through

the polarization of inner and outer, the contemporary contradiction within the concept of

place is expressed both as a problem and as a chance. With Prometeo – subtitled tragedia

dell’ascolto, a tragedy in or about listening – Heidegger’s concept of dwelling has philosoph-

ically displaced the humanist utopia,78 supposedly characteristic of the earlier Nono. But the

possible valorization of the wanderer in Nono’s ‘mobile sound’ (without any place of dwell-

ing) remains problematic, philosophically and politically. It even replicates the problems

found in Adorno, in terms of an infinite deferral of real objectification.

Adorno upholds the Bilderverbot on representations of utopia, since totalizing visions

block the utopian task itself. The artwork, however, constitutes a peculiar, negative unity,

and therein lies its ‘utopian’ meaning. The artwork is Leibniz’s ‘monad’: the inner is inner

qua different outer. Nono’s later corrective to Adorno concerns the nature of the inner–

outer dissonance (since they agree that autonomous art is socially dissonant). Of course

the outer reference of Prometeo is no longer the explicit site of existing social struggles.

The danger for the later Nono, therefore, is that non-dwelling might lapse into no-place.

At one point in the libretto Cacciari quotes Moses und Aron: we are ‘invincible in the waste-

land’. The wasteland is the attempted mimesis, not tautology, of no-place. But why leave

the wasteland at all? And how? There is a way, once we listen in relation to his previous

works: the programme of Prometeo is not, after all, so far from Nono’s political concerns.

Prometheus – ‘the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar’, as Marx

wrote in 1841 – remains a symbol of a certain humanist project, however much that view

may have been revised by anti-humanist philosophies.79 Prometeo can be regarded as an

experiential investigation into the conditions for the possibility of concrete possibilities,

such as those heard in the resisting voices of A floresta. ‘Possibility’ was Nono’s favourite

word during the 1980s. Without the inaugurated transformation of experience, the maximal

78 On his concept of dwelling see especially Heidegger, ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’.

79 Marx, ‘The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, 31.




imperative of possibility does not of itself take place. But without actual possibilities,

existential conditions of possibility remain ‘pseudo-subversive’. Against those who present

the later work as quietist, Prometeo continues Nono’s musical-political journey. The three

periods – the three extra-musical treatments of time and space – interrupt one another as

an unfinished whole.

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