Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono (Venice, January 29, 1924 — Venice, May 8, 1990) was an Italian composer who specialized in contemporary music. His best-known works are Il canto sospeso (with a reading of letters from partisans sentenced to death in the fight against fascism), Epitaph for Federico García Lorca (for reciting voice, singers and orchestra) and Incontri (Meetings), for 24 instruments.

Biography

Luigi Nono's home.

His parents, Mario Nono and Maria Manetti, named him after his paternal grandfather, the painter Luigi Nono, an important representative of the 19th-century Venetian school XIX.

Nono met Gian Francesco Malipiero in 1941 and began to follow his composition courses at the Venice Conservatory. At said conservatory he became familiar with twelve-tone serialism, especially in the way it was elaborated by Anton Webern.

At the time, he began studying law at the University of Padua. In 1946, after finishing his studies, Nono met Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna in Rome. The latter quickly became friends with him. In 1948 he attended, with Maderna, the conducting courses given in Venice by Hermann Scherchen.

In 1952, Nono joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His communist commitment is marked by revolutionary communism. During almost all of his life, his work was characterized by having a strong political charge, in particular, the fight against fascism; in his last period, however, one can notice a change in this trend due to an obsession with silence as an aesthetic/political element and a phrase in particular: "There are no roads, you have to walk", read by the composer on a wall of a building in Toledo. This phrase gives title or appears in several of his works from his last period.

In March 1954, Nono met Nuria Schönberg, daughter of the composer Arnold Schönberg, in Hamburg, where she attended the world premiere, in a concert version, of the opera Moisés y Aarón by the late composer three years before. Nono married Nuria in 1955. The couple had two daughters, Silva in 1959, and Serena Bastiana in 1964. Nono and his family settled on the island of La Giudecca (Venice) in 1956.

He became a celebrated composer of electronic and serial music.

In the 1960s, Luigi Nono taught at the Di Tella Institute (Buenos Aires), including the composer Jacqueline Nova, among others. He was the only musician who supported the opera Bomarzo (by Manuel Mujica Lainez and Alberto Ginastera), banned as pornographic by the Argentine Catholic Church and the dictatorship of General Onganía.

In the eighties Luigi Nono tutored and directed the premiere of the play "Cristal de Tiempo" of the Mexican composer Hugo Rosales Cruz at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Cuba. With the participation of the Afrocuba percussion orchestra of the Higher Institute of Art.

He was a teacher of the composer Mercè Capdevila i Gayà.

Musical evolution

From 1950 to 1960, Nono participated in the «Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik» («International Summer Courses in Contemporary Music») in Darmstadt, which allowed him to meet, among others, Edgar Varese and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Works from this first period include: Polyphonic-Monodic-Rhythmic (1950), Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca (1952-1953), La victoire de Guernica (1954) and Liebeslied (1954). In 1954, Nono participated in a symposium on new composition techniques at the Elektroakustische Experimentalstudio founded by Scherchen in Gravesano. He progressively rejected the analytical approach of serialism in order to preserve the integrity of the musical phenomenon: Incontri (1955), Il canto sospeso (1956) and Cori di Didone (1958), taken from La terra promessa by Giuseppe Ungaretti.

His lecture Presenza storica nella musica d’oggi (“Historical presence of today's music”), given in Darmstadt in 1959, sparked a violent controversy and led to his break with the German Stockhausen.

In this way, his avant-garde music is an expression of a revolt against bourgeois culture, provoked by his commitment to revolutionary communism. As such, he eschewed traditional concert genres in favor of opera and electronic music. Nono frequently resorts to political texts in his works. Thus, Il canto sospeso was made with letters written by victims of oppression during World War II and is a work that gives it international renown. This political connotation is also found in La fabbrica illuminata (1964), for soprano, chorus and magnetic tape, which denounces the terrible conditions of the workers in the factories of those years, particularly the &# 34;ItalSider" from Genoa where Nono himself recorded on his magnetic tape the noises of the machines he used to compose the piece; Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto ad Auschwitz (1966), based on testimonies of the survivors of the homonymous concentration camp; Non consumiamo Marx (1969), Ein Gespenst geht um in der Welt (1971), Siamo la gioventù del Vietnam (1973), and the famous Al gran sole carico d'amore (In the bright sun laden with love) (1975). Nono also set poetic texts by authors such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Cesare Pavese, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Paul Éluard to music.

Starting in 1954, Nono experienced a growing interest in electronic music. His early compositions included a work on magnetic tape dating from the 1960s, with Omaggio a Vedova, for magnetic tape in 1960 and Intolleranza 1960 for soloists, chorus on magnetic tape. and orchestra in 1961. He would later write, among others, Como una ola di fuerza y luz for soprano, piano, orchestra and tape recorder (1972), ... sofferte onde serene... for piano and tape recorder (1976), and above all Al gran sole carico d'amore.

After 1980, Nono worked at the Experimentalstudio der Heinrich Strobel-Stiftung des Südwestfunks in Freiburg im Breisgau where he turned to live or random electronic music. He was particularly interested in the properties of sound itself. This new approach was translated into works such as Quando Stanno Morendo. Polish Diary n ° 2 (1982), Guai ai gelidi mostri (1983), Omaggio a György Kurtág (1983) and with splendor in the last opera of he Prometheus. Tragedia dell'ascolto (1984).

Luigi Nono tomb. Venice.

Catalog of works