The Tragedy of Listening Nono, Cacciari, Critical Thought and Compositional Practice

musicgenerationʼ. Sleevenotes to Clicks & Cuts, Volume One, Mille Plateaux, 2000. 52. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 351. The tragedy of listening Nono, Cacciari, critical thought and compositional practice

Jonathan Impett

Music and philosophy follow the same principle the university. When Cacciari was eighteen, this group of working, that of construction and decon- founded a journal of critical theory, Angelus Novus, the struction. They are both systems for arriving at a title of which acknowledges their roots in the thought poetical structure. of Benjamin. Through this period Cacciari developed Massimo Cacciari1 his early work on ʻnegative thoughtʼ from Nietzsche Luigi Nono (1924–1990) occupies a key place in the and Wittgenstein, which in his hands becomes effec- development of contemporary music. Conventional tively a tool for deconstruction, for seeking out fissures accounts identify him as the composer who in the and contradictions. In a series of works, he presents 1950s most coherently confronted the implications of negative thought as a resistance, presaging Nonoʼs serialism – an approach to structuring every aspect own conceptions of ʻun-everythingʼ and continuous of musical composition developed from Schoenbergʼs questioning, which would lead him eventually to the ideas of order, structure and completeness in the use of writings of Edmond Jabès. There is also a sense of the chromatic scale (the series). Through its evolution frustration apparent here: that Benjamin had described of the very nature of both composition and composed, a post-dialectical work of art that neither the Ador- Nonoʼs work also directly addresses many of the major nians nor the espousers of political engagement had 2 issues that music has subsequently had to acknowledge: fully understood. the relationship of composition with social reality and The political trajectories of Nono and Cacciari with the performer, the nature of musical material, of are contiguous. A communism of social, intellectual representation and of listening, of musical time and and artistic responsibility informed all Nonoʼs activity space, and the uniqueness of the musical event. Richly from early on: he joined the PCI (Italian Communist grounded in music- and critical-theoretical concerns, Party) in 1952, despite the ramifications of such actions his work transcends formalism precisely because of for his international career, and was elected to the the depth of his historical-theoretical awareness and Central Committee in 1975, during the period of crisis sense of place. and the ʻhistoric compromiseʼ. Much of Cacciariʼs This article attempts an initial and necessarily early political writing concerns the structural issues 3 broad survey of the role of critical theory – in this of communism, and of thought and institutions in 4 case, philosophical thought which has material impli- general. By the time of his full participation in politics cations for artistic activity – in the later work of Nono. he vociferously refused to engage with major parties In particular it considers the role of Italian philosopher and their dynamics. and left-wing politician Massimo Cacciari. Nono first Three lines of inquiry thus present themselves: the met Cacciari, twenty years his junior, in 1965, when observable influence of critical thought on Nonoʼs music the latter was a student and member of a very active itself, the wider role of such ideas in his development group of cultural thinkers who came to dominate and practice as an artist, and the extent to which these the intellectual and political life of Venice: Franceso conceptual tools might be instrumental in reaching Dal Co, Manfredo Tafuri and Marco De Michelis. an understanding, not only of Nonoʼs music, but more Cacciari himself became mayor in 1993; the writings widely of the dynamics of modernist cultural produc- of Dal Co and Tafuri include a standard work on tion and its relation to social reality. Such a wider modern architecture; and De Michelis, brother of an understanding is afforded by Nonoʼs own insistence ex-minister, now heads a new architecture faculty at on the nature of musical thought as a particular mode

Radical Philosophy 125 (May/June 2004) 29 of human activity and its essential relevance to the properties of the words embody views of the role of individual, culture, society and their transformation. the artist and the nature of his work: political strug- These strands will intersect in the present narrative. gle, the difficulty of post-Holocaust poetry, translation The article will not, however, attempt an exegesis of and the crossing of cultures, the origins of music and Nonoʼs own thought on these questions but rather trace poetry and the fragility of individual expression. These some of the dynamics of their interaction through the are writers for whom aesthetic, philosophical and development of his work. I shall try to show that the political engagement cannot be considered separately. very depth of engagement with critical thought which In Nonoʼs milieu of the time, the debate surrounding underpins Nonoʼs entire oeuvre is what allowed him a communist aesthetics was informed by Gramsci to renegotiate radically and uniquely the relationship rather than Adorno or Marcuse. As a student of law between text, representation, act and phenomenon in before composition, he had already absorbed from his his later work. mentor, political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, the social responsibility of the intellectual to be constantly Un-everything questioning in a form of continuous cultural revolu- From the outset, Nonoʼs engagement with critical tion.6 Significant for Nonoʼs later work also is an article thought and text in general distinguished itself from by Pavese he must surely have known, written shortly that of his peers in two respects: the breadth of his before the latterʼs suicide in 1950 and the source of humanistic education and his sense of cultural and much debate in the left-wing literary world.7 It might political responsibility. Both emerge in a talk he gave appear superficially that nothing could be farther from in 1960 at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, at its apogee as the specificity of the epic, socially engaged works of the locus of the New Music debate. It is an impassioned Nonoʼs initial trajectory than the timelessness of Greek and articulate response to Stockhausenʼs suggestion of myth. However, Pavese seeks to rehabilitate myth at the previous year that in the work Il Canto Sospeso the centre of art, and suggests that the redefinition of (1956) Nono had succeeded in removing all trace of myth is the foundation for each new epoch of artistic meaning from the most emotionally charged of texts practice, the seed of every poem. The creation of a – words of the victims of fascism – and revealing new work is therefore the construction of both a new them as pure compositional material.5 Before arriving aesthetic and a new ethos; in their absence, the work at his refutation, Nono takes his Darmstadt listeners is simply a re-expression of something we already – presumably anticipating a rather different subject know and will lead away from the questioning that is matter – through a rigorous analysis of the role and the responsibility of the artist. The reinterpretation of use of text in music from Lassus to Beethoven. He then myth and the process of continuous questioning frame demonstrates with legal precision the superficiality of all of Nonoʼs late work. the contemporary compositional discourse surround- The phonetic polyphony of Il Canto Sospeso and the ing semiotics and the designification of text. He cites evocation of Ungarettiʼs own voice in Cori di Didone Merleau-Ponty: no construct is without meaning. Text (1958), for mixed choir and percussion, illustrate this is a phonetic–semantic structure from which musical indivisibility of sound, aesthetic and meaning. Nonoʼs expression can emerge; its semantic properties are involvement with the earliest performances of Schoen- transposed into the musical language of the com- bergʼs Moses und Aron in 1954 is significant in many poser. respects. In dealing with the inherent impossibility If the role of critical thought is at issue here, why of a human being realizing its own self-vision, the begin with Nonoʼs views on the use of text? The rela- opera provides an analogue for the task of the com- tionship was to become explicit in his later work, but in poser himself. While contemporary debate perceived his practice Nonoʼs engagement with his chosen texts this as reflecting a twentieth-century crisis in musical was such that subject matter and conscious reflection language, Nonoʼs subsequent work demonstrates his on his own activity are indivisible from the start. Both understanding of its wider significance in terms of are rooted in a profound sense of historical continuity the very nature of music. This moment marks the that allows his revolutions to be more radical than start of his explicit concern with music as the activity those of his ground-zero Darmstadt peers; Nonoʼs of listening to the unsayable, and of composition as strategy was quite the opposite of Boulezʼs or Stock- the mediation of this activity. As such it cannot be hausenʼs desire to reimagine music ab initio. In all of static or dogmatic but must be ʻun-everythingʼ, as he the poetry set by Nono through the 1950s – Lorca, liked to say. The dramaturgy, the unfinishedness and Pavese, Ungaretti, Machado – the semantic and sonic the Sprechgesang (speech-singing) of Schoenbergʼs

30 opera continued to fascinate him; he pointed out on Pavese himself wrote of the depression of the artist several occasions, to Webern-centred (serialist) reader- following the birth of the manifestation of a myth.10 ships, that Schoenberg presents a more complex set And, indeed, Al gran sole carico dʼamore initiated a of questions than they imagined. This also marks the protracted period of intense difficulty in which, apart beginning of his involvement with Jewish thought in from a few occasional works, Nono produced only particular, and with thought on the philosophical and the textless work, …sofferte onde serene… (1976), geographical fringes of Europe in general.8 Several for piano and tape; itself a study in the very act strands feed this line of development: an understanding of the production of music. Rather than polemical of composition as a hermeneutic activity, the figure of multimedia, …sofferte onde serene… is a work of Schoenberg himself, communism as non-Catholicism, unique unitary immanence in Nonoʼs output, sculpting and Venice itself as an interface with non-European fragments of Polliniʼs piano-playing into a modulated cultures, indifferent to the power of the Church and stillness that transcends the personal suffering which home to the first ghetto. is at its origin and reflects his own Venetian physical In an interview while working on A Floresta (1966) environment. In the string quartet of 1979, Fragmente – a piece combining three voices, soprano, clarinet, – Stille, an Diotima, a work which challenges and copper plates and tape – Nono spoke of his increasing extends the activity of listening through its ʻsuspended use of documentary texts: momentsʼ of long sustained chords and protracted I choose documentary texts … because I believe silences, Nono printed short passages from Hölderlin they have a greater relationship to reality than pure for the players alone, and in rehearsals insisted on poetry. We still live in the time that Brecht de- the observance of this inner reciting for the music to scribed: it was indeed beautiful to speak of flowers, ʻsoundʼ. The absence of the text itself from the sound roses and love, but unfortunately social conditions of the work is one logical conclusion of his desire to do not permit it. I am also convinced that as a mu- extend their meaning into music. One is reminded of sician I have a social duty to fulfil. I am convinced that as a musician one lives within a historical Nonoʼs account of Scherchenʼs rehearsing of romantic situation.9 orchestral works, when he would add words to a phrase to convey its sense to the performers. Here the textual ʻDocumentaryʼ itself conceals many levels of media- multiplicity of works like Al gran sole is replaced by a tion and aesthetic complexity. The artifice in the work new multiplicity: that of the constructive interpretation of politically engaged writers such as Lorca and Pavese brought to bear by performer and listener. The model is clear, but even in the case of Il Canto Sospeso the is not Hölderlinʼs finished poems but his sketchbooks, texts are drawn from an influential collection with its in which alternative words, lines of development, and own art and agenda. Documentary, then, might refer even languages, exist side by side with no apparent rather to the signified – the truth of injustice, of politi- selection. cal struggle – than to the signifying words themselves. This might be a valid argument in the terms of the Musical thought 1960s, but too simplistic and counter to Nonoʼs stated position. The crucial authenticity seems to be that of In talking of his discovery of a new productiveness the voice, the directness of communication whether and establishment of a new compositional practice, from artist, hero or victim. Sara dolce tacere (ʻit will Nono most frequently referred to two factors: his work be sweet to keep quietʼ), lines from Pavese set by with live electronics at the SWF Experimental Studio Nono in 1958, proved to be prescient. The inextricable at Freiburg, and his collaboration with philosopher interpenetration of music, text, aesthetic/philosophical Massimo Cacciari. The techniques of live electronics thought and social engagement came to a head in the offered Nono a means of realizing new relationships ʻazione scenicaʼ, Al gran sole carico dʼamore (1975). with time, space, structure and text – both verbal ʻAzione scenicaʼ (action on stage) is a term Nono and musical – which had seemed to have reached the adopted for his vision of music-theatre developed from limits of practicability in the works of the early 1970s, Il Canto Sospeso onwards, and the irony that Venice particularly since the Al gran sole carico dʼamore. should have given rise to both modern opera and its He could now apply these emergent ideas directly in metamorphosis in a new aesthetic and social reality his own practice. At the same time the formulation would not have been lost on him. Networks of multi- of these ideas and thus their subsequent development plicity and simultaneity of text, material and identity found a new catalyst in his relationship with Cacciari, are focused on a timeless point in the here and now who provided the text for several works over the next of the work and its audience. decade, particularly their tragedia dellʼascolto (tragedy

31 of listening), Prometeo, an ʻoperaʼ first premiered in Nono was thus presented with a very specific com- 1984. positional challenge: how to bring the performer and Writing of the piece Das atmende Klarsein (1981), listener to engage with the musical/poetical reality of for bass flute, tape and live electronics, Nono refers to the immanent present within the sequential context the multiple nature of the instant,11 which according to of musical times, structures and actions. The simul- Cacciari had become something of an obsession for the taneous doing and comprehending of a musical act in composer.12 Following Musil, Nono observed often that a multiple present, in which none of its possibilities is a sense of reality must imply a sense of possibility. The denied, becomes the central concern of Prometeo. For Man without Qualities, he suggested, is itself an ideal Cacciari, this concern with the moment of revelation is manual for composition. Indeed it affords a metaphor precisely what makes it a tragedy. The present moment for Nonoʼs process in this period of eliminating not becomes a node in structural and – in the multiple only the superfluous but everything that detracts or musical references of La lontananza (1988), for violin, points away from the present; a ʻprocess of emptying, live electronics and tape – historical networks:

) At the opposite of a sole movimentum, common to all, an arhythmic succession of points, arbitrary, naked of their own sounds, is that of Prometeo which ﬂattens paths, creates vast ʻfreeʼ equal spaces, destroys presupposi- tions. In its laws, the past is simply has-been

… and the present is a plane from which we stretch ʻeverything togetherʼ out into the future … Instead the time [of Prometeo] … is polyphonic: its dimensions are presented simultaneously; the past of this line, of this idea, of this thought, of this single word can be the future of another. The present is not a plane common to all, but the unrepeatable instant, clear and alive, of this singularity. photo Graziano Arici, courtesy Luigi Archivo Venice Nono, Massimo Cacciari and Luigi Nono ( Like the Angelo Nuovo, it sings a moment, erasing, purificationʼ, in Cacciariʼs words.13 Wittgen- but this moment is unique and unrepeatable, and for 16 stein also figured, for both Nono and Cacciari, in this this uniqueness and unrepeatablity it is necessary. need ʻto break with schematism, with formulas, with The acrostic miracle of sixteenth-century polyphony mannerisms, with givens and the taken for granted, – the relationship between the vertical and horizontal with repetitionʼ.14 Characteristically, this was accom- dimensions of musical space – had informed Nonoʼs panied by a political repositioning; not an abandon- work since his first studies in composition with Gian ing of principle, but a leaving-behind of dogma and Francesco Malipiero and Bruno Maderna, particularly orthodoxy as Nono ceased his active engagement with in his interpretation of serialism. It provides a plane the PCI. Prometeo is mentioned in the letter in which on which events and thought can be simultaneous Cacciari proposes extracts from Rilke and Orphic without being temporally identical, and vice-versa. In hymns for Das atmende Klarsein, and in which he Prometeo and its related works, Nono thinks through summarizes his view of Nonoʼs relationship with text the ʻdisappearance of unique, unitary, unifying timeʼ in and thought: terms of an earlier ars combinatoria.17 He thus finds a What they [certain musicologists] understand is the logically consistent solution to the technical issues pro- dissolution (really: dis-solve – and, therefore, criti- posed in Al gran sole. In their very identification, he cal – no sudden illumination) of the relationship of draws a line between the theorists of sixteenth-century the metaphysical with the signified – what they will polyphony – who by no coincidence mostly breathed never understand (as good ʻavant gardeʼ…) is how the same Venetian air – and contemporary philosophy. everything is still given in the ʻsignʼ – and thus cer- tainly also Fabbrica, also Floresta. The ʻrevolution- At the same time, he ensures that our engagement can aryʼ side of what youʼre doing today seems to me only be with the immanent – the underlying formal to be precisely in the non-resolving (still peacefully structures are unretrievable to the ear; moments are and…) of the metaphysics of the signified in her suspended, separated by silences of such density that ʻsisterʼ, the sign.… That it should be difficult, and listening removes itself from chronological time to painful, I can understand.15 deal with the contents of echoic memory; and repre-

32 sentation as a mnemonic for performance is separated mentʼ which he worked so intensively with particular from its affording a mode of analysis. Hence Nonoʼs performers throughout this period to achieve, and in frequent later references to the centrality of listening the re-formation of each of the late chamber works in in Jewish thought, as opposed to the representations every different acoustic. and misrepresentations of Christianity. Cacciari dates discussion of Prometeo to a trip The ʻpeacefullyʼ of the letter above seems to refer to Sardinia in 1976, and their collaboration is men- to the ʻweak Messianic powerʼ, ʻwhich alone can trans- tioned by Nono as early as 1977. An understanding formʼ; ʻthe strength of the absence of violence which of a common approach to Prometeo appears to have is at the heart of the assemblage of texts Cacciari pre- emerged soon, as well as a sense of the way in which sented to Nono on Christmas Day, 1982.18 ʻDo not contact with Cacciari had begun to influence his own waste it … this weak Messianic power … to put into practice: silence in the moment the empty duration.ʼ19 Frag- above all in the relationship between laws and ments from Benjaminʼs Theses on the Philosophy of their transgression towards a new formulation … I History, from Hölderlin and Hesiod are paraphrased am interested in the struggle between the founda- and rearranged into what are termed islands; static tion of the principles of life and the continuous areas between which composer and listener construct dynamic which leads to their transcending, even multiple trajectories and perspectives. The texts are if in a continually conflictual relationship.… With spoken, sung, fragmented, counterpointed and layered, Cacciari, through long conversations, I have man- aged to expand my methods of analysis, I manage and absent, hidden in the score; a cantar e a sonar to perceive new ways of thinking, to increasingly as Nono indicates on several occasions, in reference embrace the multiple, to overcome certain schemati- to earlier Venetian music. Their comprehensibility is zations, certain habits, certain common categories.21 constantly shifting. Multiplicity and the active engagement of the imagination of the listener are inseparable Nono adds: ʻFrom Massimo I have learned very much. themes that run through Nonoʼs writing in this period To begin with, to look at the text rather than the and Cacciariʼs later work DellʼInizio (ʻOf Originsʼ). context, which becomes a banal sociology in one 22 The very possibility of action in the present is opened branch of the soviet school.ʼ to Nonoʼs exploration by the new theoretical and tech- This capacity to assimilate new and evolving modes nological tools at his disposal. This is the search for of thought in the fabric of his work was rooted in Nonoʼs the Rilkean Augenblick (instant); the word that may early and thorough acquaintance with early Venetian not be anticipated or recalled. music theory, which understands music as embodied 23 Multiplicity and trajectory, rather than narrative philosophy – whether the conservative Zarlino, the 24 25 line, also inform Nonoʼs use of space; in this case humanist Galiliei or the pragmatic Zacconi – as the wooden ark constructed inside the Church of San well as in an unceasing engagement with the issues Lorenzo by Renzo Piano. The physical space is not a that had brought music to its present state: canvas for narrative or drama but an ever-present ana- Composing musically isnʼt just a technical matter, it logue of the simultaneity of the sequentially presented is not handcraft, it is thought … Schoenberg taught music. With the suspension of chronological time, to think, not to compose.… This is also demonstrat- space or rather place becomes crucial.20 Spatiality and ed in the renaissance – from Zarlino, Zacconi and movement are central to this use of sound. The real- Artusi to Padre Martini – when one always spoke of differences of musical thought.26 time sound transformations of live electronics allowed Nono to explore the present in terms of parameters Cacciari describes Nono as ʻalways a composer, in – space, resonance, time, frequency – which were the strictly artisanal sense of the word, in the classical already inherent in his own cultural past. The time- understanding of the termʼ.27 The mutual nature of frequency domain relationship at the technological their collaboration is acknowledged in Cacciariʼs own core of such operations literally abstracts sounds from work, although he is careful to note that in neither their chronological context; an inevitable quantum case should such influence be read too literally onto trade-off between frequency and time constrains all the surface.28 In the book Icone della Legge (ʻIcon knowledge about sound. There is a cognitive contigu- of the Lawʼ) (1985, and hence contemporary with the ity between the architectural movement of performers revisions of Prometeo), the chapter ʻThe Mouth of in Prometeo, the formal use of acoustic and virtual Mosesʼ is a meditation on the Moses of Freud and of space as a compositional device in Omaggio a György Schoenberg; Cacciari thanks Nono for his hand ʻin Kurtag (1983), in the ʻsound in continuous move- this chapter, the book and all the restʼ. The silence

33 he describes in his conclusion is that of Nono (quite of ancient memoryʼ. It is in light of this that Nono different to that of Cage, as Nono had observed): claims the ʻtechnology of today allows us to rediscover our past in a new way, to study itʼ.35 Jabèsʼ book also The word which is missing is the name, that sound extends the biblical interdiction of representation to – missing is the word capable of expressing the writing in general; and Nonoʼs musical response was silence without betraying it, to express the silence 36 as silence, to hear the inaudible, to hear it truly in immediate. Découvrir la subversion: Hommage à as much as it is truly inaudible.29 Edmond Jabès, the resultant work, persists only in its sketches and the fact of its performance. Perhaps we LʼAngelo Necessario (ʻThe Necessary Angelʼ) of the should likewise see Nonoʼs use of material generated following year also addresses issues central to Pro- in the course of the research process in interaction meteo: if pure representation refers to pure idea as a with certain musicians as a process of structural self- pre-given, how is immanence possible? Angels become effacement. The book, the text, as Jabès points out, is ʻgods of the instantʼ. always too late: Cacciariʼs major work of the decade was DellʼInizio (ʻOf Originsʼ), the importance of which was anticipated To go into the silence is to measure oneself against the unknown, the unknowable. In no way to learn by Nono some years previously, and the first copy of what one doesnʼt know, but on the contrary to which he survived to receive. Cacciari dedicated a unlearn, to be ultimately nothing but an antenna for chapter on hearing to Nono: ʻuntil the absent God the infinity into which we sink.37 makes himself heardʼ.30 And, as Röller has pointed out, the dialogues through which Cacciariʼs ideas develop Transforming time could virtually be transcriptions of their conversa- Which of the theoretical paths pursued by Nono could, tions.31 Cacciari takes from Benjamin the notion that in then, help us to understand the later works, those in representation, word and idea are one.32 The relation- which conscious ʻschematicizationʼ has been explicitly ship between this dual unity and song is, according to banished, in which are heard the emergent product of a Cacciari, what underlies all Nonoʼs work, especially deep historical and theoretical awareness and a rigor- in his last fifteen years.33 The death of listening is ous action-in-the-present? Cacciariʼs work would seem therefore inevitable when we no longer need to hear an obvious starting point, but analytical understand- to understand; that we write music is symptomatic. ing arises from the friction, the difference generated That they describe Prometeo as tragedia dellʼascolto, between analytical model and object. The complexity ʻtragedy of listeningʼ, has historic significance for of intellectual exchange is such that Cacciariʼs work both of them: it refers to Nietzscheʼs declaration of is to an extent a product of the same common activ- the inseparability of music and tragic myth, but also to ity. Nonoʼs library – every new volume identified by Monteverdiʼs ʻTragedia in musicaʼ, Orfeo, a prime can- date and place – provides a map of the evolution of didate for a starting point of modern Western music. his intellectual environment. Levinas and Derrida are Cacciari was also instrumental in introducing the present, as Nono described, because he understood Egyptian–French–Jewish poet-philosopher Edmond their work as a hermeneutical activity which dem- Jabès to Italian readers, and to Nono. Jabèsʼ short, onstrates the passing of systematic thought, of the dry questioning style offers no answers and affords Enlightenment.38 Derridaʼs Speech and Phenomena, no reduction; as poetic form it is descended directly the work dealing most directly with Nonoʼs crucial from radical philosophy. To transcend or escape self relationship of speech, text and act, he bought in the and yet be able to act is at the ethical heart of aesthetic French original and later in its Italian translation. behaviour, and was Nonoʼs abiding concern. Jabès sug- Strikingly absent from Nonoʼs library and discussion gested a certain model here. Cacciari writes that, in his is Deleuze. Perhaps this is for circumstantial reasons, Book of Margins, for example, ʻJabès breaks the “pact” or perhaps precisely because Deleuzeʼs work is not of Levinas between the other and the face. The abso- hermeneutic; like Nonoʼs it proposes new constructs, lute other is also that which is other to every face.ʼ34 the experience of which transforms our relationship Nono meanwhile searched for open textual structures with the others that surround us. ʻOnly by legworkʼ which could be organized like the textual ʻislandsʼ is Deleuzeʼs formulation of Nonoʼs Hay che caminar of Prometeo. In Jabèsʼ Little Book of Unsuspected (ʻtraveller – there is no path, only walkingʼ; Nonoʼs Subversion Nono found him theorizing ʻcontinuous motto for his last series of works). ʻOf the refrainʼ, and interrogation, continuous questions, continuous doubts, ʻConcrete rules and abstract machinesʼ, in A Thousand continuous research … ancient memory, discoveries Plateaus, also provide parallels with Nonoʼs own des-

34 tratified space which could constructively be enumer- confronts in these works – the increasing hegemony ated. Nonoʼs work is likewise the product of a search of the musical predicate to the point where we must for ʻpure immanenceʼ, a kind of new empiricism. In be freed from it. The musical predicate is how Sch- both cases this is founded on an intimate acquaintance oenberg describes tonal music – comprehensibility, the with the gods which Nono tells us after Hölderlin decoding of ʻis aʼ – and it is what he leaves behind and Nietzsche are dead and not yet reborn. However, in his vision of ʻthe unity of musical space [which] to return to Paveseʼs article, this might reinforce an demands an absolute and unitary perceptionʼ.41 A more aesthetic appreciation of both artists rather than initiat- accelerated growth of predicational violence can be ing the active, creative, personal response which Nono seen through the Darmstadt years, culminating in describes and affords. Nonoʼs debate with Stockhausen. Some articles by Cacciari published together in The concerns of Nonoʼs late work – the relation- 1980 as Dallo Steinhof (translated as Posthumous ship of speech, text and act, space and the perpetual People) – some of which had appeared in Laboratorio movement of sound, the suspension of time and action Musicale, edited by Nono – may appear at first sight to in the present moment, simultaneity, representation, have little relevance.39 In their reflection on Viennese the leaving behind of schemas – are all ultimately thought at the beginning of the twentieth century – the functions of time. They all address the same technical cultural moment which is the subject of Musilʼs great issue: how to mediate and transform the time of human book – Cacciariʼs essays point to the crucial role of a experience and culture without denying or negating difference between language games, or rather between the power of its continuity and directionality? Perhaps multiple language games and subject. Perhaps this the most useful key, finally, lies in Benjaminʼs famous is the difference that opens up new spaces wherein evocation of a ʻweak Messianic forceʼ, in the Theses the ʻmoment of revelationʼ, later referred to by Nono, on the Philosophy of History: becomes possible. He explores the commensurability The present … as a model of Messianic time, com- of formal or logical, phenomenological and natural prises the entire history of mankind in an enormous language spaces for the development of understand- abridgement … For every second of time [is] the ing. Language, he notes, brings to bear the power strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.42 of intentio. He looks at the ambivalent relationship of text and music as described by Schoenberg and A postscript for any who may be tempted to regard sees a strength in their non-coincidence. Nono uses real-world controversy surrounding the political actions text to keep this space open, to avoid any possibility of major thinkers as a thing of the past. Fifty metres of reduction. A space is kept open within which an from the Archivio Luigi Nono on Giudecca is the most emergent immanence is possible. It is not described visible trace of Cacciariʼs impact on the cityscape of or formally implied, and conceptual models will not Venice: the Molino Stucky, a vast nineteenth-century adhere to the musical text. Exceptions to this strategy warehouse being restored as a congress centre over are few; …sofferte onde serene…, with its particular a decade, at great expense to the city. During the circumstances, may perhaps be one. research for this article in the Archivio, the Molino Finally, he considers the violence of preaching/ burned down in an afternoon. Nobody has suggested predication identified by Nietzsche and which he sees this was an accident. Musilʼs book as attempting to eradicate at one point; a Notes critique of the category of ʻbeingʼ, of the verb ʻto beʼ, the elimination of which Derrida says would leave us I wish to thank Nuria Schoenberg-Nono and Erika Schaller of the Archivio Luigi Nono for their generous assistance. a language of pure invocation, of pure adoration. The utopia of language dispossessed of all ʻbeingʼ can only 1. Massimo Cacciari, in Nils Röller, Migranten: Edmond Jabès, Luigi Nono, Massimo Cacciari, Merve, Berlin, be called from afar, says Cacciari, because it would 1995, p. 13. ultimately become a form of listening. This ʻdivineʼ 2. Massimo Cacciari, ʻNote sulla dialettica del negativo state, he says of Musil, is necessarily denied. He nellʼepoca della Metropoliʼ, Angelus Novus 21, 1971, p. 37. describes the essay in question as ʻan attempt to give 3. Massimo Cacciari, ʻSul problema dellʼorganizzazione. 40 voice to the silence that embraces all preachingʼ. In Germania 1917–1921ʼ, in György Lukàcs, Kommunismus this analysis we find a mode of understanding, not just 1920–1921, Marsilio, Padua, 1972, pp. 7–66. of the last period of Nonoʼs work, the period of col- 4. Massimo Cacciari, Krisis, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1976. 5. Luigi Nono, Scritti e colloqui, 2 vols, ed. Angela Ida laboration with Cacciari which this phrase describes Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, Ricordi, Milano, 2001, beautifully, but of the historical trajectory that he Vol. 1, pp. 57–83.

35 6. See Norberto Bobbio, A Political Life, Polity, Cambridge, 25. Lodovico Zacconi, Prattica di Musica, 2 vols, Venice, 2002, p. 42. 1596/1622. 7. Cesare Pavese, La letteretura americana e altri saggi, 26. Luigi Nono in Wie Hölderlin komponierte, WDR radio Einaudi, Turin, 1951, pp. 315–22. broadcast, 1980. 8. Laurent Feyneyrou, ʻMoses and the Warsaw Ghetto: 27. Cisternino, ʻCon Luigi Nonoʼ, p. 33. Arnold Schoenberg According to Luigi Nonoʼ, Avidi 28. Ibid., p. 24. Lumi V, 2002, p. 15. 29. Massimo Cacciari, LʼIcone della Legge, Adelphi, Milan, 9. Theo Gallehr, Denn der Wald ist jung und voller Leben, 1985, pp. 176–7. television documentary, WDR, Cologne, 1968. 30. Massimo Cacciari, DellʼInizio, Adelphi, Milan, 1990, p. 10. See Pavese, La letteretura americana. 707. 11. Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 1, p. 487. 31. Röller, Migranten, p. 14. 12. Nicola Cisternino, ʻCon Luigi Nono… per rivedere le 32. Massimo Cacciari, LʼAngelo Necessario, Adelphi, stelle. Conversazione con Massimo Cacciariʼ, in Gian- Milan, 1986, p. 78; translated as The Necessary Angel, vincenzo Cresta, ed., Lʼascolto del pensiero: Scritti su State University of New York Press, New York, 1994. Luigi Nono, Ruggimenti, Milano, 2002, p. 24. 33. Massimo Cacciari, Conversazione con il prof. Massimo 13. Ibid., p. 27. Cacciari, documentary ﬁlm, Arezzo, 1996. 14. Luigi Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 2, p. 262. 34. Massimo Cacciari, in Röller, Migranten, p. 69. 15. Letter from Cacciari to Nono, 19 August 1980. 35. Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 2, p. 390. 16. Massimo Cacciari, ʻVerso Prometeo, tragedia 36. See Röller, Migranten, pp. 38–44. dellʼascoltoʼ, in Cacciari, ed., Verso Prometeo, Ricordi, 37. Edmond Jabès, in Röller, Migranten, p. 21. Milan, 1984, p. 20. 38. Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 2, p. 403. 17. Nono, ʻVerso Prometeo, Frammenti di diariʼ, in Cacciari, 39. Massimo Cacciari, Dallo Stienhof, Adelphi, Milan, ed., Verso Prometeo, p. 15. 1980; translated as Posthumous People: Vienna at the 18. Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 2, pp. 425, 456. Turning Point, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 19. Cacciari, Verso Prometeo, p. 74. 1994. 20. Cisternino, ʻCon Luigi Nonoʼ, p. 26. 40. Ibid., p. 206. 21. Nono, Scritti e colloqui, Vol. 2, p. 256. 41. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings 22. Ibid., p. 333. of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leo Stein, trans. Leo Black, 23. Gioseffe Zarlino, Le Isititutioni harmoniche, Venice, Faber, London, 1975, p. 223. 1562. 42. Walter Benjamin, ʻTheses on the Philosophy of Historyʼ, 24. Vincenzo Galiliei, Dialogo… della musica antica e della in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana, London, moderna, Venice, 1581. 1973, p. 255. ��