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

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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
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