A guide to Luigi Nono's music | Classical music

A guide to Luigi Nono's music

Luigi Nono's music was never going to change the world. There's a cliche that the Italian composer's trenchant political convictions, and the stream of pieces he wrote with avowedly protesting or politically radical titles and messages – the music theatre pieces Intolleranza (which caused a partisan riot at its premiere in 1961 at La Fenice in Venice) and Al gran sole carico d'amore, his anti-fascist orchestral and choral masterpiece from the mid-50s Il canto sospeso, his experimental anti-capitalist cantata for soprano and tape La fabbrica illuminata, or the violent expressionism of the partly improvised A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida – are narrow-minded pieces of agitprop that beat their audiences over the head with superficial sloganising and alternately despairing or utopian imagery.

There is a grain of truth in some of that, in the way, for example, Al gran sole has its revolutionary choruses of poster-paint vividness, but what I want to give you in a selection of listening to Nono is the sheer musical richness of his achievement, and especially the pieces he wrote and conceived in the 15 years or so before his death in 1990. Few composers have wanted their music to say, to mean, to be about something more than Nono did, and few have understood as keenly that every musical decision a composer makes also has social and political ramifications. But Nono's real legacy, I think, is in drawing attention to the act of listening itself as a space to sound out ourselves and our relationship with the world, something that's much more politically profound than any kind of rabblerousing from the rooftops.

Here's what I'm talking about: this music of shimmering spaces, disturbed silences, sharp-edged fragments and dream-like unpredictability, his very last work, "Hay que caminar" Soñando for two violins, which Irvine Arditti and David Alberman premiered in 1989. It's music in which you participate almost as much as the performers, acting out your own dream-journey of moving through a landscape that's at once still and violent. It's one of a handful of pieces that Nono wrote at the end of his life inspired by a motto he discovered on the walls of a monastery in Toledo in Spain: "Caminante no hay caminos hay que caminar", one of the great aphorisms that's roughly but inelegantly translatable as "traveller, there is no way to travel, only travelling". It's a motto that encapsulates the search through unmarked musical territories on which Nono's late music embarks – and symbolises how far he and his music had come from any sense of artistic or cultural certainties. Nono isn't telling you how to listen in Hay que caminar, only offering a soundscape for your ears to navigate along with the progress of the two violinists.

That sort of contemplative intimacy might have seemed unlikely if you knew Nono as a young man, when he was one of the defining personalities and agent provocateurs of the Darmstadt-based avant garde, the cauldron of creativity, controversy and conflict between composers and musical ideas. Nono and Stockhausen fell out over the word-setting of Nono's Il canto sospeso – an argument about musical semantics and politics that composers just don't have enough any more – and they didn't talk again for decades. Nono took a musical and ideological hard line with composers who didn't fit his vision of musical progress, whether Henze or Stravinsky. But when you hear his own music of the period now, it's the lyricism and delicacy of his breakthrough piece, the Canonical Variations on Schoenberg's tone-row from his Ode to Napoleon that's so striking, or the limpidity of the instrumental music from Il canto sospeso. (That connection with Schoenberg wasn't just importantly symbolically to Nono: he fell in love with and married Schoenberg's daughter Nuria in 1955.)

But there can be a grandiosity in Nono's music, as in the choral scenes of Intolleranza or the despair and, ultimately, hope of Al gran sole carico d'amore, written in 1975, not least because of the power and prominence of the choral writing in the later piece: the choruses "play a greater role than the soloists", Nono said. "That is both a theatrical and a social idea … Musical means of expression are utilised in order to encompass the expression of individual and collective utterance in one person."

It was the music that Nono wrote from the mid-70s that marked a different world of sonic exploration, often involving electronics, and new kinds of very slow or even static time, and silence. The effect of these pieces, from the clangorous, lamenting … sofferte onde serene … for piano and tape in 1976 to Prometeo, his gigantic sonic installation for Venice in 1984/5 is both to focus objectively on the minutiae of individual voices, textures and sounds and to explore the inner world of our own imaginations and ways of hearing. Prometeo is Nono's magnum opus, a piece he calls a "tragedy of listening", involving a set up that seems theatrical on the face of it, with groups of singers and instrumentalists stationed around the hall and the audience, all projected and manipulated with live electronics. (Prometeo's original space was a wooden "ark" designed by Renzo Piano.) The experience of the piece is resonantly mythic and resolutely contemporary; over more than two hours it becomes less a drama about Promethean ideas and more a dramatisation of what it means to listen, to find your place in the slowly yet suddenly changing soundscape projected around you, what it means to find the work's elusive meaning from the textures of mysterious vocalisation you hear throughout the piece. Along with the Hay que caminar pieces, Prometeo is Nono's most ambitious, immersive, and, for me, his most important work.

If you want one place to start with, try the Tre Voci sections, among the most beautiful minutes of music Nono ever wrote, like an infinitely subtle and surreal refraction of 17th-century madrigals heard through a halo of electronics and amplification. Maybe it's music that does have the power to change the world after all, through the subtlest but most powerful medium of all – our ears.

Five key links

Prometeo

Intolleranza

… sofferte onde serene …

"Hay que caminar" sonañdo

Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKWlqLake9OopKydoqu2pLHBpaagZ2JlfnN7zaitaGpmZLm2tcaiZKennqR6pLvNrZymqJ%2BnrrPFjKasrKGTYrS2tcOe