“It's always too late”: Luigi Nono's Politics of Dissonance
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Commissioned by Martina Francesca Cavalot for Luigi Nono: Sound as rule, notation as epilogue, 22 Nov 2024 at KM28, Berlin.
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– 1. –
There is a moment in “Hay que caminar” soñando, at exactly eight measures in, which is usually about a minute into the work, where, having propelled the air into movement with a quick succession of staccato notes that sequester into a brief instant of silence, one of the violins plays a piercing pitch over three bars, a note that whistles into the room softly, wavering, like air leaking from a container. Like air leaking from a container, one does not notice its displacement until a visible change in shape occurs. Or until we hear the other violin whistling in, this time beginning with a little more volume: another leak. For just about half a minute more, each of the two violins vacillate between various degrees of pitches no louder than a hiss. The barely perceptible crescendos and decrescendos deny the audience the stillness of silence by displacing it with another; the air is simmering, this leaky stillness more organic than absolute silence itself. And then the pitches return to the more typical range of the violin, but the ghosts of this moment – these hissing leaks – linger along throughout the remainder of the composition, Luigi Nono’s final completed piece. Without silence to return to, what does sound fall back on? These pitches are dissonant because they remain unresolved , they do not find themselves in a kind of release1 or response, a momentary shelter; they do not find themselves. “Hay que caminar” soñando is the last in a cluster of works whose titles draw from an inscription at a monastery in Toledo, Spain, from a poem by Antonio Machado, “Caminante, no hay caminos, hay que caminar,” which roughly translates to “Wayfarer, there are no paths, [yet] you must walk.” The dissonant sound lacks destination. It wanders, unanchored and unlocalizable, in perpetual flux. The tragedy of listening ends in silence decomposing into sound.
– 2. –
“I think of an authentic past,” commented Nono on Robert Schumann’s Fantasie in C as a self-fragmenting compositional technique, “that lives buried in us and which suddenly jumps out and which we then discover is from two thousand years ago, carried along by the currents of history, by great waves of culture.” This concept of an authentic past carries another medium of2 dissonance that Nono employs in his compositions: tape music, broadcast on speakers and written to be integrated with live performers. In La fabbrica illuminata, a solo soprano is centered mid-stage and surrounded by four channels broadcasting Nono’s carefully assembled magnetic tape music. Although, the sounds within the opera that one would associate with the sonic palette of electroacoustic music – the metallic, static fuzz of industrial noise – are not the outcome of feedback that is created in performance through live manipulation of inputs/outputs and distortion, but a predetermined transformation of sonic material Nono collected at a steel3 manufacturing plant in Genoa belonging to a company named Italsider. In performance, the libretto is thus incanted both by the soprano and factory workers in a text strung together by the writer Giuliano Scabia consisting of verbal fragments derived from the workers’ own communication with each other at the factory, their union contracts, and poetry by the anti-fascist neorealist writer Cesare Pavese. Intersticing these voices are the reverberations of steel, smelting and pouring and clanging.
But volume – sheer volume, precisely indicated again through dynamic markings – is ever as important as the fabric in which the voices and sounds weave in and out of each other. When La fabbrica illuminata begins, it is their alternating volume that distinguishes the soloist from the tape music; foregrounding a barely-decipherable chorus of worker voices, her voice appears as the role of a Greek chorus, the commentator who declares, “fabbrica dei morti la chiamavano”: the factory of the dead, they called it. As she continues to describe the labor conditions of the workers, her narration is delivered in outbursts with attacks at ff (fortissimo) and fff (fortississimo), and even a rapid, piercing crescendo from p (piano) to ff. As the piece transitions into the second section, the soloist sings nothing for a stretch of nearly three minutes; she stands on-stage surrounded by the four speakers purely as a witness, contributing nothing but her silent presence to the cacophonous scenes of labor. After which, when she begins to speak again, her voice either emerges from the tape music or becomes absorbed by it. Bending together with the worker’s voices and industrial soundscape, she becomes indistinguishable, subsumed in the machine.
The sonorous fragments of this particular machine were captured by the tape at a time past, but the moments of labor and the physical transformation of steel are ongoing and continue routinely at the factory. Meanwhile, the recording is only broadcast in performances, which have been sporadic since its premiere. With the use of tape music, the past which has nowhere to land and as such “suddenly jumps out” to allow us to discover it anew, is agnostic to thematic inclinations that would otherwise render it inauthentic. Nono developed close working relationships with the factory workers, seeking criticism alongside their co-operation; while Nono studied the psycho-physical effects of their work environment, the workers, upon attending the performance, were not interested in the Marxist messages as much of Nono’s audiences would seize, but in the “cultural and mental processes that had brought [him] to that work, [his] technical choices in the use of one particular kind of material rather than another.”4
Up until the fourth and final section, the piece moves along a fixed temporal boundary since the tape runs from the first to the third section uninterrupted. Even though the pitches are determined as they would be in any score, the presence of the tape music urges the soloist not to focus strictly on the written score, but instead to respect the intervals between the tape and the vocal line, as Lilliana Poli, a soprano who performed a number of Nono’s compositions, advised future performers of the work . When she returns to speak a full stanza uninterrupted, released of5 the factory’s heaving breath, she recites fragments of Pavese’s poems: “the mornings will pass / the anguish will fade / it will not be this way forever / you will recover something.” It is a hopeful message, optimism bearing on the passage of time, but who is she now? Is she speaking as the witness or as the wishful factory worker? In the tragedy of listening we can’t tell to whom a sound belongs. In this final section, there is no echo of the labor conditions or the factory at all. And yet she sings of resolve: a coda to the infinite histories that come before, and that will come. She is the voice of the authentic past.
Over twenty years later, Nono would premiere Post-Prae-Ludium No.1 "per Donau" (1987), written for the tuba as the solo instrument only accompanied by its own electro acoustically enhanced reverberations, allowing the tuba’s sound to be interrupted by itself through “random sound events.” The composition concludes with the performer using the6 technology of the instrument in a different approach, by reproducing a decay in delays of nearly thirty seconds over its four-speaker system – a clear pitch unmistakably coming only from the upper register of the tuba, held in space for nearly three minutes, an unnatural duration, a kind of duration and frequency that resembles an air raid siren except that it gradually converges to7 zero. Similarly in La fabbrica illuminata, a voice, unenhanced and unmarred, carries on.
– 3. –
When the Italsider workers heard La fabbrica illuminata performed with their words and much more largely, their work, their reaction was centered on an awareness of their alienated state at the factory. In the reflections they shared with Nono they commented, “We work like mechanized robots, almost no longer realizing the violence of the human sound situation. Now we are rediscovering it and recovering awareness of it even through music.” Played back on8 tape, extracted from the setting in which the very same sounds are produced and inhabited everyday, the workers hear as though for the first time the violent and dehumanizing conditions they are subjected to. Why does the reality of subjugation remain unperceived until expressed through dissonance?
In the 1967 essay-documentary Far from Vietnam made by a collective of filmmakers of the French New Wave, Bernard Fresson’s character, a writer in Paris, spirals into a fourteen minute monologue on the war that happens “not in Vietnam, heads, streets, but in a piece of furniture,” since for the first time in history, everyone around the world is able to witness the war, telecasted while it goes on. “They see it,” he seethes, pacing around his living room, “the bombs really kill, the bullets really make holes.” He directs his lamentations to his companion, she who lays on the couch and glares at him doe-eyed, but those eyes while wide open are vacant, languid, indifferent. At the present moment of a livestreamed genocide committed by the Zionist coalition, thirteen months on: scenes of a death factory as barbaric as the concentration camps of World War II are not only shared within a scope of an ongoing war by being broadcast on the television days after capturing footage on the grounds being rampaged, but are posted to the internet in real-time. When a Palestinian journalist is killed by targeted strikes, news of the assassination reaches the world through our devices before the martyred journalist’s Instagram Stories expire from their 24-hour lifespan. We who do not live the violence are made aware of it as close to instantaneously as the instants occur, but it is always too late – spectatorship is always too late. The temporal gap is indefensible even if it keeps narrowing with the speed of fiber optic cables. In the tragedy of listening, the witness, with their eyes wide open, is always too late.
The condition of being subjugated is to be depleted of opportunities to abstract elements of one’s reality. Adam Hajyahia articulates in a stunning essay titled The Principle of Return: The repressed ruptures of Zionist time that Zionism produces a temporal architecture in which an interpretation of a biblical time fuels “the extraction of time over Palestinian psychic and material life.” Thus, only the witness, operating on a clock different – delayed – from the one that fuels the violence of a time-regime, is able to conjure the sound of resolution. For the subjugated, resolution can only be achieved by shattering the clock that extracts from them, and constructing another: the struggle of self-determination is not only a historical process but also a temporal one. “Palestinian return is from the present to a different present,” Hajyahia writes, “In other words, return produces possibility and fractures the apparatus that polices our imagination and our life. It is the opening to the future as endless uncaptured time.”9
– 4. –
It is the first week of November at the time of writing. A few days ago we took a walk in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, and as we crossed W 3rd Street towards Pan Pacific Park we began to hear the sounds of a music we least expected to hear in the pop-culture capital. We began to hear classical music, to be specific an orchestral piece played so loud we could not at once pinpoint its source. Was someone blasting Tchaikovsky from their car? Without any particular reason fuelling our curiosity we stepped closer to where the music seemed to originate from, a parking lot outside of a 7-Eleven store at the corner of the junction, across the entrance to the park, and paced around, mouths agape like silly fish swimming towards the smell of breadcrumbs, looking for the source of this afternoon surprise.
Having found no culprit amongst the half-dozen cars in the 7-Eleven parking lot, we stepped further in towards where we could hear the music loudest and ended up under the awning of the convenience store’s entrance, standing beneath the ubiquitous red, orange and green stripes. We looked up in search of speakers, but even when we looked them directly in the eye – they were there, a pair of white, squarish speakers affixed above the entrance, one on each side like a pair of Chinese imperial guardian lions – we struggled to realize the fact that those devices were the transmitter of this surreal aural experience. Riding on the dopamine hit of the near-hallucinatory moment, we took our walk through the park impressed by the music selection of the franchised convenience store – who knew? – although not for much longer: when we got home we recounted the moment to our brother who mentioned he had seen reports on Twitter of 7-Eleven stores playing classical music to deter the homeless from loitering in its vicinity. Naively appalled, we tapped on our smartphones to fact-check what was indeed a strategy tried and-tested throughout various states in the US, as well as in the UK.10
They would have been insidious if the music they broadcasted hadn’t been so loud, those speakers. Except that it was because it was so loud, so outward-facing towards the open street where people were walking not only towards the store but also in no particular direction, as we were, that it had to be an establishment instituted with the right to broadcast at a volume as high as 95 decibels , so loud that the senses would be enveloped such that one’s aural orientation11 could disconnect from the spatial, and not be able to tell where a sound came from. Furthermore, why classical music? We should have known better than to have been so enchanted. Even in the most neoliberal of cities the choice of music was never meant to be curated with the purpose of luring a targeted demographic group of potential customers in. Yet, if the purpose of blasting music at high volume is to ward against the homeless from dwelling in its shelter, a genre like black metal or even noise music would also most certainly do the trick. But it has always been classical music that is broadcast in public spaces. At this particular 7-Eleven station it was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture being put on. Never mind its explicit tones of war in depicting Russia’s military victory against Napoleon’s imperialism and the actual artillery fire included in its score (sixteen cannon shots precisely notated for the finale), 1812 Overture is one of the most frequently used pieces of classical “background music” because of the American appropriation of its nationalistic themes to soundtrack 4th of July celebrations, although Tchaikovsky’s beloved overture has in recent years been boycotted by several orchestras around the world due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent war . Played at low12 volumes in retail stores or elevators, moments like the quiet prayer opening at pp with a Russian Orthodox hymn and the battle sequences with the full orchestra at fffff become compressed into a polite complexity hovering between lyrical melody and abstract orchestral textures. Sound that has become synonymous with an air of refinement circulating as invisibly and naturally within the HVAC systems of these spaces that, when amplified to bewildering decibels from a 7-Eleven13 store, is still compressed in its dynamic range, still somewhat non-disruptive to its neighboring inhabitants, shopkeepers and especially to its customers – but at the same time serving as an effective nuisance to the homeless. In much of the world, 7-Eleven stores are operated as franchises, and franchise owners who wish to employ classical music as a repellent device against the homeless would receive speaker systems from the corporation, complete with the music pre-installed. The tragedy of listening begins with the dynamic range of a piece of music leaving the body of the score.
1 This definition of dissonance is taken from Charles Rosen, “Atonality chapter from Arnold Schoenberg,” 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2 Luigi Nono, interviewed by Enzo Estagno in 1987, “Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected 2 Writings and Interviews,” ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis, Veniero Rizzardi, (University of California Press, 2018), 43.
3 Described in a press statement by Casa Ricordi, “For the music on tape Nono used a selection of 3 recordings of the Coro della RAI in Milan, a recording of a number of improvisations on a canovaccio by the mezzo-soprano Carla Henius, voices and noises recorded at Italsider and synthesised sounds. These sonoric materials were re-elaborated at the RAI Sound Laboratory in Milan, blended and transformed electronically.” See https://www.ricordi.com/en-US/Critical-Editions/Nono-Luigi-Critical-Editions/Nono-La fabbrica-illuminata-Critical-Edition.aspx.
4 Luigi Nono, interviewed by Renato Garavaglia in 1979-80, “Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's 4 Selected Writings and Interviews,” ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis, Veniero Rizzardi, (University of California Press, 2018), 257.
5 Liliana Poli, in “Advice from the interpreters to the interpreters,” “LA FABBRICA ILUMINATA: Critical 5 Edition,” ed. Luca Cossettin, (Universal Music Publishing Ricordi, 2010).
6 Luigi Nono, in the performance notes for the first performance of the piece by Giancarlo Schiaffini on the 6 17 October 1987, translated by Jacob Sundstrom and Jenna Sotelo in “Luigi Nono's Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau, no. 1.”
7 An artifact worth noting: in August 2024, a Ukrainian singer Armenian-Georgian origin named Diana 7 Ohanesian posted to Instagram a video of her harmonizing with the air raid sirens on the streets of Kiev. The video went viral: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-7IvKWNeUh/.
8 Luigi Nono, interviewed by Renato Garavaglia in 1979-80, “Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's 8 Selected Writings and Interviews,” ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis, Veniero Rizzardi, (University of California Press, 2018), 281.
9 Adam Hajyahia, “The Principle of Return: The repressed ruptures of Zionist time,” in “Palestine” Issue, 9 (Parapraxis, 2024). https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-principle-of-return
10 This program has been running for several years. See https://www.latimes.com/california/story/ 10 2019-09-06/homeless-7-eleven-franchise-classical-music.
11 We measured the volume standing underneath the speakers on a decibel meter app on the iPhone. 11
12 Reported by The New York Times, “Amid Ukraine War, Orchestras Rethink ‘1812 Overture,’ a July 4 12 Rite,” (The New York Times, 5 July 2022).
13 HVAC is the common acronym used in English-speaking countries for heating, ventilation, and air 13 conditioning.