twentiethcenturymusic

http://journals.cambridge.org/TCM Additionalservicesfortwentiethcenturymusic: Emailalerts:Clickhere Subscriptions:Clickhere Commercialreprints:Clickhere Termsofuse:Clickhere

SpacesofResistance:theAdornoNonoComplex
WESLEYPHILLIPS
twentiethcenturymusic/Volume9/SpecialIssue12/March2012,pp7999 DOI:10.1017/S1478572212000217,Publishedonline:27March2013

Linktothisarticle:http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1478572212000217 Howtocitethisarticle: WESLEYPHILLIPS(2012).SpacesofResistance:theAdornoNonoComplex.twentiethcentury music,9,pp7999doi:10.1017/S1478572212000217 RequestPermissions:Clickhere

Downloadedfromhttp://journals.cambridge.org/TCM,IPaddress:169.234.243.239on09Apr2013

twentieth-century music 9/12, 7999 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013 doi:10.1017/S1478572212000217

Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

WESLEY PHILLIPS

Abstract The historical and theoretical resonances between the work of Theodor Adorno and that of Luigi Nono have hitherto remained underexplored. In this article a debate is constructed between the two figures concerning the politics of space in advanced music in order to question a frequently held opposition between autonomous and political art. Nono can be seen to interweave German and Italian traditions of historical materialism, responding simultaneously to the issues of both reification and imperialism. This is drawn out by way of Adornos evolving attitude towards the younger generation at Darmstadt, via his revised understanding of the relationship between music and painting. Conversely the solidarity Nono maintained with contemporary spaces of resistance while not compromising his musical language promises to expand Adornos aesthetic theory.
In a conversation about Luigi Nono German music critics Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn noted in 2003 that Helmut Lachenmann has often asked us why [Theodor] Adorno never discussed Nono. Riehn reects that Lachenmann, Nonos former student, is mistaken, insofar as Adorno was forcefully engaged with the Varianti (1957), which he mentioned publicly in 1966. As to the AdornoNono complex, Riehn continues, I always wanted to have a conversation with [the soprano] Carla Henius, who was friendly with both Nono and Adorno, and to ask her [about it], as she had dealings with the two men. But sadly she has passed away.1 This AdornoNono complex is the theme of the following investigation. Although the two men are known to have met, no record survives of any debate of the kind that they might well have had with one another, given both their historical-biographical relationship (since each contributed to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse during the 1950s) and their theoretical relationship, in that they both made a notable contribution towards a historical materialist aesthetics. The changes in their respective work over time render this project ever more fraught, but at the same time intriguing. A debate will be reconstructed between the critical theorist and the composer sometimes real, sometimes virtual with regard to the politics of space in the post-war avant garde. The contention of this article is that the relationship under consideration promises to mediate the autonomous versus committed models of art, frequently presented as an insoluble dualism. Our task breaks down into three moments, reecting the three commonly categorized stages of Nonos uvre: the serialism of the 1950s, the electronic works up to the mid1970s, and the later work continuing up to the composers death. One example will be taken to represent each period: Il canto sospeso (1956), A oresta ` e jovem e cheja de vida
1 Wagner, Nono und der musikalische Fortschritt, 1467. All translations in this article are by the author unless stated otherwise.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

79

80 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

(19656), and Prometeo (1984). The rst section is inevitably the lengthiest, for the reason that the historical-biographical and theoretical must be treated together: Nono ceased contributing substantially to Darmstadt in 1960 and Adorno died in 1969. This initial section will seek to understand Il canto sospeso both as a response to Adornos Das Altern der Neuen Musik (The Ageing of the New Music, 19545) and as an anticipation of his concepts of reication, expression, and mimesis. It will be argued that Nono combines German and Italian traditions of historical materialist thought by resisting both reication and imperialism. This reading will proceed by way of a perceivable turn in Adornos attitude towards the young generation, discernible from his reconsideration of the relationships between music and painting. Roughly speaking, Adornos post-war lectures and essays on music can be put into two categories, falling either side of this realignment: Philosophie der ltnis von Malerei und Musik Neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music, 1949), Zum Verha ber Wagner heute (On the Relationship between Painting and Music Today, c1950), Versuch u (In Search of Wagner, 1952) and Das Altern der Neuen Musik (19556) belonging to the former group; Wien (Vienna, 1960), Vers une musique informelle (1961), Wagners ber einige Relationen zwischen t (The Relevance of Wagner for Today, 1963), U Aktualita Musik und Malerei (Some Relationships Between Music and Painting, 1965), and Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik (The Function of Colour in Music, 1966) belonging to the latter. Coincidentally or otherwise, this readjustment is contemporaneous with Adornos forceful engagement with Nonos 1957 Varianti. The second section will examine the relationship between Nonos musical and extramusical (i.e. political) senses of space and time. Nonos incorporation of documentary spaces of resistance leads to a dissonance, but not an incoherence, with his musical material. This successful integration is read both as a critique of Adornos absolutist conception of musical material and as a post-Adornian model for an art of resistance. In the nal section Prometeo will be presented as a continuation of the composers interest in the utopian signicance of the artwork, recalling the etymological meaning of utopia as no-place. Nonos tragic sense of this problem corrects and expands Adornos vision of an autonomous art.

Adorno at Darmstadt
Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, albeit with intermittent returns to the USA thereafter, in order to help establish the new branch of the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.2 By this time the summer course at Kranichstein Castle near Darmstadt, inaugurated by Wolfgang Steinecke in 1946 and known from 1948 r Neue Musik, was already up and running. Given that as the Internationale Ferienkurse fu the young generation (including Goeyvaerts, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono) began to take control of the summer courses from the early 1950s, Adorno could not have encountered
2 Detlev Claussen reminds us that the return happened in stages: Not until 194950 did [Adorno] take his rst trip back to Germany following the end of the Nazi regime, and he returned to America more or less directly. In 19523 he spent almost a year at the Hacker Foundation in California (Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno , 176).

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 81

Darmstadt at a more formational moment. By 1958, Nono could identify (and was indeed the rst to do so publicly) a Darmstadt school, recognizing the collective achievements of recent years. Importantly, in the context of what follows, Nono compares the school to the eld of the plastic arts, to what was achieved in the Bauhaus of Weimar and Dessau in its day.3 Adorno contributed to the Ferienkurse nine times between 1950 and 1966.4 His rst substantial contribution in 1951 proves to be crucial when coming to understand his initial reception of the young generation. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, then a spokesman for the younger generation on theoretical matters, has since claimed, along with others, that Das Altern der Neuen Musik, given as a lecture in 1954 and published the following year, was most probably informed by a performance and discussion of Goeyvaerts Sonata for Two Pianos, and not Boulezs Second Piano Sonata, one of Adornos stated targets.5 Adorno had taken exception to Goeyvaerts concept of musical material only to extend this to all and any serial technique.6 What is striking, of course, is that the verdict of Das Altern predates the ourishing of the young generation from the mid-1950s onwards. Adorno had deemed the new music to be old before it had yet come to maturity. In his generally negative assessment of Adornos engagement with post-war music, Marcus Zagorski identies a predictable element in Adornos critique of Materialfetischismus.7 Das Altern reads like a mere restatement of the thesis of Philosophie der Neuen Musik , a book that, despite appearing in West Germany in 1949 and being read by young and old alike, originated in the 1930s. It is as if, in order to remain the leading intellectual on advanced music, Adorno had to demonstrate the continuing veracity of his thesis of the 1930s and 40s. As Metzger sensed, and as Adornos staggered return to Europe also suggests, the critical theorists premature verdict on the young generation can be seen as theoretically overdetermined locked into the categories he had theorized already back in the 1930s and underdetermined by actual, practical encounters with the music itself.

Youth, age, temporalization

The relationship between the older and younger generations became intertwined in Adornos mind with the theoretical question of the obsolete and the new. The young generation shared Adornos insistence on an advanced musical material, and his feeling that anything less was

3 4 5 6

Nono, Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik, 30. Details of the contributors to each course are provided in Borio and Danuser (eds), Im Zenit der Moderne , vol. 3. See Toop, Messiaen / Goeyvaerts, Fano / Stockhausen, Boulez, 1423. Following Morag Grants usage, serial is used advisedly here so as to avoid, on the one hand, any restriction to the post-Schoenbergian sense of twelve-note music and, on the other hand, the pejorative senses of both integral and total serialism in English-language discussions of the European and Cagean traditions of the post-war avant garde. Aware of the categorical distinctions between serial techniques, Adorno nevertheless retains a largely negative assessment of all of them during in the early fties, standing against anything serial. See Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics , 56. 7 Zagorski, Nach dem Weltuntergang, 6815.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

82 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

tainted by association with the recent political past. But the Philosophie der Neuen Musik was at the same time a bone of contention with many of the younger generation (though Ligeti would remain more receptive). Adorno had contrasted the restoration of Stravinsky with the progress of Schoenberg, in whose atonal expressionism (c1910) objective construction was treated with subjective freedom. Schoenberg nevertheless remained, in spite of his later innovations in twelve-note technique, a bourgeois anachronism on account of his retention of other parameters from the tradition, notably with regard to development and rhythm. The model was instead Webern, who, it was reckoned, had begun to extend his teachers technique to all parameters, paving the way for total serialism or totally organized music. In 1953 Nono, Stockhausen, Boulez, and others gave a presentation marking Weberns seventieth birthday. This was followed by a special Webern issue of Die Reihe, the periodical of the young composers. Of course the situation is more complicated where Nono is concerned: while belonging to the post-Webern school at this point, he also remains uniquely indebted to Schoenberg, an indebtedness that went beyond the music, since he had married the composers daughter, Nuria. Adorno would have heard Nonos rst published compositions before writing Das Altern der Neuen Musik, works that are not perhaps as compelling as those he composed ` re of PolifonicaMonodia later in that decade. The 1951 Ferienkurse included the premie Ritmica (1951) under the baton of Hermann Scherchen. In 1954 Adorno attended the course that heard La victoire de Guernica (1954). Adorno leaves us to assume, therefore, that these examples are not exempt from the charge of Materialfetischismus. Indeed, Nono is included amongst the enfants terribles in Adornos contemporaneous essay Neue Musik heute (New Music Today, 1955): they include Boulez in France, Stockhausen in Germany, and Maderna and Nono in Italy. Objective construction is now supposed to encapsulate all elements mathematically, in particular rhythmic ones; the aim, to put it drastically, is the liquidation of composition in each composition.8 One of the charges levelled by Das Altern der Neuen Musik is that of a confusion of preformed material with musical experience. This criticism is both philosophical and music-critical in nature. In philosophical terms, if the conception is too determinate worked out in advance then the work is over before judgement (critical listening) has been called upon. Free judgement not only takes time but is equally a form of temporalization. Adorno connects this aesthetic principle to music in particular. The author discerns in both the later Webern and the young composers the attempt to outdo Schoenberg in the sphere of development and rhythm. But in abstractly negating all previous forms (thematic development and variation) they are alleged to have liquidated temporalization altogether. Adorno pushes the two critiques, philosophical and musical, together: non-temporalization is but a consequence of the over-reliance on preformed material. This pre-war tendency has continued into the music of the younger generation, whose music is accordingly not new but old. Hence young people no longer trust in their youth.9 Since Adorno addresses the
8 Adorno, Neue Musik heute, 3989. 9 Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 156 (trans., 191).

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 83

new music as such, there are two levels of ageing: that of the individual works and that of the conception of music on which they rely. New music itself is falling into contradiction with its own idea.10 For Adorno, the problem of temporalization remains acute with respect to music, insofar as he insists that, of all the arts, music has time as its problem, and that Zeitkunst, the temporal art, is equivalent to the objectication of time.11 This is why he focuses on what is happening to development and, moreover, why he is concerned with the relationship between the temporal art of music and the spatial art of painting.12 Two essays on this relationship, dating from around 1950 and 1965 respectively, illuminate the adjustment in Adornos stance on space in the new music during this period. In the earlier text Adorno holds that new music has slipped into a pastiche of modern painting, resulting in a form of stasis. Once again, he has in mind the visual and spatial senses of drawing up the composition, including, of course, latter-day pointillism, of which PolifonicaMonodiaRitmica remains an early example. The reference of musical pointillism to painting was, ever since Schoenbergs Klangfarbenmelodie, explicit: Reginald Smith Brindle, for instance, commented on the almost static atmosphere of the opening of Polifonica.13 But in Adornos thinking of the time the static is treated purely pejoratively: The basis of this serialism is a static idea of music: the precise correspondences and equivalences that total rationalization requires are founded on the presupposition that the identical element that recurs in music is indeed actually equivalent, as it would be in a schematic spatial representation.14 The sense that Adorno was not ready to listen to the young generation was concretized in Metzgers response, which, appropriately enough, appeared in the Young Composers issue of Die Reihe : Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik (The Ageing of the Philosophy of New Music, 1958). Metzger accused Adorno of not keeping pace with the concept of new musical material in a manner that his philosophy of new music would itself demand. Adorno was to take Metzgers critique to heart, and by 1961 was confessing that informal music is but an expression for Metzgers term an a-serial music.15 One reason why Adorno takes Metzger seriously is that they share an identication of musical time as being the crux of the matter. But Metzger takes Adorno to task on his conation of space with stasis, and then stasis with non-temporalization. The performance can remain experientially non-identical to the score whilst at the same time borrowing something distinctively spatial from it. Metzger cites Adornos own phrase only to turn it against its author: There are indeed cases in present-day production in which a schematic

10 11 12 13 14 15

Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 143 (trans., 181). ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei, 628 (trans., 66). Adorno, U ltnis von Malerei und Musik heute, 142 (trans., 415). Adorno, Zum Verha Brindle, The New Music , 18. Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 1512 (trans., 188). Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 272).

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

84 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

spatial presentation takes on an unusual value.16 This somewhat vague unusual value, we shall suggest, nds particular meaning (going beyond Metzgers own preferences) in Il canto sospeso (1956).

Nono with and against Adorno

The Italian music critic Massimo Mila regarded Il canto sospeso as a practical riposte to Das Altern der Neuen Musik. Nono denies the historical pessimism of Adorno, whereby, due to his rigid sociological determinism, the barbarism of the new [Darmstadt] school is unavoidable.17 Where Mila posits a simple opposition between Adorno and Nono, a dialectic should be proposed. Nonos work takes on the genuine criticisms of Adornos polemic in a manner that might even be seen as anticipating Adornos subsequent repositioning. This reading must proceed by way of Nonos talk Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute (History and the Present in the Music of Today, 1959), even though it dates from slightly later and was essentially ghost-written by his pupil, Helmut Lachenmann. Judging from a letter to his pianist friend Eduard Steuermann reporting back on the 1955 course, Adorno held Nono the man in high esteem, but Nono the composer, and indeed Nono the intellectual, in less high esteem. Again, the context is the relationship of the elder statesmen to the youth, whom Adorno now charges with paranoia: Of course, to paranoia also belongs the moment of unresponsiveness, something found in the otherwise very likeable and originally gifted Nono, with whom Rudi [Kolisch], Horkheimer, and I attempted to hold a very fundamental discussion. But that got no further than the question of what we had against the youth, against which, incidentally, Rudi too politely and too weakly argued for us to preserve something of our experiences.18 ` re of Nonos Incontri as dry and very weak and yet Adorno goes on to describe the premie like the earlier things, perhaps anticipating the overall warming to Nono that becomes ` red clearer after 1957, the year Adornos violinist friend Kolisch commissioned and premie Nonos Varianti.19 During a series of three lectures on Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik (The Function of Colour in Music) at the 1966 Ferienkurse, Adorno recalls the Varianti in relation to Kolisch and his crisis of strings thesis.20 Adorno and Kolisch were taken with Nonos deconstruction of the violins beautiful tone and his expansion of its possible timbres. Together with other, later essays, these lectures display Adornos tentatively new position on musics relationship to painting. Referring to the 1966 lectures, Alistair Williams has spoken of Adornos conviction that sound colour becomes a crucial part of structure
16 Metzger, Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik, 74 (trans., 73). 17 Mila, La linea Nono, 301 (French trans., 58). 18 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie , 247. I am indebted to Adrian Wilding for the translation of this passage. 19 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie , 248. 20 Adorno, Die Funktion der Farbe, 3045.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 85

hte), by which he when music, as he puts it, has cut its connecting cables (Verbindungsdra means when it has dispensed with established methods of organizing components such as pitch and rhythm.21 Frustratingly, Adorno does not explicitly identify this expanded conception of form as a valid response to the problem of stasis, even though stasis is explicitly related to painting in his earlier texts. The non-connection of colour to time is surprising, given that, as Williams notes, Adornos lectures were informed by Ligetis essay Form in der Neuen Musik (1966), in which the new form is dened as the product of an imaginary `res, a work with profound spatialization of the temporal process, and that Ligetis Atmosphe temporal implications, appears in the Funktion der Farbe lectures.22 Nono and Adorno seem to have missed each other on crucial occasions. First and fore` re of Il canto sospeso, which most, it is doubtful that Adorno attended the Cologne premie took place in October 1956 after Nono had missed the deadline for Darmstadt in the same year. At best Adorno may have heard recorded extracts in 1957 when Stockhausen gave his Musik und Sprache (Music and Speech) lecture, which Nono took to have misrepresented the work. This would account for Adornos acquaintance with at least its programme, as we shall see. Secondly, Adorno did not attend the 1959 course, the occasion of Nonos Geschichte und Gegenwart polemic. And nally, it is not clear that Nono heard Adornos 1961 lectures on an informal music, given that Nono had cast himself adrift with the justcited talk (though he surely knew of Adornos subsequent essay). Steineckes death in 1961 further hastened the departure from Darmstadt of Nono, whose interest was instead turning to the possibilities of music theatre, international politics, and new technologies.23 Incidentally, Adorno dedicated the written text of Vers une musique informelle to the memory of Steinecke, and this was followed by a warm obituary given at the 1962 Ferienkurse, once again suggesting a new acknowledgement of the courses value. Two of Adornos references to Nono appear in the essay Wien (1960), in which he attempts to reconcile young and old by way of a continuing Viennese modernist tradition. The rst remark declares Nono and Bruno Maderna the principal exponents of Italian modernism. In the second remark the allusion to Il canto sospeso is unmistakable: The fact that [the most recent composers] compose settings for revolutionary texts, the diaries of anti-fascists under sentence of death, or surrealist shock verses, is appropriate to the music, just as the dreamlike convulsions of [Schoenbergs] Erwartung can be said to t what is admittedly a comparatively harmless text.24 On the face of it, Adorno places little importance on the programmatic content and context of Il canto sospeso. The letters, written by anti-fascists facing execution, are valuable as examples of expression rather than for their confrontation of the listener with the gravity of the historical event. But Adornos emphasis on expression is by no means dismissive of the works historical signicance. Expression names the artworks mimetic relation to a
21 22 23 24 Williams, New Music, Late Style, 196. Ligeti, Form in der neuen Musik, 795. Stenzl, Luigi Nono , 59. Adorno, Wien, 449 (trans., 219).

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

86 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

reied society. Being mimetic (in Adornos particular sense of the term, dened below), the artwork is non-identical, and to that extent constitutes an act of resistance to the identical, including the perpetuation of fascism. For Adorno, advanced music does not stand in inherent need of a programmatic text, since advanced music constitutes a historically mediated language of its own.25 Expression and mimesis are two of the most important categories of Adornos unnished sthetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). Art is modern art through its mimesis of the A hardened and alienated.26 Mimesis and expression are not thereby behavioural or psychological categories but, rather, social and even ontological ones. The artwork embodies a dialectic of rational construction and mimetic expression.27 In three texts dating from the 1930s, Walter Benjamin dened mimesis as original appropriation, a prototype being child development.28 Mimesis is the freedom of becoming where reication is the imposition of stasis, mirroring the above opposition between youth and ageing. One of the critiques of Adorno from other traditions of Marxism is that this opposition between freedom and the totally administered society obscures other more immediate problems and opportunities. Reication society becoming a thing as the consequence of the exchange principle in the commodity seems to be the most fundamental problem for the rst generation Frankfurt School, according to which fascism, imperialism, and exploitative labour conditions become subsidiary problems or symptoms. Luigi Nono, who joined the Italian Communist Party in 1952, saw these latter problems as the fundamental ones. As Carola Nielinger has demonstrated, these issues remained pertinent to the politics of Italy after the war. Her article The Song Unsung: Luigi Nonos Il canto sospeso seeks to correct the antinomic reception of Il canto sospeso: either totalitarian serialism or sentimental historical memory. Nielinger concludes that for Nono and Maderna, as for Italian neo-realism, abstraction and expression are not opposed but rather complementary. For Maderna, Expression can mean abstraction because: to express means to bring forth, i.e. to abstract or, better, to isolate a part of the whole and to transfer it into another dimension.29 Extending Nielingers insight, without endorsing her portrait of Adorno, Nono can in fact be seen to combine a German critical tradition of resistance to reication with an Italian activist tradition of resistance to imperialism (we know that Nono read Antonio Gramsci, for instance). This serves to situate Nono fascinatingly within both the German language Marxist cs, and aesthetics debates of the 1930s, which included Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, and Luka their resumption in the art and life debates of the 1960s up to the present day.30 Given that Stockhausens Darmstadt presentation (Musik und Sprache) focused on the settings of Il canto sospeso, Adorno may not have been familiar with the instrumental movements of the work, which is scored for soprano, alto, tenor, mixed chorus, and orchestra.
ltnis. See Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verha sthetische Theorie , 39 (trans., 21). Adorno, A sthetische Theorie , 723 (trans., 445). Adorno, A See, On Astrology (1932), Doctrine of the Similar (1933), and On the Mimetic Faculty (1933), in Benjamin, Selected Writings , vol. 2. 29 Cited in Nielinger, The Song Unsung, 136. 30 See Taylor and others (eds), Aesthetics and Politics. 25 26 27 28

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 87

No. 4 follows the concluding line of no. 3, falling into silence: Your son is leaving, he will not hear the bells of freedom . . . . Strings enter with extremely long durational values. But so as to pre-empt sentimentality, small instrumental groups and solo instruments, including percussion, interrupt those strings violently. Dialectically, these interruptions serve to heighten the erstwhile static character. Nielinger is attentive to this stoic staticism, a fundamental and indeed very expressive characteristic of Il canto sospeso. We can say that the work is simultaneously an exponent of pointillism, each instrument sounding few notes, and an Aufhebung of pointillism, in that Nonos polarization leads to a paradoxically moving stasis. A surprising sense of unfolding is eked out, arguably anticipating Nonos later use of the fermata. As we shall see, Nono will subsequently deny any characterization of Il canto sospeso as pointillist on the grounds that pointillism equates with socially reactionary atomism. But this defence can itself be read as a symptom of the fraught, mimetic treatment of stasis that is at play. This is achieved through the combination of existing Klangfarbenmelodie with a new understanding of duration, something that will resonate with Adornos aesthetic theory.

Reification and mimesis

Evidence of a thaw in Adornos relationship to the younger generation is most readily found in Vers une musique informelle: I have been favourably impressed by works of the Kranichstein or Darmstadt School , as well as Boulezs such as Stockhausens Zeitmae, Gruppen, Kontakte, and Carre tre , his Second and Third Piano Sonatas and his Sonatina for Flute. Marteau sans ma I was also deeply moved by a single hearing of Cages Piano Concerto played on Cologne Radio, though I would be hard put to dene the effect with any precision.31 Adorno had already heard the Boulez Second Sonata at the time of giving The Ageing of the New Music. The piece was then deemed legalism.32 Now he is favourably impressed. Diary evidence unearthed by Zagorski indicates that Adorno in 1960 may not have been any more favourably impressed with Boulez than he was (with Goeyvaerts?) in 1955. There is truth in Zagorskis notion that Adorno sought to appear aktuell, up to date, without meaning it,33 which would contradict any notion of a genuine turn. However, there is little doubt that at one level Adorno accepted the necessity of the avant-garde project. For instance, both Nielinger and Zagorski capture Adornos earlier conation of serialism with reica rung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947) it is clear that tion. But even in Dialektik der Aufkla resistance to reication is possible only by means of working through it, not by opposing sthetische Theorie, the it romantically.34 Art is the myth of myth. As Adorno will say in A

31 32 33 34

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 494 (trans., 270). Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 151 (trans., 187). Zagorski, Nach Dem Weltuntergang, 695. Zagorski, Nach Dem Weltuntergang, 689.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

88 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

artwork is not mimetic in spite of rational construction, but rather by virtue of it; otherwise, there is no mimesis of the hardened and alienated. The advanced artist must remain mimetic and technically advanced. By the late fties, we nd Adorno contemplating the possibility of a new mimesis through the current (and aged?) state of musical material. Unlike most manifestos, Vers une musique informelle is not able to provide any programmes.35 Rather, an informal music is pursued through the negation of existing, failed approaches, notably serial and aleatory techniques. It is worth noting, therefore, that however many correspondences we may nd between post-war music and Adornos music theory, the latter cannot in principle accept any example as having lived up to the concept of an informal music. Informal music is a regulative idea, a little like Kants perpetual peace.36 The texts idealism is both its strength and its weakness. That said, all three of the main problems identied across Das Altern der Neuen Musik and Vers une musique informelle (preformed material versus free experience, becoming versus stasis, history versus nature) are addressed in several of Nonos works. To return to no. 4 of Il canto sospeso, Nono fetishizes neither the quasi-mathematically derived series nor natural-acoustic Being. Perhaps we should caution against Nielingers stoic staticness, insofar as stoicism invokes a moral attitude that fails to grasp the critical-rational status of resistance that is dialectically expressed in its mimetic comportment. This mimesis constitutes what Adorno elsewhere terms a new form of apperception, requiring conscious engagement on the part of the listener.37 Fundamentally, the social and political signicance of the stasis derives from Nonos Gramscian organic intellectual sense of time as constituting an extramusical problem. Mimetic stasis resists only as a resistance to reication, or the detemporalization of time, as Adorno writes in Negative Dialektik (1966).38 The ageing of the new music is somehow symptomatic of the ageing of the world. Perhaps this is why half of Adornos writings are devoted to music. With Il canto sospeso, not only are Adornos complaints about the crossover from technique to experience misplaced, but the composer anticipates the mimesis of the hardened and alienated as a response to the problem of ageing. Becoming in other words, temporalization may be achieved by way of mimetic stasis, the temporalization through space suggested by the same Metzger whose a-serial music would later be endorsed by Adorno. Fundamentally, such a reading of Nono is not unwarranted once we consider the role of Lachenmann. There are two items of evidence to consider here: (1) Lachenmanns discussion of Il canto sospeso, and (2) his ghost-writing of the German Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute, read out by Nono at Darmstadt.39 t. In the Adorno eventually signals the mimetic approach to stasis in Wagners Aktualita ber Wagner Adorno had taken the line from the Transformapre-war monograph Versuch u tion Scene of Parsifal: You see, my son, time here becomes space, to emblematize Wagnerian
35 36 37 38 39 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 496 (trans., 272). Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 540 (trans., 322; translation modied). Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 494 (trans., 271). Adorno, Negative Dialektik , 324 (trans., 331). Stenzl, Luigi Nono , 132, n. 84.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 89

phantasmagoria or reication.40 Once again Adorno radically revises his stance, avowedly in response to Darmstadt: In the most recent music, which draws so near to painting and the graphic arts, the trend toward the static becomes quite marked here, too, something is fully realized that Wagner had envisioned earlier [. . .]. Colour itself became architectonic.41 In the context of the contemporaneous Darmstadt talk Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik, Adornos remark invokes a new possibility, not limitation, in new musical spatialization. Of course the integral serialism of Il canto sospeso would already guarantee its failure in Adornos ears. Yet he surely underestimated Nonos inventive use of the technique. The composer uses the all-interval wedge series, generated by jumping between chromatic scales in opposite directions from a nodal pitch. From such raw materials, David OsmondSmith notes, Nono could stamp out the shapes often bristlingly architectonic to which his immersion in the visual abstraction of post-war painting made him feel akin (the reference is surely to Nonos comrade Emilio Vedova, who painted the sets for Intolleranza 1960).42 The elementary nature of Nonos material gives him more freedom rather than less, since there is no pretence towards games that remain forever hidden. Jeannie Maria Guerrero has even shown how Nono transcends the preformed row through systematic interruption (sospeso can also mean interrupted), meaning that the interruption is not itself preformed but rather, in Adornos terms, mimetic. Even back then, Nono later explains, I was not writing what the press called totally organized music [. . .]. [C]omposing was never for me merely the concretization of preformed structures. Improvisatory moments always played a part; I left decisions open until the last instant.43 In Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute, the text formulated for him by Lachenmann, Nono faults the ahistorical concept of musical material that he now associates with Joseph Schillinger and John Cage (or at least, Cages followers). But it is likely that in doing so Nono was lamenting the inuence of his former friend, the increasingly mystical Stockhausen, to whom the moral-political leadership of Darmstadt seemed now to have fallen. At stake were two opposing visions of the advanced artist: one socially conscious, the other pseudo-subversive.44 In a line that could have come from Adornos pen Nono states, The proposition I am space, I am time comes as a kind of moral stimulant which spares the individual the problems of historical responsibility.45 Nonos emphasis upon the historical basis of music chimes with Adorno. Each denies the meaning of sound outside of its relations to other sound and (for Nono, at least) to other non-sound: relations that change in time and place.46 In another theoretical correspondence Adornos attack upon

ber Wagner , chapter 6, 10720 (trans. 7485). Adorno, Versuch u t, 5535 (trans., 5934). Adorno, Wagners Aktualita Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 3. ch mit Hansjo rg Pauli, in Luigi Nono: Texte , 200; quoted in Guerrero, Serial Intervention in Nonos Nono, Gespra Il canto sospeso . hrt, 299 (trans., 22). 44 Lachenmann, Von Nono beru 45 Nono, Geschichte und Gegenwart, 36 (trans., 42). 46 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 508 (trans., 286). 40 41 42 43

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

90 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

unconstrained musical nominalism47 can be found in TextMusikGesang (TextMusic Song, 1960), the talk in which Nono corrects Stockhausens claim that the Italian had atomized the phonetic material of Il canto sospeso according to a serial principle.48 In 1971 Nono would attack atomism in social terms: for me, it has always been clear that a human being can realize himself only in his relations with other people and with society.49 Given this theoretical context, it is surprising that it should be Stockhausen and not Nono to whom Adorno will extend the greater sympathy with regard to the problem of musical time: My rst reaction to [Stockhausens] Zeitmae, in which I relied exclusively on my ears, involved me in a strange interaction with his theory of a static music which arises from a universal dynamics as well as with his theory of cadences.50 Adorno refers here to Stockhausens essay . . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . . (. . . how time passes . . . , 1957), which sets out the above-mentioned critique of anachronism in the parameters of development and rhythm: most people who today write pitches in this system [of Schoenberg] are not aware that they are giving form to time-proportions.51 And yet here, as in Musik und Sprache, Stockhausen surely pursues a positivist mysticism of sound that is anathema to Adorno. It is on this point that the stases of Nono and Stockhausen may be differentiated. Stockhausen will, in 1961, dene his moment form as a vertical slice dominating over any historical conception of time and reaching into timelessness.52 Of course this is not to say that Stockhausen should be taken at his word, or that his work cannot be interpreted against the composers intentions. For Lachenmann, It is particularly in a work like Il canto sospeso that one can see the beginnings of the gap (now a gulf) between composers like Stockhausen and Nono. Lachenmann recalls that his teacher had been accused of giving up on the avant-gardist path: as a West German composer put it in 1960 [. . .] Nono had ground to a halt.53 Could this West German composer have been Stockhausen himself ? Lachenmann nevertheless turns this grinding to a halt from a limitation into a quality: Structural purication of a new, terse expressiveness which is almost archaic in quality, and thus liberated from its conventional reication this was what Nono had ground to a halt in. Or, perhaps one should say [. . .] Nono in the late fties had remained clinging to a rough, inhospitable landscape of naked signs from which others were striving to nd their way to more homely surroundings forwards, backwards or sideways [. . .]. In those days Nono did not move further on he went deeper.

47 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 496 (trans., 273). 48 What impressed Stockhausen about the work, in fact, was that, [w]e are dealing [. . .] with an autonomous musical serial structure in all parameters (Stockhausen, Musik und Sprache, 49; trans., 53). 49 Nono, Il Canto Sospeso , ix. 50 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 271). 51 Stockhausen, . . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . ., 14 (trans., 11). rner, Stockhausen: Life and Work , 467. 52 Wo hrt, 2967 (trans., 19). 53 Lachenmann, Von Nono beru

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 91

Nonos student does not refer to wilfully mystical depth here. Rather, the processes of structuring and differentiation were ultimately determined by their function of driving music into space.54 Such driving of music into space becomes a temporalization through space. Lachenmann conrms in the same essay that his concept of reication comes from cs.55 Clearly it is senseless to suppose that Nono was seeking to enact the future ideas Luka of his student. At issue is more likely an elective afnity something in the air whereby Nonos intellectual and political concerns tallied with a stream of German as well as Italian radical cultural theory. We recall that Lachenmann has remained curious about why Adorno had so little to say about Nono, that the AdornoNono complex remains un cs forms a part of this complex, since it is he who put the concept nished business. Luka of reication on the map (the term was not used by Marx). The commodity form degrades time to the dimension of space, he states in History and Class Consciousness.56 This characterizes Das Altern der Neuen Musik also. But, under the inuence both of Darmstadt and of his editing of Benjamins writings for Suhrkamp, Adorno changes his verdict from the late 1950s onwards on the relation between the arts of time and space, now suggesting that music may paradoxically nd its salvation in painting, yet without being painting. Something of this relation can be sensed in Adornos use of the term informel, a movement in post-war painting throughout Europe, including Adornos Frankfurt.57 ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei (On Some Relationships The essay U between Music and Painting) now makes clear a double possibility: The convergence of music and painting [. . .] opens up the possibility of crass infantilism, at least in music; it is possible to stave off this element only to the extent that it reects it within itself, as an expression of decay, and composes it out, so to speak.58 However negatively, Adorno acknowledges the productive possibility of the spatial in music, if we take expression of decay in Adornos own, full sense of the term to refer to the mimetic relation to ageing already grasped (according to this reading) in Il canto sospeso. Against his previous verdict Adorno now considers the productive aspects of musics spatiality in terms of colour and ecriture. If the disadvantage of ecriture is its syncretism (since all the arts can be understood in terms of this single principle, again taken from the writings of Benjamin), then its advantage criture is three-dimensionally conis an acknowledgement of the external space of music. E ber das gegenwa rtige Verha ltnis von Philosophie structivist. In an exceptional passage from U
hrt, 298 (trans., 21). Lachenmann, Von Nono beru hrt, 303 (trans., 27). Lachenmann, Von Nono beru cs, History and Class Consciousness , 89. Luka Adorno mentions the Frankfurt informel painter Bernard Schultze, but unfavourably. His preferred moment of modernist painting is Picassos synthetic Cubism; the later essay on music and painting is dedicated to Picasso collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Moreover, the term musique informelle was chosen by Adorno as a small token of gratitude towards the nation for whom the tradition of the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage s to produce manifestoes. Hence, the name does not refer to the specic manifesto of art informel (namely Tapie An Other Art ). See Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 272). ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei, 631 (trans., 68; my emphasis). 58 Adorno, U 54 55 56 57

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

92 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

and Musik (On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music, 1953) Adorno writes that musical space springs from the collective implications of all music, the character of something that embraces groups of human beings, which is gradually carried over to the sound as such.59 Adornos thinking on this theme is much informed by Ernst Kurths Musikpsychologie (1931, second edn 1947). Kurth found that music gives rise to a strongly felt [. . .] analogy to the outer60 music constitutes an enigmatic [. . .] spatial presentation, but that the localization of the sound has nothing to do with the inner musical space.61 However, he takes this opposition of inner and outer to be absolute, meaning that external, social space takes place only in the inherent musical material itself, in keeping with his musical modernism. As a result Adornos evaluation of musical space remains restricted, even from a Kurthian perspective. In Vers une musique informelle we thus read: The site of all musicality is a priori an interior space and only here does it become constituted as an objective reality. [. . .] It is precisely the most subjective aspects of music, the imaginative, associative element, the idea content and the historical substance that is present in all music that point back to externals, to the real world. Music negates psychology dialectically.62 In Adornos thinking, Kurths opposition becomes one of autonomy and heteronomy: the real world is mediated into the musical material by way of imagination. For Nono, on the other hand, the opposition is itself internalized into the work, as an externalization itself. Nono repeatedly asserts the relationships (by no means consonant) between inherent musical space, external performance space, and the social spaces introduced through the texts and voices. This experimental pursuit of a new music theatre continues through the 1960s and beyond.

Young and full of life

In tracking this transition to the 1960s, the best-documented examples would include Nonos rst political azione scenica, Intolleranza 1960. Importantly, this work employs a whole section of no. 4 from Il canto sospeso, contradicting any sudden break with the Darmstadt era, including Nonos interest in the static. For the purposes of the foregoing argument our representative work from this period is A oresta ` e jovem e cheja de vida (The Forest is Young and Full of Life, 19656), for soprano, three reciters, B@ clarinet, copper plates, and eight-channel tape, which lasts for around forty minutes. The texts, selected by Giovanni Pirelli, document liberation struggles from around the world. It is dedicated to the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, and its title comes from the

59 60 61 62

ber das gegenwa rtige Verha ltnis von Philosophie und Musik, 166 (trans., 150). Adorno, U Kurth, Musikpsychologie , 120. Kurth, Musikpsychologie , 128. Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 521 (trans., 301).

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 93

words of an Angolan freedom ghter: they cannot burn the forest because it is young and full of life. An immediate and crucial difference from Il canto sospeso is that these are explicitly contemporary struggles. Nono regarded fascism as an ongoing danger. But some within the economic miracle of West Germany may have mistaken Il canto sospeso for a cathartic farewell to a past problem. After all, where Il canto sospeso was well received on its Cologne ` re (with its bourgeois audience, as Metzger was at pains to point out), the 1960s premie works were received with far more difculty, the performance of La fabbrica illuminata (1964) even being censored by Italian radio for its protest against factory working conditions.63 The work opens with the words of a repair mechanic from Bergamo: As Marx said, we are in prehistoric time. A second difference to Il canto sospeso is that Nonos spaces of resistance now exceed the European context, given the international struggles cited. Beginning in Cologne, Nonos exploration of electronic music was no celebration of technology for its own sake. The composer was attracted to magnetic tape for its capacity both to bring the contemporary world into music and to take music out of the concert hall back into the world, including the factory.64 Moreover and this aspect has not aged at all the acerbic sonorities of the tape medium remain appropriate to an anti-sentimental realism. In A oresta we can say that Nono carves out a barren landscape from which sites of political struggle rise and fall. That which sounds the most bereft of life promises to be full of life. This promise is to be understood in terms of hope, and not expectation. As with Il canto sospeso and, above all, Al gran sole carico damore (1975) promise is combined with mourning. A oresta in no way regards its revolutionary spaces as utopias. It is their present activity of resistance that might rather be termed utopian. In one respect this electronic work of music-theatre (the speakers were originally actors from the Living Theatre company) cannot be compared with the non-electronic and serial Il canto sospeso. This is not to say that A oresta is harmonically ambivalent: the harmonic context is given in its separation of the material around fourths and fths, combined with micro-intervallic variations in the soprano. But the main continuity lies in its polarization of duration through the dramatization of timbral relations, constituting a newly spatialized time. Indeed, the tape medium allows Nono to polarize further still, not being limited to the all-too-human connes of live instrumental production; or, rather, it is precisely the crossover between the live instruments and the recorded ones that presses the new technology back to the human-social context. The reworked instruments and voices, combined with the copper sheets and the Flatterzunge of the clarinet, realize this contrast between a quasispatial continuum and the convulsive movements of protest. What is new, therefore, is the interaction of that inherent spatialization (the mimetic stasis considered above) and the real spaces of resistance introduced programmatically (a written programme that, as ever with Nono, accompanies the performance as a crucial aspect of it). Resistance to reication is brought into conjunction with resistance to imperialism and oppression. Against Adorno, Nono knows the socio-representational limits of
63 Stenzl, Luigi Nono , 63. 64 See Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 4.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

94 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

absolute music. With Adorno, Nono upholds that absolutist moment of the Zeitkunst as a crucial element of his overall music theatre. Nonos upholding of the potential for both spaces of music, inner and outer, can be sensed in his slightly earlier Notizen zum Musiktheater heute (Notes on Music Theatre Today, 1961). Criticizing the single perspective of stage action (I see what I hear and hear what I see), Nono cites Moses und Aron as a work of anti-opera, the burning bush scene especially, in which the singers are hidden or dispersed. Nono refers to both the external production and the musical structure here: Schoenberg has to nd a new spatial dimension of the tonal [Raumdimension des Klanglichen] and introduce an element whose focus until now has been centred in the orchestra and on the stage.65 Anticipating Prometeo, Nono refers to an electroacoustic cori spezzati. For A oresta Nono arranged the loudspeakers spatially to achieve this new idea of space. What results is another level of spatial interaction, between the polarized, static-eruptive music and its movement about the performance space. But this does not confuse matters, since the effect is one of pulling the listeners attention out of the stage, out of the concert hall, and into a world of concrete problems, problems that, according to Nonos music theatre, this engaged consciousness might begin to address. Nonos avant gardism thus differs from that of Adorno, for whom the task of art is to negate the existing space and not to propose solidarity with any new one. For the critical theorist the artwork shows that the world could be other than it is.66 This other remains perpetually negative, and the neglect of concrete spaces, in art as well as in political situations, remains a problem with the critical theorist (examples of architecture are scarce in Aesthetic Theory, for instance). When, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that the modern artwork is the determinate negation of a determinate society, he is playing on a double sense of determinate: logical and political. Society is determinate (already determined) in the sense of being xed, or even ageing into a new barbarism. But the all-too-unied world is determinately negated by the disruptive unity of the advanced artwork, albeit as semblance. What is paradoxically unied in the artwork is that which has become disenchanted: experience (Erfahrung). As Adorno knew well, Hegelian logic states that determinate negation, unlike abstract negation, gives rise to something new in the process of mediation. This something new would be the alternative objectication to reication. Hence Nonos critique of formalism at the end of the 1950s leads him to a music theatre that brings these possible objectications (all too empirical for Adorno) into aesthetic experience itself. Yet, equally true to Adorno, Nono is aware that this remains an aesthetic experience semblance and not an immediately revolutionary act. Nono even outdoes Adorno by acknowledging the positing as well as negating character of determinate negation: the critique of reication must suggest other spaces for life if that critique of reication is not to be merely abstract, if it is really to resist the determinate society.

65 Nono, Notizen zum Musiktheater heute, 64. sthetische Theorie , 208 (trans., 138). 66 Adorno, A

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 95

In a nal, biographical encounter between the two men, Adornos attitude to Nonos direction in the 1960s would become all too clear. Nielinger tells us that, When asked for ` re of Henzes Das Flo der Medusa in a letter of support in the context of the ill-fated premie 1968, Adorno responded positively at rst but changed his mind after having heard that such letters had already been written by Nono and [Peter] Weiss.67 Whereas in the early fties we nd Adorno pitted against the youth of Metzger and Nono, by the late sixties we nd Adorno and Metzger, who had dismissed Nonos use of political texts in 1962, pitted against Nono. Again, Adornos dismissal cannot simply be accounted for in terms of the artists political commitments, insofar as Nonos musical language remained dissonant, and because Adorno cannot really have dissented from many of those concerns (Adorno refers to Vietnam and South Africa in his lectures of the 1960s).68 What is strange is that whereas the Adornian Metzger would outline a turning point in Nonos development in 1981 (back to the avant-garde fold, perhaps) we can just as easily discern a new direction within an ongoing, political investigation into art, space, and utopia.69

A tragedy about dwelling today

What has subsequently been regarded as a late turn concerns Nonos musical politics: I had the need to think anew my whole work and my whole existence as a musician today and as an intellectual in this society, to discover new possibilities of knowledge and creation.70 Nono had become wary of the ideological and had avowedly turned inwards. But Osmond-Smith reminds us that Nonos work of the eighties onwards continued to resonate with the perception that social evolution is achieved by subverting subjective priorities.71 Nonos turn has been attributed equally to his friendship and collaboration with the philosopher Massimo Cacciari. During the 1960s Cacciari had been an active trade unionist. By the 1970s, however, he had moved towards a more generalized critique of capitalist modernity that bore some similarity to Adorno (the centrality of Weberian rationalization, for instance). Cacciari nevertheless avoided the critical theorist, opposing negative thought to any form of dialectics, including negative dialectics. Coming, along with his friend Manfredo Tafuri, from a background in architectural theory, Cacciari investigated the nihilist project of the metropolis, founded upon a rationalist determination of space. Urban spaces have come to be determined by exchange relations alone, the Venetian philosopher observed, in a manner that ideologically conceals real social divisions. The ideal place without content was a no-place, in line with the dialectical-idealist utopia. Cacciaris response was an architecture of nihilism,72 that which attempts to articulate the contemporary, near-impossibility of dwelling as non-dwelling.73
67 68 69 70 71 72 73 Nielinger, The Song Unsung 92. See Adorno, Metaphysik , 160, 202 (trans., 101, 130). See Metzger, Wendepunkt Quartett?. Stenzl, Luigi Nono , 978. Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 4. Much of this material can be found in English in Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism. Cacciari, Eupalinos or Architecture, 111.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

96 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

With Cacciaris thinking about Prometeo in the early 1980s as well as in it, since he ber den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept compiled its texts, including Benjamins U of History, also known as Theses on History, 1940) the project of determining place as geometrical space is traced through a history of the performance spaces of European music. ` re of In a conversation with Nono, included in the programme for the Venice premie Prometeo, Cacciari makes the following remarks: In parallel to the cemeteries, asylums, and prisons are built the theatres and concert halls [. . .]. The concentration and homogenization of space, the disappearance of the multi-spatial possibility of the musical event, is closely related to the obvious reduction of polyvocity, of the multivocal possibility of directions in listening: [. . .] listening and the space of listening coincide, are apprehended together. All this during what one could perhaps call the bourgeois era of listening.74 However, just as possible as reading the later Nono out of Cacciaris philosophy is reading it, along with the early and middle-period works, in relation to Adornos aesthetic theory. What sounded striking about Fragmente-Stille in 1981 was its fragility: a departure from the strident theatrical-political works. But this was, in a sense, a strident fragility. The way in which Nono invited the musicians to determine the weight and length of each fermata, for instance, was new or rather, said the detractors, old : a return to subjectivist expression. But this is once again Lachenmanns terse expressiveness. The fermata is not ornamental, externally imposed upon the materials unfolding, but rather of that unfolding. Here lies the afnity to Il canto sospeso and A oresta. Nonos fermata the term comes from the Latin rmare, to stop is a coming-to-a-standstill. Hence, in their interpretation, Nono asked the Arditti Quartet to play the fermatas ever longer.75 At stake is not contemplative slowness but rather a quasi-spatial immersion into the material. The composer now radicalizes some of the insights of his earlier Notizen zum Musiktheater essay: the use of a nongeometrized space [. . .] runs up against the dissolution of normal time, of the time of narration and of visualization.76 This inner spatialization comes into its own when brought into play with the possibilities of outer spatialization in Prometeo. Music, on account of its spatial ambiguities, can offer a different experience of space. The singers, speakers, chorus, solo strings, solo winds, glasses, orchestral groups, and live electronics are arranged around the audience. But, unlike the former works, the estrangement of inner and outer, of the musical space and the space of the music, is refused reconciliation. The editor of Nonos writings in French suggested that the music composes the space.77 But this is too phenomenological. How can such space be ` re) the composed in an already composed space, namely (in the case of the Venice premie deconsecrated San Lorenzo? The harmonic material of Prometeo is polarized between close
` re: 74 Bertaggia, Conversation, 133. The original Italian text appeared in the concert programme of the Prometeo premie Verso Prometeo (Venice: Ricordi, 1984). 75 Arditti, Nonos Fragmente-Stille . . . , 7. 76 Bertaggia, Conversation, 138. 77 Laurent Feneyrou, cited in Pape, Nono and His Fellow Travellers, 60.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 97

intervals, including micro-intervals, and expansive ones the promethean fth being a constant amidst similarly polarized pitch and dynamics. Nono exploits height and depth. Similar gures are repeated in different instrumental groupings, again recalling Il canto sospeso, but this time moving across the physical space from different sources. There is a polarization of the smallest transition within the musical material and its external transition about the performance space. In other words, the mimetic stasis of the music resonates dissonantly with its environment, comprising a peculiar spatio-temporal experience. The fermata dwells on the performance space as its incontrovertible reference, only for the listener to be confronted with the space of its non-dwelling: an instance of the presently reied world. Heard in relation to A oresta, this tragic non-reconciliation corresponds to a heightening of the utopian task, not its renunciation. In Cacciaris thinking, an expression of non-dwelling hints at the possibility of dwelling anew: a new space. The thinker relies upon the post-active nihilisms of both Benjamin and Heidegger. Cacciari is interested in the gure of the wanderer Robert Musils man without qualities because only the wanderer may circumvent the no-place of utopia. Through the polarization of inner and outer, the contemporary contradiction within the concept of place is expressed both as a problem and as a chance. With Prometeo subtitled tragedia dellascolto, a tragedy in or about listening Heideggers concept of dwelling has philosophically displaced the humanist utopia,78 supposedly characteristic of the earlier Nono. But the possible valorization of the wanderer in Nonos mobile sound (without any place of dwelling) remains problematic, philosophically and politically. It even replicates the problems found in Adorno, in terms of an innite deferral of real objectication. Adorno upholds the Bilderverbot on representations of utopia, since totalizing visions block the utopian task itself. The artwork, however, constitutes a peculiar, negative unity, and therein lies its utopian meaning. The artwork is Leibnizs monad: the inner is inner qua different outer. Nonos later corrective to Adorno concerns the nature of the inner outer dissonance (since they agree that autonomous art is socially dissonant). Of course the outer reference of Prometeo is no longer the explicit site of existing social struggles. The danger for the later Nono, therefore, is that non-dwelling might lapse into no-place. At one point in the libretto Cacciari quotes Moses und Aron: we are invincible in the wasteland. The wasteland is the attempted mimesis, not tautology, of no-place. But why leave the wasteland at all? And how? There is a way, once we listen in relation to his previous works: the programme of Prometeo is not, after all, so far from Nonos political concerns. Prometheus the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar, as Marx wrote in 1841 remains a symbol of a certain humanist project, however much that view may have been revised by anti-humanist philosophies.79 Prometeo can be regarded as an experiential investigation into the conditions for the possibility of concrete possibilities, such as those heard in the resisting voices of A oresta. Possibility was Nonos favourite word during the 1980s. Without the inaugurated transformation of experience, the maximal
78 On his concept of dwelling see especially Heidegger, Bauen Wohnen Denken. 79 Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, 31.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

98 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

imperative of possibility does not of itself take place. But without actual possibilities, existential conditions of possibility remain pseudo-subversive. Against those who present the later work as quietist, Prometeo continues Nonos musical-political journey. The three periods the three extra-musical treatments of time and space interrupt one another as an unnished whole.

Bibliography
bingen: Mohr, 1949. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. MinneAdorno, Theodor W. Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Tu apolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006. ber Wagner. Berlin and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1952. Trans. Rodney Livingstone as In Search of . Versuch u Wagner. London: Verso, 2005. . Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1990. sthetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, . A 1970. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press, 1997. . Dissonanzen; Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Gesammelte Schriften 14. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. . Das Altern der Neuen Musik (1955), in Adorno, Dissonanzen. 14367. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will in Adorno, Essays on Music. 181202. . Musikalische Schriften, vols 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schulz. Gesammelte Schriften 16. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978. ltnis im gegenwa rtigen Komponieren (1956), in Musikalische Schriften, . Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verha vols 13. 64964. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie in Adorno, Essays on Music. 113226. ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei (1965), in Musikalische Schriften, vols 13. 62842. . U Trans. Susan H. Gillespie in Musical Quarterly 79 (1995), 6679. . Vers une musique informelle (1961), in Musikalische Schriften, vols 13. 493540. Trans. Rodney Livingstone in Adorno, Quasi una fantasia. 269322. t (1963), in Musikalische Schriften, vols 13. 54364. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie in . Wagners Aktualita Adorno, Essays on Music. 584602. . Wien (1960), in Musikalische Schriften, vols 13. 43353. Trans. Rodney Livingstone in Adorno, Quasi una fantasia. 20124. . Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schulz. Gesammelte Schriften 18. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. . Neue Musik heute (1956), in Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5. 12433. Trans. Wieland Hoban in Adorno, Night Music. 384400. ber das gegenwa rtige Verha ltnis von Philosophie und Musik (1953), in Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5. . U 14976. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie in Adorno, Essays on Music. 13561. ltnis von Malerei und Musik heute (c1950), in Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5. 14048. Trans. . Zum Verha Wieland Hoban in Adorno, Night Music. 41125. . Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1992. . Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (1965), ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. London: Polity Press, 2001. . Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik (1966), in Darmstadt-Dokumente I, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Munich: edition text kritik, 1999. 263312. . Essays on Music. ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. . Night Music: Essays on Music 19281962. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Calcutta: Seagull, 2009. rung. Amsterdam: Querido, 1944. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. , and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufkla Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Arditti, Irvine. Nonos Fragmente-Stille . . ., in Luigi Nono: Fragments of Venice (concert programme, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 23 October 2007). London: South Bank Centre, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 2: 19311934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bertaggia, Michele. Conversation entre Luigi Nono et Massimo Cacciari, trans. Thierry Baud, in Luigi Nono: ` Paris 1987. Paris: Contrechamps, 1987. 13246. Festival dAutomne a r Neue Borio, Gianmario, and Hermann Danuser, eds. Im Zenit der Moderne: die Internationalen Ferienkurse fu Musik Darmstadt 19461966: Geschichte und Dokumentation. 4 vols. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239

Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 99

Brindle, Reginald Smith. The New Music: the Avant-Garde since 1945. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Cacciari, Massimo. Architecture and Nihilism: on the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Patrizia Lombardo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. . Eupalinos or Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli. Oppositions 21 (1980), 10616. Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008. Ewenz, Gabriele, and others, eds. Adorno: eine Bildmonographie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003. Grant, M. J. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Guerrero, Jeannie Maria. Serial Intervention in Nonos Il canto sospeso. Music Theory Online 12/1 (2006). <http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.06.12.1/mto.06.12.1.guerrero.html>. ge und Aufsa tze. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1954. 13956. Heidegger, Martin. Bauen Wohnen Denken, in Vortra Trans. Albert Hofstadter as Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 14561. Kurth, Ernst. Musikpsychologie (1931), 2nd edn. Bern: Krompholz, 1947. hrt (1991), in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 19661995, Lachenmann, Helmut. Von Nono beru usler, 2nd edn. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Ha rtel, 2004. 295305. Trans. as Touched by Nono. ed. Josef Ha Contemporary Music Review 18/1 (1999), 1730. rgy. Form in der neuen Musik (19656), in Gyo rgy Ligeti: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Monika Ligeti, Gyo Lichtenfeld. Mainz: Schott, 2007. 18599. Trans. Stephen Hinton in Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music, vol. 3: Essence, ed. Ruth Katz and Carl Dahlhaus. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992. 78196. cs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Luka Marx, Karl. The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1: Marx, 18351843. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975. 25107. Online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm>. Metzger, Heinz-Klaus. Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Die Reihe 4 (1958), 6480. Trans. Leo Black as Intermezzo I: Just Who Is Growing Old?. Die Reihe (Eng. edn) 4 (1960), 6382. . Wendepunkt Quartett?, in Luigi Nono, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Musik-Konzepte 20. Munich: edition text kritik, 1981. 93112. Mila, Massimo. La linea Nono (a proposito de Il canto sospeso). Rassegna musicale 30/4 (1960), 297311. Fr. ` Paris 1987. Paris: Contrechamps, 1987. 5666. trans. Viviana Alberti in Luigi Nono: Festival dAutomne a Nielinger, Carola. The Song Unsung: Luigi Nonos Il canto sospeso. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131/1 (2006), 83150. rg Stenzl. Zu rich: Atlantis, 1975. Nono, Luigi. Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. Ju . Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik (1958), in Luigi Nono: Texte. 2133. . Notizen zum Musiktheater heute (1961), in Luigi Nono: Texte. 617. . Il canto sospeso (1956), for soprano, contralto and tenor soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra. Study score (corrected edn, with an introduction by Christoph Flamm). London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1995. , with Helmut Lachenmann. Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute (1959), in Luigi Nono: Texte. 3440. Trans. as The Historical Reality of Music Today, The Score 27 (1960), 415. , Text Musik Gesang (1960), in Luigi Nono: Texte. 4160. Osmond-Smith, David. Break-Out from the Concert Hall, in Luigi Nono (concert programme, Royal Festival Hall, 27 April 2005). London: South Bank Centre, 2005. Pape, Gerard. Luigi Nono and His Fellow Travellers. Contemporary Music Review 18/1 (1999). 5965. rg. Luigi Nono. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998. Stenzl, Ju Stockhausen, Karlheinz. . . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . .. Die Reihe 3 (1957), 1342. Trans. Cornelius Cardew. Die Reihe (Eng. edn) 3 (1959), 1040. . Musik und Sprache. Die Reihe 6 (1958), 3658. Trans. Ruth Koenig. Die Reihe (Eng. edn) 6 (1964), 4064. Taylor, Ronald, and others, eds. Aesthetics and Politics: the Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson. London: New Left Books, 1977. Toop, Richard. Messiaen / Goeyvaerts, Fano / Stockhausen, Boulez. Perspectives of New Music 13/1 (1974), 14169. ch, Wagner, Andreas. Nono und der musikalische Fortschritt: Heinz-Klaus Metzger und Rainer Riehn im Gespra in Luigi Nono: Dokumente, Materialien, ed. Andreas Wagner. Saarbrucken: PFAU, 2003. 13948. Williams, Alastair. New Music, Late Style: Adornos Form in the New Music . Music Analysis 27/23 (2008), 1939. rner, Karl H. Stockhausen: Life and Work, trans. Bill Hopkins. London: Faber, 1973. Wo Zagorski, Marcus. Nach dem Weltuntergang: Adornos Engagement with Postwar Music. Journal of Musicology 22/4 (2005), 680701.

http://journals.cambridge.org

Downloaded: 09 Apr 2013

IP address: 169.234.243.239