The tragedy of listening

Music and philosophy follow the same principle of working, that of construction and deconstruction. They are both systems for arriving at a poetical structure.
Massimo Cacciari

Luigi Nono (1924-1990) occupies a key place in the development of contemporary music. Conventional accounts identify him as the composer who in the 1950s most coherently confronted the implications of serialism – an approach to structuring every aspect of musical composition developed from Schoenberg’s ideas of order, structure and completeness in the use of the chromatic scale (the series). Through its evolution of the very nature of both composition and composed, Nono’s work also directly addresses many of the major issues that music has subsequently had to acknowledge: the relationship of composition with social reality and with the performer, the nature of musical material, of representation and of listening, of musical time and space, and the uniqueness of the musical event. Richly grounded in music- and critical-theoretical concerns, his work transcends formalism precisely because of the depth of his historical-theoretical awareness and sense of place.

This article attempts an initial and necessarily broad survey of the role of critical theory – in this case, philosophical thought which has material implications for artistic activity – in the later work of Nono. In particular it considers the role of Italian philosopher and left-wing politician Massimo Cacciari. Nono first met Cacciari, twenty years his junior, in 1965, when the latter was a student and member of a very active group of cultural thinkers who came to dominate the intellectual and political life of Venice: Franceso Dal Co, Manfredo Tafuri and Marco De Michelis. Cacciari himself became mayor in 1993; the writings of Dal Co and Tafuri include a standard work on modern architecture; and De Michelis, brother of an ex-minister, now heads a new architecture faculty at the university. When Cacciari was eighteen, this group founded a journal of critical theory, Angelus Novus, the title of which acknowledges their roots in the thought of Benjamin. Through this period Cacciari developed his early work on ‘negative thought’ from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, which in his hands becomes effectively a tool for deconstruction, for seeking out fissures and contradictions. In a series of works, he presents negative thought as a resistance, presaging Nono’s own conceptions of ‘un-everything’ and continuous questioning, which would lead him eventually to the writings of Edmond Jabès. There is also a sense of frustration apparent here: that Benjamin had described a post-dialectical work of art that neither the Adornians nor the espousers of political engagement had fully understood.2

The political trajectories of Nono and Cacciari are contiguous. A communism of social, intellectual and artistic responsibility informed all Nono’s activity from early on: he joined the PCI (Italian Communist Party) in 1952, despite the ramifications of such actions for his international career, and was elected to the Central Committee in 1975, during the period of crisis and the ‘historic compromise’. Much of Cacciari’s early political writing concerns the structural issues of communism,3 and of thought and institutions in general.4 By the time of his full participation in politics he vociferously refused to engage with major parties and their dynamics.

Three lines of inquiry thus present themselves: the observable influence of critical thought on Nono’s music itself, the wider role of such ideas in his development and practice as an artist, and the extent to which these conceptual tools might be instrumental in reaching an understanding, not only of Nono’s music, but more widely of the dynamics of modernist cultural production and its relation to social reality. Such a wider understanding is afforded by Nono’s own insistence on the nature of musical thought as a particular mode of human activity and its essential relevance to the individual, culture, society and their transformation. These strands will intersect in the present narrative. The article will not, however, attempt an exegesis of Nono’s own thought on these questions but rather trace some of the dynamics of their interaction through the development of his work. I shall try to show that the very depth of engagement with critical thought which underpins Nono’s entire oeuvre is what allowed him to renegotiate radically and uniquely the relationship between text, representation, act and phenomenon in his later work.

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