‘The Song Unsung’: Luigi Nono's Il canto sospeso

Abstract

Taking into account the sources now available at the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice, this article first looks at Nono's serial masterpiece Il canto sospeso (1955–6) in its historical context, both in Germany and in Italy. Having outlined the political circumstances and aesthetic premisses, the article goes on to provide a detailed analysis of the serial technique employed. Particular attention is paid to a technique of pitch permutation that explains the pitch structures of several movements, hitherto not fully understood. Each of the nine movements is examined in view of a better understanding of the work's expressive qualities and in order to show the underlying formal and compositional relationships.

Non-Conventional Planar Designs in the Works of Nono and Tintoretto

“…Another passage from Cori di Didone contains one such unconventional approach to text allotment, relying on overlapping phonemes to create new musical scenarios. This passage exhibits small-scale imitation in the same vein as the canonic expanse in the fifth movement discussed above, but, in this instance, 38 Guerrero (2006) and Nielinger (2006), independently of one another, offer similar observations on the movement. Nielinger examines the serialization of instrumental colors in addition to duration and dynamics.…”

“…34 The technique 34 See Borio (1999), Guerrero (2006), Motz (1999), Neidhäfer (2007), and Nielinger (2006). 5 10 3 8 1 6 11 4 9 2 7 12 10 8 6 4 2 12 5 3 1 11 9 7 8 4 12 3 11 7 10 6 2 5 1 9 4 3 7 6 5 9 8 12 11 10 2 1 3 6 9 12 10 1 4 7 5 8 11 2 6 12 1 7 8 2 3 9 10 4 5 11 12 7 2 9 4 11 6 1 8 3 10 5 7 9 11 1 3 5 12 2 4 6 8 10 9 1 5 2 6 10 7 11 3 12 4 8 1 2 10 11 12 8 9 5 6 7 3 4 2 11 8 5 7 4 1 10 12 9 6 3 11 5 4 10 9 3 2 8 7 1 12 6…”

“…36 Next, the collections are plotted onto a network of eight and a half "Position-Grids," shown in,Example 9(b). 37 Each grid's 35 Rearrangement schemes throughout the cantata are treated extensively by Bailey (1992) and Nielinger (2006), and their use in Incontri is discussed by Durazzi (2001Durazzi ( , 2005. Some of the schemes correspond to the M n(S) operation of Lewin (1966), which multiplies order-position numbers by the constant, n mod 13; the rearrangement here is M 7(S).…”

The beautiful and the political

“…The music contains many elements and permutations of serial organisation-and other structured methods of organisation which are not necessarily serial-and can be thought of as a cantata for voices and large ensemble. Luigi Nono has also explicitly stated the influences of Maderna, Varèse and Scriabin on the sound-world of the music (Nono, 1987in Nielinger, 2006. These aspects of the work-a highly structured Kreidler has endorsed the term 'new conceptualism' within a public debate around this post-modern approach to 1 music.…”

“…Carola Nielinger (2006) and Kathryn Bailey (1992) both address the poietics of the music in some considerable detail, and both point out that musicological assumptions about the use of serialism in the work, mostly derived from Reginald SmithBrindle's analysis of serialist technique in only one of its movements, have neglected the depth of technical variation in the music (Bailey, 1992, p.280). Both Nielinger and Bailey draw special attention to the final instrumental section of the work: its 8th movement.…”