Not knowing Nono

Ben Harper, of Boring Like a Drill, has a great post about Luigi Nono's music, focusing in on its changing reception, or more precisely, its changing packaging.

I am rather attached to Nono's 1980 string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima and I have, more than once, considered adding it to my "landmarks" list (see the sidebar). But each attempt to write something meaningful about the quartet has failed, and I'm not sure whether my failure lies in my inability to get closer to a work whose distance to my own musical culture is great, or in a more fundamental doubt about the work as a technical and musical achievement.

Nono does not make it easy: the score is annotated with a series of 53 quotes from Hölderlin, difficult, sometimes cryptic or even mystical stuff. These are not at all like the playful texts that sometimes accompany scores by Satie; I suspect they are more akin to Ives's philosophical Essays before a Sonata, but without the connecting prose and argument that give Ives's writings their explanatory power, I suspect that the function of the Hölderlin texts is to accompany, not explain, the music.

The music of the quartet is mostly quiet, always on the edge of the abundant silences which are measured both precisely and under fermati of various relative lengths. The progress of the piece is always in a halting rhythm and uncertain metric. Nono's choices of pitches and timbres continually challenge the ear's ability to define a pitch as a pitch. The use of Verdi's scala enigmatica (C, Db, E, F#, G#,A#, B) is less a point of reference for the listener than a point of departure for the composer, in particular allowing the contrast between the wholetone and semitone clusters found in the scale and chromatic or microtonal modifications of individual pitches to further obscure pitch relations.

There is substantial critical literature, mostly in German, about Nono's music, none of which I have found helpful in getting into the quartet. There is also Nono's music-historical role and, in particular, the controversies around him, his work, and the work of others: Nono's attacks on Cage and Stockhausen in 1958 (the Cage attack was largely the writing of the young Helmut Lachenmann) ; his engagement with the PCI; the turn away from real politics (and possibly towards the mystical) with the Quartet and the 1984 "tragedy of listening", Prometeo; the ugly posthumous attack on a supposed Scelsi-Nono-Feldman "cult", spurred on by the composer György Ligeti and led by the critic Peter Niklas Wilson... None of that is much help either.

Both supporters and detractors of Nono's music share a lack of loquacity when it comes to engagement with the actual material substance of the work. I like to be able to discuss music in very concrete terms, and these have been either vague or absent in the Nono discussion; with Nono's turns, especially in the latter music, to territories (both musical and otherwise) that are very mysterious to me, obscure notes have invited more obscure notice, and as a listener I scarcely know where to begin.

As attractive as musical territories are which are slow, quiet, halting, obscured, ambiguous, ephemeral and/or enigmatic, they can also be deceptive. They can disguise writing made from facility and habit rather than labor and conviction, and an absence of material will often be less a mark of profound economy than the receipt for an absence of ideas. With Nono's quartet, my gullibility is tested: I am attached to the piece, but can't begin to explain why; I doubt its technique but want to believe.