Fragmente-Stille, An Diotma/"Hay que caminar" sognando

Luigi Nono - Fragmente-Stille, An Diotma/"Hay que caminar" sognando

Performers:

track 1: Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti - violin; David Alberman - violin; Levine Andrade - viola; Rohan De Saram - cello

tracks 2-4: Irvine Arditti - violin; David Alberman - violin

Recorded during July 1990

A certain conception of music prevailed around the mid-nineteenth century: the conception of instrumental music as "pure art", as an acoustic representation of the realm of ideas. This concept still endures through the twentieth century in the notion of "absolute music". A great number of instrumental works, among them major masterpieces, from Mozart's last three symphonies to Boulez's "Structures", can be correlated to this conception within which one instrumental combination occupies a choice position: the string quartet. Thus around 1850, the theoretician Karl Kostlin defined it as "a music of the spirit, a pure art, removing us far away from the deafening turmoil of life to lead us to the silent kingdom of conceptual shadows" (in "Die Idee der absoluten Musik", Carl Dahlhaus, Kassel 1978, p. 21).

Completed in January 1980 and premiered on June 2, 1980 by the LaSalle quartet at te Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Luigi Nono's string quartet, entitled "Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima" ("Fragments-Silence, To Diotima"), would seem to fit quite naturally within the principle of this thesis. Nothing in this arcane music, sprinkled with pauses and virtually always performed softly, ever recalls "the deafening turmoil of life." With just a touch of naiveness, the title might even be interpreted as a tribute to an ideal Greece. And then again, the 50-odd fragments of Friedrich Holderlin's poems which Nono wrote down above the notes on his score, seem indeed to refer to the "silent kingdom of conceptual shadows". The annotated poems are intended for the performers and meant to help them achieve an intuitive comprehension of the music: "a more secret world"/ "In rich silence" / "born from ether" / "In the eternal silent light", etc. Other shards from Holderlin's text can nevertheless be found with yet a quite different tenor: "emerging into air and light" / "I, how could I rest?" / "When in sorrow I was engulfed" and - no less than five times - "yet you do not know this". Might those be the echoes from the "silent kingdom of conceptual shadows"? Or rather, a very tangible, at times even insistent way to address an imaginary interlocutor, a situation perhaps of dialogue rather than monologue.
...
"Hay que caminar" sognando, for 2 violins, was composed in 1989, and was the last work to be completed by the composer. The piece is related, though perhaps not obviously, to the String Quartet written nine years earlier. In both works Nono uses the "Scala Enigmata" ("Enigmatic scale") from Verdi's "Four sacred pieces". In the title page of the score of the Violin Duo, Nono carefully quotes the notes of which the scale is comprised; they are to be brought out by the interpreters, and players almost without vibrato. As pieces of purely instrumental writing, the String Quartet and the Violin Duo mark the beginning and end of the composer's final period of development between 1980 and 1990.
During this period, Nono worked with live electronics in the Friburg Experimental Studio, and became intensively occupied with questions of spatial acoustics, and with the analysis of pure sound. "Hay que caminar" is however not simply a return to instrumental music: Nono's experiences with live electronics have left a deep imprint on this work. The concept of "mobile sound" used in this work, for instance, is particularly striking.
In the music using live electornics this effect of "rotating the sound source" would be achieved with the help of carefully placed loudspeakers. In the Violin Duo, it is the interpreters who are the mobile sound sources: Nono has instructed that the pages of the score be distributed among three music stands for each performer. These stands are then to be placed in different positions in the concert hall. Both the order in which these positions are to be used, and the route used to reach them, are to be determined by the interpreters. Nono's experiences with live electronics have also left traces in the microstructure of the sound itself - for instance in the extremely high pitches used, the wide variety of articulation (col legno, ponticello, etc. . . .), and a dynamic range which extends as low as 7 pianissimi. Both the subtle shifting and fluctuating of the sounds, and the exploration of the very lowest limits of human hearing refer back to the opera "Prometeo", Nono's central work of the 1980's. With the more recent restriction to purely instrumental music, Nono seems to have set himself to seek new ways of realising his visionary aims as a composer. This quest was brought to a brutally premature end by his death in May 1990. (Max Nyffeler)

Tracklisting:

1. Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima {36:10}
(1979/1980) for string quartet

2. "Hay que caminar" sognando: première partie {6:20}
(1989) for 2 violins

3. "Hay que caminar" sognando: deuxième partie {10:46}
(1989) for 2 violins

4. "Hay que caminar" sognando: troisième partie {10:34}
(1989) for 2 violins

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