A flute, a choir and lots and lots of uncertainty

Translated into music, this is about getting us to listen again by breaking up our musical assumptions, assumptions to which we have become so accustomed that we are no longer aware of them. For example, the performers in Io, frammento ... are encircled by the audience. In addition, the electronics open up a separate room within a room. Do we listen differently when the music doesn’t come from the front, or when we can’t see its source?

The room as an instrument

Nearly 400 years before Nono, the composer Giovanni Gabrieli was asking similar questions when he distributed several groups of singers and players around the many galleries in the San Marco Cathedral in Venice and let them sing and play across the room. Gabrieli published two collections of music titled Symphoniae Sacrae. Both are written especially for the San Marco Cathedral; the first was published in 1597.

Open landscapes

Luigi Nono originally wrote his Prometeo work for the same room in the San Marco Cathedral and thought of it as an extension of Gabrieli’s cori spezzati (separated choir). But Nono's musical rooms are more volatile and unpredictable than Gabrieli’s. Perhaps they remind us more of a city than of a building, open landscapes in which the audience can immerse themselves.

The room in the music

Nono also explores the two-dimensional space in the music itself; the space between tall and light, and low and deep tones. In the center of Io, frammento dal Prometeo is a bass flute. Both the flute and contrabass clarinet sound in extreme registers that we do not normally associate with these instruments. Around them, we hear a small choir and a soloist group. Typically, singers are accompanied by instruments, but here it is the opposite. The singers form a backdrop for the woodwind, sing in the outer registers, and they often have to sing faintly, so the sound produced is other than what we associate with a human voice.

A pure music?

When instruments, voices and electronics meet, the transitions are often indistinct. Soprano voices and flute tones flow into each other, and it is difficult to know where one ends and another begins.

This correlates with Nono’s efforts to clean the music of all its accumulated preconceptions. Classical music is full of references to systems; whether they are quotes from other works, harmonies, text, learnt affectations, types of form or programmes. Nono wants to find the way back to a cleaner sound, and talks about moving from thinking back to sensing. 

Prometheus' unrest

Nono often lets each sound move between discordant and concordant tones, and through this achieves a rich and layered sound. The piece progresses in leaps and bounds. At the same time, the musical holes are filled with sound, because the intervals flow together harmoniously and establish temporary tonalities.

The tumultuous and the fluid also affect the way the music unfolds itself in time. In a number of places the tempo of the flute and clarinet is relatively free, and there are even some improvised sections. The unrest mirrors the story of Prometheus. He is assigned by Zeus to create man, but he is so fond of his creation and gives man so much knowledge, that Zeus feels threatened and sentences Prometheus to a life in captivity, without sleep or rest. In this state, Prometheus meets Io, a woman who is herself doomed, by Zeus’s wife Hera, to a life of eternal wandering, after Zeus fell in love with her.

The text as sound

The philosopher Massimo Cacciari has selected fragments of the Prometheus myth from several writers, including Aeschylus, Hölderlin and Sappho. From these sources, the composer has reduced the fragments even further, to single words or just syllables. "It's not the content of the texts that has been reproduced musically, only traces of the text", says Nono. "I have always given weight to the sound of words, because in music, only sound can speak."

Doubts as method

The turbulence and uncertainty in the Prometheus-works are often portrayed as a break in Nono's artistic work, because much of his earlier music was marked by dialectics and clear contrasts. In one way this is certainly true, but it is also important not to lose sight of how, with these works, Nono is actually trying to avoid a break and establish a more fluid, non-hierarchical world of sounds. The twin work to Io, Das Atmende Klarsein, also includes a bass flute and a choir. Just before Das Atmende Klarsein was first performed, Nono described it in a manner that could also be appropriate to Io, frammento dal Prometeo:

A flute, a choir and lots and lots of uncertainty.

HILD BORCHGREVINK
English version: ALISTAIR SPALDING