Luigi Nono

- Andy Hamilton, Classic CD, September 2000

all of this sounds great.

amt- it must be...

I've got this as well, have never really got into it.

having said that, you can't be doing anything wrong if you've been letting just the recordings "blow your mind"

I'm not on ebay george (i'm just not willing to pay the monstrous prices they seem to ask).

anyway: am trying to dowload some kagel, nono and kayn as i post this.

Too right, the prices being asked for original vinyl of 20th century music are ridiculous. A case in point, I was in Reckless in Soho the other day - they had a copy of "Le Voyage" by Pierre Henry. Now I bought "Le Voyage" in Glasgow about 5 years ago for somewhere around a fiver - Reckless were charging £70. It's even worse in Harold Moores - but nonetheless reassuring to realise all those Stockhausen albums I picked up in Glasgow for next to nothing are actually worth a fortune! (By the way, "Le Voyage" isn't even very good).

fwiw, above, i was just hinting that you don't need to buy an ebay item like 'acustica' to be able to download those often hilarious & intriguing sleevenotes that ebayers are often posting pictures of along with the auction, often included so the potential buyers know that it's all there

further, by way of example that many 20th century collectos will cash in things like items like this in the recesses of their 30 year collections when it turns out that they are seriously collectible: i emailed a guy who _was_ selling his DG double lp (with full pristine notes) of 'acustica', and despite the fact that i wasn't even going to be bidding on that one and had made that clear to him, he helpfully made available to me all that (imho) interseting ephemera free of charge

bitch all you want about eBay prices -- wouldn't you sell your item for 50 quid if some twerp was going to pay it yet you could still transfer it to cd and copy all the extras ? -- eBay prices like these say much more about the buyers than the vendors, who often turn out to be interesting friendly people, quite conscious that they themselves simply 'got lucky' thirty years ago, quite able to participate in email discussions of the music they're often selling with regret yet jumping at economic incentives most people here would not sneeze at, people quite capable and hardly 'above' participating in just the same style discusions that we have here

Dadaismus, especially ironic for you, as you might be interested to know that talking to the Kagel item vendor led to me swapping a copy of my copy of Henry's "Apocolapse de Jean" with him

this is the one kagel composition I'm trying to download right now.

''bitch all you want about eBay prices -- wouldn't you sell your item for 50 quid''

unless I was in a desperate situation i wouldn't really sell my best records (whether they were worth 5 or 50 quid).

ok sorry I didn't quite know what 'libretto' meant.

yet the reasons these people sell their stuff for inflated prices need not necessarily tar them as speculators.

i've met lots of people through ebay, and while it's not true for all of them, the vendors with the interesting stuff are often just as much fun as anyone else in hyperscape with similar musical interests.

so i guess what i'm saying is, don't rule them out for some sort of exchange, however low-budget, as most music-lovers are still part of the same lonely arts club, and they're online.

the label "col legno" has many good selections of his work

yeah sure I do love doing CDR/tape exchanges with anyone. and yeah, online is where the action is.

there's good stuff on the wergo discs -- search 'La fabbrica illluminata' and 'Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz', for chorus and tape. Nice concrete. Not restful, full of piercing close intervals, shrieks, it's all about tension this music. Also 'Omaggio a Vedova', for tape, from 1960; sounds much like other tape music from the time, i.e. I like it a lot.

He's written a lot of choral stuff. 'Das atmende Klarsein' is a 44 minute piece with lovely slow movements for voice alternating with bass flute solos doing quiet overtone flurries. It's a very quiet piece, and the opening in particular sets a spell.

'guai ai gelidi mostri' is for small ensemble with drastic live electronic processing. the textures are right in line with Stockhausen's 'Mixtur'.

ok, back to listening to the Swingle Singers...

side 'como...' starts off with tape and soprano (the words 'luciano!': not berio but Luciano cruz, 'one of the yound leaders of the revolutionary left' in chile, who died earlier that year, the piece is dedicated to him). The orchestra and piano (in 'clouds of sound' type mode) join in: pure bliss!

'Y entonces' is a work for soprano and tape, both instruments exploring 'higher registers', there is soprano singing and spoken word, tough to figure out on one listen just what sound is made by soprano and what is coming from tape, the readings disorientate further and this is kept up until the final section where the tape (and my mind) exploded with recordings of demonstrations (and a reading of some of Che's last letter to fidel and castros own voice making an appearance). A great way to end it and a top LP. The guy who sold this must have been really desperate for cash or sumfin'.

(*this was Stockhausen's "Kommunion/Intensitat" - the latter has KS hammering nails into a block of wood for 30 minutes)

that is my third LP of classical (have a stockhausen, xenakis one too).

The thing to do is just search those second hand shops and hope you get lucky.

and people are stockpiling about-to-go OOP CD and DVD material now.

i hate to think what that means for known-as interesting and well-meaning music stores in London. at least you can find someone who'll play you almost anything there. but the movement of vinyl (often never played or damaged) like Stockhausen into low-rent (public) high art auction rooms, maybe that's got more to do with Europe.

well, there'll will be plenty of exc-exchanged fire sales from elsewhere soon enough.

its not an 'auction'. Its a second hand store. also the vinyl isn't 'damaged' or anything.

because we are talking at cross purposes. i'm just trying to be helpful. did i say something unnacceptably sarcastic up-thread ? i'm sorry if i did and i did not mean to cause any grievance to anyone.

that's something i wished the whole internet did better or did not do at all -- perhaps sarcasn is the most facile of adolescant throwbacks, but if that's so the it follows that would it would be the last form of communication thar i'd have to warn the hopefully adult recipients about.

'como una ola de Furza de luz/ y entonces comprendio'
God bless my grandmother that one year the year she visited for xmas during my early teenage years. My parents had decided that this, from among all the xmas gifts for me, would be the one attributed to her. Meaning she got to sit with me on Christmas day while I listened straight through both sides with great enthusiasm (Julio has done a nice job upthread of capturing how exciting the opening of "como..." is). She was not much of a music listener at all, certainly not an adventurous one, and I recall her being at a complete loss for words, the music was so foreign to anything she'd heard or imagined. But I was obviously happy with it, and that was enough for her I suppose.

For anyone who likes the breathy, shimmering bass flute writing in 'Das atmende Klarsein', I'd also recommend Brian Ferneyhough's 'Mnemosyne' for 8 multitracked layers of bass flute. It's on probably the best single disc representing Ferneyhough's work -- an Etcetera release that also includes a stunning performance of 'Etudes Transcendantales', the clarinet concerto 'La chute d'Icare" and more.

http://www.jpc.de/jpcdb/frames/jpcset.html?hnum=8404169&iampartner=pdm&maktion=artikel&msparte=buecher&language=de

(somewhat less so as his hairline continued to recede)

I'll try one more time

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/3499505827.03.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drf600/f610/f61067qfmrt.jpg

''I'd also recommend Brian Ferneyhough's 'Mnemosyne' for 8 multitracked layers of bass flute.''

oh I think I have read a record review of this I'll get it.

could give me some names of the compositions so I can track it down?

The other recording puts the piece in the context of Ferneyhough's other works for flute, which is own main instrument (although he's not active as a performer). In a nutshell, most of those works are for unaccompanied solo flute, but will SOUND like about 8 flutes overdubbed due to the hyperactivity that's characteristic in Ferneyhough's music. There's an immensely athletic aspect to these pieces, and the performer is equally engaged in a *psychic* struggle to meet the demands of the score without overloading mentally. Mnemosyne is striking in this context because all of that maximalist excess, multiplied via overdubbing, effectively "disappears" in the shadowy timbres of the bass flute -- the result is one of Ferneyhough's most mellow pieces, yet you can never quite ignore the sense of something frantic bubbling just beneath the surface.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006JJ56/002-4172843-3185623?v=glance
This one's in print; I don't know these performances, but the composer himself has apparently given them his blessing so I think it's a safe bet.

If you find one of these and like it (and I hope you do!), I could offer several more recommendations along the same lines.

was listening to this today: one of his late pieces, quite a change in style. Pretty quiet at times, but not constantly so like feldman, I like it lots.

So I didn't find it constant but very uneasy, which makes the textures more interesting to listen to (pretty, constant textures are a bit of a problem when I'm trying to listen to warp type electronic music, or even some 'noise').

Was listening to 'etude...' just now and this is one of my favourites. Very much in line with '...lunaire' and yet pretty distinctive. just wanted to ask abt ferneyhough after the 80s or abt him in general...any other gd compositions I should be on the look out for? any other recommenadtions along those lines would be cool too but we have prob explored those in other threads.

'La fabbrica illluminata' was played in a short versh (as explained in the pre-concert talk given by nono's wife) and the work that followed were from purely serial period and really as dry as it comes but I felt it wasn't so much a fault of the serial music so much as to do w/finding yr own feet and working out stylistic contours.

The next three works involved voice and that's when it picked up: the first for seven sopranos, then ensemble and choir (with fairly lame acoustic gtr) -- the vocals were used in that webernian way, ie. sparingly. The high point came with the work for soprano/electronics: the tape sounded gorgeous as played in the hall, consisting of pure electronics and concrete riot sounds -- like the thing with concrete (as me and mark s were talking abt) is that the sounds of doors clashing with trains is nice n'all but its too fkn ABSTRACT can't give a shit abt it! Riots, sounds of a baby's cry/voices steadingly blurring/decaying (lucier, humans being destroyed by tape) has an emotional charge that's lacking elsehwhere...in this partircurlar piece (forgot to buy a programme) the soprano's (claron mcfadden (sp) who also performs on birtwisle's pulse shadows) is blurring in and out, catching everyone out -- this carried onto the pieces for piano and tape and 5 perc and tape: he was so damn subtle at working tape sounds onto the acoustics that I couldn't tell where one started and the other began -- something I kind of knew but never reckoned with face to face. tape used to accentuate the blurring of the sections; a sharpening the contradictions of live electronics in the classical hall. finally a piece for two bass clarinets and tape from the 80s -- one of his near silent pieces -- its like the revolution destroyed so what do u have left? uneasy ambience...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/performanceon3/pip/5025c/

There's a playlist, too, which should clear up any questions about which piece was which...

I caught it from the middle of 'la fabrica...' onwards: a tad underwhelmed by it, the surround sound (as verity sharp later implied) makes quite a difference but Radio 3 doesn't pick up very well over here, the static adding to the quiet pieces.

I kind of twigged last night as to what a close cousin those 'quiet improv' things (I'm not listening to much of it these days merely listening to it in other musics) are to late nono except the tension is really lost in the improvising which makes it a challenge. i think that kind of thing is, to a certain extent, still being worked out.

also I pulled out my copy of his opera from the early 70s 'al gran sole carico d'amore': got the impression that the first half was more of that orchestra writing in blocks/mass choral/chatter etc whereas the second was much more on the quiet so I wz again wondering abt his responses to setbacks in the struggle (in latin america), waiting for another opportunity to get things on the move but in the meantime learn the lessons (?!)...I dunno, maybe its just me prob reading into things that aren't there again. His brand of silence is very different to feldman's isn't it? wondering how much it differs from arvo part and those guys...on the musical front I'm hearing the live electronics even more working its way as tiny rumblings instead of roars.

Been using slsk to do some investigating -- 'time and motion II' for cello and electronics is a brilliant piece in the way it seems to use electronics in a v sparse and careful manner, punctuating the hyper-expressive cello lines. A similar piece was also composed by kaija saaraiho on her 'six japanese gardens' disc but i didn't like it so much, the cello sounded far busier whereas here I think here is there is more of a balancing act, somehow. the electronics sound as if they keep the cello company, a not so active part...

Got hold of a radio rip of an act from his opera 'shadowtime' too, I think NMC are working on a recording so I can't wait to hear the whole thing.

Also got 'sieben sterne' for organ (with two assistants, apparently) immediately reminding me of ligeti at points with these low low, quiet drones but there are some crashing climaxes at other points. great piece.

CB

been listening to a lot of Nono recently, he's been clicking. this one isn't severe at all, it's kind of lush and beautiful like an explosion

Como una ola de fuerza y luz, for Soprano, Piano, Orchestra & Magnetic Tape (1971-72) / ...sofferte onde serene... For Piano & Magnetic Tape (1976) / Contrapunto dialettico alla mente, for Magnetic Tape (1968) -- Maurizio Pollini, Deutsche Grammophon

the pieces for orchestra & tape from the 50's/60's on the Wergo discs are the other ones I'm spending time with

I tried listening to 'Intolleranza 1960' again, and that one still resisted me, and that's the one that usually gets touted as the early masterpiece. it probably is, I'm usually into stringent brutality & batshit shrieking for full chorus but yyyikes. maybe I need to listen to it on a road trip.

this looks good, and picture

"maybe I need to listen to it on a road trip."

er...you'll need a steady hand?

'Intolleranza' is v full-on. I'm really liking the voices in 'Prometeo'. Surely there is no opera like it: the voices are all elongated, slowed down but not immediately mournful. Didn't the first performance take place in a public park in Venice?

'Sara Dolce Tacere' for 9 voices is vv good, but I keep flipping on 'il canto sospesso'.

From the instrumental-only side I've been digging his only string quartet: 'Fragmente, al diatoma' is late-period but he doesn't let the lines rest on themselves, just (JUST!) enough cross-tension.

just like they say in Venice: va' in mona, balordo!

I heard an OK Ferneyhough portrait. 'Missa Brevis' for chorus was a revallation! Sadly, don't think there is a recording of it so now its all a blur. That programme also had a premiere of his 5th string quartet.

my poor, poor neighbors. even at low volumes, the dynamic range is so wide that I had to switch to headphones -- long stretches of quiet little details followed by a shockingly loud burst of distorted noise followed several silent seconds later by _unbelievably loud_ taped explosions and electronic howling. a lot of early tape music is loud (Ferrari, Robert Ashley, Riley) but almost celebratory / cathartic -- this isn't cathartic, it's just horror. I'm beginning to understand the political underpinning -- someone this aesthetically provocative and trying had _better_ have a message. listen and the message is there. make it through and there are some unbelievably beautiful sections, ghostly choral writing mirrored by the tape part -- nono definitely knows how to write for voice

if you like noise, this is a big release up there with that Luc Ferrari Early Electronic Works disc on EMF, which is essential -- this one, probably essential too, though it's a much rougher ride, zero fun. one frustration -- it doesn't have "Non consumiamo Marx" (We Do Not Consume Marx), for voice and tape. Many of his pieces are technically live pieces with tape parts, and not solo tape, but the Julio's mp3 definitely makes it seem like a straight up collage piece.

I've also recently heard the Gideon Kramer version of La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura on Deutche Grammofon's 20/21 series -- very, very different than the Arditti version. Arditti version is stringent and taut. The Kramer version just goes for it, much more radical & dynamic mixing of the tape parts, a lot more fire, I think I like it more. Grant Chu Covell wrote a great overview of the piece at my favorite 20th/classical site La Folia, which helped me find a way in to the piece: http://www.lafolia.com/archive/covell/covell200403nono.html

the Kramer disc, the Solo Tape set & the Pollini Como una ola de fuerza y luz set on DG with the red budget cover, those are my current favorite three

One for the calendar:

Monday 4 June, 7.00pm The Great Hall, Richard Hoggart Building

Barry Guy - WGG
Mizuka Yamamoto (violn), James Bull (electronics)
performing Luigi Nono - ‘La Lontanza Nostalgia Utopica Futura’ for solo violin and 8 magnetic tapes

Nono? Yesyes!

Recently heard something by Franco Donatoni I quite liked. Anyone got recommendations, thoughts or something on him?

I've never heard of him!

Yes indeed! Which gigs are you all looking forward to?

The Arditti quartet and one of the (two!) performance of 'Prometeo', only thing w/the latter is we've got too bloody long to wait.

Sinfonietta might be gd (1st October) though the later music is so radically different from the earlier (and mid-period) that mixing both might not be entirely desirable. We'll see..as for the vocal Renaissance, the programme could've made more of any links between that group and Nono.

Other gd ones will be "Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag" on the 17th.

a_m - Donatoni is fantastic, one of my favourites. I asked the same question at the thread on Sciarrino so have a look at the archives for Paul in SC's answer. I return to this disc of ensemble works time and time again.

So 'Prometeo' sold out...but 'Fragments of Silence' was excellent.

Keep an eye out on Prometeo - I've heard a rumour that not all the tickets have been released yet -the RFH people haven't figured out how they're going to lay out all the surround sound etc, so they don't know how many seats will be available. There may be more to come, but I don't know when.

Bummed I had to miss the Ardittis last night, but you can't go to everything and Pollini next week should be amazing.

Yeah I'll probably try to see that - the thing is you've got that Jonathan Powell recital the next day and I'm not sure I'll have the stamina for both.