Luigi Nono

Double CD set compiling the complete music for solo tape by Luigi Nono. CD2 also includes two italian radio broadcasts (tracks 2.2 and 2.3) meant to be spoken introductions to the broadcast of Ricorda Cosa Ti Hanno Fatto In Auschwitz and Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente respectively. This two Disk set allows you here to survey Luigi Nono's contributions to this creative trajectory who also utilized live performers with electronics. Nono thought of the electronic genre as incredibly suitable to promuligating Marxism, the cause of the Left.


The concert hall venue was increasingly hostile to political content and overall too difficult and bound to exclusively the middle classes.Who could better to afford seats at the opera.It was only with the help of the PCI in Italy that Nono was able to have any of his large-scale works produced, as his opera to activism in women's history, "like a burgeoning light of love" (1972/74) Obvious as well was this form of radical expression did not sit well within bourgeois venues, concert promotors and corporate funders.


The overall effect of the tape sounds here are mural-like,and the timbres sound dated with many different voices occuring simultaneously, with long sustained enveloping sounds,sharply cut,then noise-like"musicque concrete" events, shouting, all quite effective and powerful. The anti-war "Contrappunto dialettico alla mente" (1967-68) commissioned for radio broadcast especially has this incredible power of disunity,of fragmentations. It is serious music here with a rich complex pallette of sounds and texts from the Sixties.Nono thought of the medium itself of electronics as subversive, for it came to disrupt the logical projections of instrumental music. His opera "Intolleranza" for example, the electronics projected from multiple speakers throught the performing space "fights" with the pit orchestra and becomes circumvented where you cannot decipher whats going where.
There are also very detailed notes and complete texts for all the works here in the accompaning booklet, all translated into English. These texts are seminal,never published (in English) takened from the Studio Fonologia (RAI)in Milan and the Nono Archive in Venice.