twentieth-century music 9/12, 7999 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013

doi:10.1017/S1478572212000217

Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

WESLEY PHILLIPS

Abstract
The historical and theoretical resonances between the work of Theodor Adorno and that of Luigi Nono have
hitherto remained underexplored. In this article a debate is constructed between the two figures concerning the
politics of space in advanced music in order to question a frequently held opposition between autonomous and
political art. Nono can be seen to interweave German and Italian traditions of historical materialism, responding
simultaneously to the issues of both reification and imperialism. This is drawn out by way of Adornos evolving
attitude towards the younger generation at Darmstadt, via his revised understanding of the relationship between
music and painting. Conversely the solidarity Nono maintained with contemporary spaces of resistance while not
compromising his musical language promises to expand Adornos aesthetic theory.
In a conversation about Luigi Nono German music critics Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer
Riehn noted in 2003 that Helmut Lachenmann has often asked us why [Theodor] Adorno
never discussed Nono. Riehn reflects that Lachenmann, Nonos former student, is mistaken,
insofar as Adorno was forcefully engaged with the Varianti (1957), which he mentioned
publicly in 1966. As to the AdornoNono complex, Riehn continues, I always wanted to
have a conversation with [the soprano] Carla Henius, who was friendly with both Nono and
Adorno, and to ask her [about it], as she had dealings with the two men. But sadly she has
passed away.1
This AdornoNono complex is the theme of the following investigation. Although the
two men are known to have met, no record survives of any debate of the kind that they
might well have had with one another, given both their historical-biographical relationship
(since each contributed to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse during the 1950s) and their theoretical
relationship, in that they both made a notable contribution towards a historical materialist
aesthetics. The changes in their respective work over time render this project ever more
fraught, but at the same time intriguing. A debate will be reconstructed between the critical
theorist and the composer sometimes real, sometimes virtual with regard to the politics
of space in the post-war avant garde. The contention of this article is that the relationship
under consideration promises to mediate the autonomous versus committed models of
art, frequently presented as an insoluble dualism.
Our task breaks down into three moments, reflecting the three commonly categorized
stages of Nonos uvre: the serialism of the 1950s, the electronic works up to the mid1970s, and the later work continuing up to the composers death. One example will be
taken to represent each period: Il canto sospeso (1956), A floresta `e jovem e cheja de vida
1 Wagner, Nono und der musikalische Fortschritt, 1467. All translations in this article are by the author unless
stated otherwise.

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80 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

(19656), and Prometeo (1984). The first section is inevitably the lengthiest, for the reason
that the historical-biographical and theoretical must be treated together: Nono ceased contributing substantially to Darmstadt in 1960 and Adorno died in 1969. This initial section
will seek to understand Il canto sospeso both as a response to Adornos Das Altern der
Neuen Musik (The Ageing of the New Music, 19545) and as an anticipation of his concepts of reification, expression, and mimesis. It will be argued that Nono combines German
and Italian traditions of historical materialist thought by resisting both reification and
imperialism. This reading will proceed by way of a perceivable turn in Adornos attitude
towards the young generation, discernible from his reconsideration of the relationships
between music and painting. Roughly speaking, Adornos post-war lectures and essays on
music can be put into two categories, falling either side of this realignment: Philosophie der
Neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music, 1949), Zum Verhaltnis von Malerei und Musik
heute (On the Relationship between Painting and Music Today, c1950), Versuch uber Wagner
(In Search of Wagner, 1952) and Das Altern der Neuen Musik (19556) belonging to the
former group; Wien (Vienna, 1960), Vers une musique informelle (1961), Wagners
ber einige Relationen zwischen
Aktualitat (The Relevance of Wagner for Today, 1963), U
Musik und Malerei (Some Relationships Between Music and Painting, 1965), and Die
Funktion der Farbe in der Musik (The Function of Colour in Music, 1966) belonging to
the latter. Coincidentally or otherwise, this readjustment is contemporaneous with Adornos
forceful engagement with Nonos 1957 Varianti.
The second section will examine the relationship between Nonos musical and extramusical
(i.e. political) senses of space and time. Nonos incorporation of documentary spaces of
resistance leads to a dissonance, but not an incoherence, with his musical material. This
successful integration is read both as a critique of Adornos absolutist conception of musical
material and as a post-Adornian model for an art of resistance. In the final section Prometeo
will be presented as a continuation of the composers interest in the utopian significance
of the artwork, recalling the etymological meaning of utopia as no-place. Nonos tragic
sense of this problem corrects and expands Adornos vision of an autonomous art.

Adorno at Darmstadt
Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, albeit with intermittent returns to the USA thereafter, in order to help establish the new branch of the Institute for Social Research at
the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.2 By this time the summer course at Kranichstein
Castle near Darmstadt, inaugurated by Wolfgang Steinecke in 1946 and known from 1948
as the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik, was already up and running. Given that
the young generation (including Goeyvaerts, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono) began to take
control of the summer courses from the early 1950s, Adorno could not have encountered
2 Detlev Claussen reminds us that the return happened in stages: Not until 194950 did [Adorno] take his first trip
back to Germany following the end of the Nazi regime, and he returned to America more or less directly. In 19523
he spent almost a year at the Hacker Foundation in California (Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno, 176).

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 81

Darmstadt at a more formational moment. By 1958, Nono could identify (and was indeed
the first to do so publicly) a Darmstadt school, recognizing the collective achievements of
recent years. Importantly, in the context of what follows, Nono compares the school to the
field of the plastic arts, to what was achieved in the Bauhaus of Weimar and Dessau in its
day.3
Adorno contributed to the Ferienkurse nine times between 1950 and 1966.4 His first
substantial contribution in 1951 proves to be crucial when coming to understand his initial
reception of the young generation. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, then a spokesman for the younger
generation on theoretical matters, has since claimed, along with others, that Das Altern
der Neuen Musik, given as a lecture in 1954 and published the following year, was most
probably informed by a performance and discussion of Goeyvaerts Sonata for Two Pianos,
and not Boulezs Second Piano Sonata, one of Adornos stated targets.5 Adorno had taken
exception to Goeyvaerts concept of musical material only to extend this to all and any serial
technique.6 What is striking, of course, is that the verdict of Das Altern predates the flourishing of the young generation from the mid-1950s onwards. Adorno had deemed the new
music to be old before it had yet come to maturity. In his generally negative assessment
of Adornos engagement with post-war music, Marcus Zagorski identifies a predictable
element in Adornos critique of Materialfetischismus.7 Das Altern reads like a mere restatement of the thesis of Philosophie der Neuen Musik, a book that, despite appearing in West
Germany in 1949 and being read by young and old alike, originated in the 1930s. It is as if,
in order to remain the leading intellectual on advanced music, Adorno had to demonstrate
the continuing veracity of his thesis of the 1930s and 40s. As Metzger sensed, and as
Adornos staggered return to Europe also suggests, the critical theorists premature verdict
on the young generation can be seen as theoretically overdetermined locked into the
categories he had theorized already back in the 1930s and underdetermined by actual,
practical encounters with the music itself.

Youth, age, temporalization

The relationship between the older and younger generations became intertwined in Adornos
mind with the theoretical question of the obsolete and the new. The young generation shared
Adornos insistence on an advanced musical material, and his feeling that anything less was

3
4
5
6

Nono, Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik, 30.

Details of the contributors to each course are provided in Borio and Danuser (eds), Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 3.
See Toop, Messiaen / Goeyvaerts, Fano / Stockhausen, Boulez, 1423.
Following Morag Grants usage, serial is used advisedly here so as to avoid, on the one hand, any restriction to the
post-Schoenbergian sense of twelve-note music and, on the other hand, the pejorative senses of both integral and
total serialism in English-language discussions of the European and Cagean traditions of the post-war avant garde.
Aware of the categorical distinctions between serial techniques, Adorno nevertheless retains a largely negative assessment of all of them during in the early fifties, standing against anything serial. See Grant, Serial Music, Serial
Aesthetics, 56.
7 Zagorski, Nach dem Weltuntergang, 6815.

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82 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

tainted by association with the recent political past. But the Philosophie der Neuen Musik was
at the same time a bone of contention with many of the younger generation (though Ligeti
would remain more receptive). Adorno had contrasted the restoration of Stravinsky with
the progress of Schoenberg, in whose atonal expressionism (c1910) objective construction
was treated with subjective freedom. Schoenberg nevertheless remained, in spite of his later
innovations in twelve-note technique, a bourgeois anachronism on account of his retention
of other parameters from the tradition, notably with regard to development and rhythm.
The model was instead Webern, who, it was reckoned, had begun to extend his teachers
technique to all parameters, paving the way for total serialism or totally organized music.
In 1953 Nono, Stockhausen, Boulez, and others gave a presentation marking Weberns
seventieth birthday. This was followed by a special Webern issue of Die Reihe, the periodical
of the young composers. Of course the situation is more complicated where Nono is concerned: while belonging to the post-Webern school at this point, he also remains uniquely
indebted to Schoenberg, an indebtedness that went beyond the music, since he had married
the composers daughter, Nuria.
Adorno would have heard Nonos first published compositions before writing Das
Altern der Neuen Musik, works that are not perhaps as compelling as those he composed
later in that decade. The 1951 Ferienkurse included the premie`re of PolifonicaMonodia
Ritmica (1951) under the baton of Hermann Scherchen. In 1954 Adorno attended the
course that heard La victoire de Guernica (1954). Adorno leaves us to assume, therefore,
that these examples are not exempt from the charge of Materialfetischismus. Indeed, Nono
is included amongst the enfants terribles in Adornos contemporaneous essay Neue Musik
heute (New Music Today, 1955): they include Boulez in France, Stockhausen in Germany,
and Maderna and Nono in Italy. Objective construction is now supposed to encapsulate all
elements mathematically, in particular rhythmic ones; the aim, to put it drastically, is the
liquidation of composition in each composition.8
One of the charges levelled by Das Altern der Neuen Musik is that of a confusion of
preformed material with musical experience. This criticism is both philosophical and
music-critical in nature. In philosophical terms, if the conception is too determinate
worked out in advance then the work is over before judgement (critical listening) has
been called upon. Free judgement not only takes time but is equally a form of temporalization. Adorno connects this aesthetic principle to music in particular. The author discerns in
both the later Webern and the young composers the attempt to outdo Schoenberg in the
sphere of development and rhythm. But in abstractly negating all previous forms (thematic
development and variation) they are alleged to have liquidated temporalization altogether.
Adorno pushes the two critiques, philosophical and musical, together: non-temporalization
is but a consequence of the over-reliance on preformed material. This pre-war tendency has
continued into the music of the younger generation, whose music is accordingly not new
but old. Hence young people no longer trust in their youth.9 Since Adorno addresses the
8 Adorno, Neue Musik heute, 3989.
9 Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 156 (trans., 191).

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 83

new music as such, there are two levels of ageing: that of the individual works and that of
the conception of music on which they rely. New music itself is falling into contradiction
with its own idea.10
For Adorno, the problem of temporalization remains acute with respect to music, insofar
as he insists that, of all the arts, music has time as its problem, and that Zeitkunst, the
temporal art, is equivalent to the objectification of time.11 This is why he focuses on what
is happening to development and, moreover, why he is concerned with the relationship
between the temporal art of music and the spatial art of painting.12 Two essays on this
relationship, dating from around 1950 and 1965 respectively, illuminate the adjustment in
Adornos stance on space in the new music during this period.
In the earlier text Adorno holds that new music has slipped into a pastiche of modern
painting, resulting in a form of stasis. Once again, he has in mind the visual and spatial
senses of drawing up the composition, including, of course, latter-day pointillism, of which
PolifonicaMonodiaRitmica remains an early example. The reference of musical pointillism to painting was, ever since Schoenbergs Klangfarbenmelodie, explicit: Reginald Smith
Brindle, for instance, commented on the almost static atmosphere of the opening of
Polifonica.13 But in Adornos thinking of the time the static is treated purely pejoratively:
The basis of this serialism is a static idea of music: the precise correspondences and
equivalences that total rationalization requires are founded on the presupposition
that the identical element that recurs in music is indeed actually equivalent, as it
would be in a schematic spatial representation.14
The sense that Adorno was not ready to listen to the young generation was concretized in
Metzgers response, which, appropriately enough, appeared in the Young Composers issue
of Die Reihe: Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik (The Ageing of the Philosophy
of New Music, 1958). Metzger accused Adorno of not keeping pace with the concept of
new musical material in a manner that his philosophy of new music would itself demand.
Adorno was to take Metzgers critique to heart, and by 1961 was confessing that informal
music is but an expression for Metzgers term an a-serial music.15
One reason why Adorno takes Metzger seriously is that they share an identification of
musical time as being the crux of the matter. But Metzger takes Adorno to task on his
conflation of space with stasis, and then stasis with non-temporalization. The performance
can remain experientially non-identical to the score whilst at the same time borrowing
something distinctively spatial from it. Metzger cites Adornos own phrase only to turn it
against its author: There are indeed cases in present-day production in which a schematic

10
11
12
13
14
15

Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 143 (trans., 181).

ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei, 628 (trans., 66).
Adorno, U
Adorno, Zum Verhaltnis von Malerei und Musik heute, 142 (trans., 415).
Brindle, The New Music, 18.
Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 1512 (trans., 188).
Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 272).

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84 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

spatial presentation takes on an unusual value.16 This somewhat vague unusual value, we
shall suggest, finds particular meaning (going beyond Metzgers own preferences) in Il canto
sospeso (1956).

Nono with and against Adorno

The Italian music critic Massimo Mila regarded Il canto sospeso as a practical riposte to Das
Altern der Neuen Musik. Nono denies the historical pessimism of Adorno, whereby, due
to his rigid sociological determinism, the barbarism of the new [Darmstadt] school is
unavoidable.17 Where Mila posits a simple opposition between Adorno and Nono, a dialectic
should be proposed. Nonos work takes on the genuine criticisms of Adornos polemic in a
manner that might even be seen as anticipating Adornos subsequent repositioning. This
reading must proceed by way of Nonos talk Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von
heute (History and the Present in the Music of Today, 1959), even though it dates from
slightly later and was essentially ghost-written by his pupil, Helmut Lachenmann.
Judging from a letter to his pianist friend Eduard Steuermann reporting back on the 1955
course, Adorno held Nono the man in high esteem, but Nono the composer, and indeed
Nono the intellectual, in less high esteem. Again, the context is the relationship of the elder
statesmen to the youth, whom Adorno now charges with paranoia:
Of course, to paranoia also belongs the moment of unresponsiveness, something
found in the otherwise very likeable and originally gifted Nono, with whom Rudi
[Kolisch], Horkheimer, and I attempted to hold a very fundamental discussion. But
that got no further than the question of what we had against the youth, against
which, incidentally, Rudi too politely and too weakly argued for us to preserve
something of our experiences.18
Adorno goes on to describe the premie`re of Nonos Incontri as dry and very weak and yet
like the earlier things, perhaps anticipating the overall warming to Nono that becomes
clearer after 1957, the year Adornos violinist friend Kolisch commissioned and premie`red
Nonos Varianti.19 During a series of three lectures on Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik
(The Function of Colour in Music) at the 1966 Ferienkurse, Adorno recalls the Varianti
in relation to Kolisch and his crisis of strings thesis.20 Adorno and Kolisch were taken
with Nonos deconstruction of the violins beautiful tone and his expansion of its possible
timbres. Together with other, later essays, these lectures display Adornos tentatively new
position on musics relationship to painting. Referring to the 1966 lectures, Alistair Williams
has spoken of Adornos conviction that sound colour becomes a crucial part of structure
16 Metzger, Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik, 74 (trans., 73).
17 Mila, La linea Nono, 301 (French trans., 58).
18 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie, 247. I am indebted to Adrian Wilding for the translation of
this passage.
19 Ewenz and others (eds), Adorno: eine Bildmonographie, 248.
20 Adorno, Die Funktion der Farbe, 3045.

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 85

when music, as he puts it, has cut its connecting cables (Verbindungsdrahte), by which he
means when it has dispensed with established methods of organizing components such as
pitch and rhythm.21 Frustratingly, Adorno does not explicitly identify this expanded conception of form as a valid response to the problem of stasis, even though stasis is explicitly
related to painting in his earlier texts. The non-connection of colour to time is surprising,
given that, as Williams notes, Adornos lectures were informed by Ligetis essay Form in
der Neuen Musik (1966), in which the new form is defined as the product of an imaginary
spatialization of the temporal process, and that Ligetis Atmosphe`res, a work with profound
temporal implications, appears in the Funktion der Farbe lectures.22
Nono and Adorno seem to have missed each other on crucial occasions. First and foremost, it is doubtful that Adorno attended the Cologne premie`re of Il canto sospeso, which
took place in October 1956 after Nono had missed the deadline for Darmstadt in the same
year. At best Adorno may have heard recorded extracts in 1957 when Stockhausen gave his
Musik und Sprache (Music and Speech) lecture, which Nono took to have misrepresented
the work. This would account for Adornos acquaintance with at least its programme, as
we shall see. Secondly, Adorno did not attend the 1959 course, the occasion of Nonos
Geschichte und Gegenwart polemic. And finally, it is not clear that Nono heard Adornos
1961 lectures on an informal music, given that Nono had cast himself adrift with the justcited talk (though he surely knew of Adornos subsequent essay). Steineckes death in 1961
further hastened the departure from Darmstadt of Nono, whose interest was instead turning
to the possibilities of music theatre, international politics, and new technologies.23 Incidentally, Adorno dedicated the written text of Vers une musique informelle to the memory of
Steinecke, and this was followed by a warm obituary given at the 1962 Ferienkurse, once
again suggesting a new acknowledgement of the courses value.
Two of Adornos references to Nono appear in the essay Wien (1960), in which he
attempts to reconcile young and old by way of a continuing Viennese modernist tradition.
The first remark declares Nono and Bruno Maderna the principal exponents of Italian
modernism. In the second remark the allusion to Il canto sospeso is unmistakable:
The fact that [the most recent composers] compose settings for revolutionary texts,
the diaries of anti-fascists under sentence of death, or surrealist shock verses, is
appropriate to the music, just as the dreamlike convulsions of [Schoenbergs]
Erwartung can be said to fit what is admittedly a comparatively harmless text.24
On the face of it, Adorno places little importance on the programmatic content and context
of Il canto sospeso. The letters, written by anti-fascists facing execution, are valuable as
examples of expression rather than for their confrontation of the listener with the gravity
of the historical event. But Adornos emphasis on expression is by no means dismissive of
the works historical significance. Expression names the artworks mimetic relation to a
21
22
23
24

Williams, New Music, Late Style, 196.

Ligeti, Form in der neuen Musik, 795.
Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 59.
Adorno, Wien, 449 (trans., 219).

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86 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

reified society. Being mimetic (in Adornos particular sense of the term, defined below), the
artwork is non-identical, and to that extent constitutes an act of resistance to the identical,
including the perpetuation of fascism. For Adorno, advanced music does not stand in inherent need of a programmatic text, since advanced music constitutes a historically mediated
language of its own.25
Expression and mimesis are two of the most important categories of Adornos unfinished
sthetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). Art is modern art through its mimesis of the
A
hardened and alienated.26 Mimesis and expression are not thereby behavioural or psychological categories but, rather, social and even ontological ones. The artwork embodies a
dialectic of rational construction and mimetic expression.27 In three texts dating from the
1930s, Walter Benjamin defined mimesis as original appropriation, a prototype being child
development.28 Mimesis is the freedom of becoming where reification is the imposition of
stasis, mirroring the above opposition between youth and ageing.
One of the critiques of Adorno from other traditions of Marxism is that this opposition
between freedom and the totally administered society obscures other more immediate
problems and opportunities. Reification society becoming a thing as the consequence of
the exchange principle in the commodity seems to be the most fundamental problem for
the first generation Frankfurt School, according to which fascism, imperialism, and exploitative labour conditions become subsidiary problems or symptoms. Luigi Nono, who joined
the Italian Communist Party in 1952, saw these latter problems as the fundamental ones. As
Carola Nielinger has demonstrated, these issues remained pertinent to the politics of Italy
after the war. Her article The Song Unsung: Luigi Nonos Il canto sospeso seeks to correct
the antinomic reception of Il canto sospeso: either totalitarian serialism or sentimental historical
memory. Nielinger concludes that for Nono and Maderna, as for Italian neo-realism,
abstraction and expression are not opposed but rather complementary. For Maderna,
Expression can mean abstraction because: to express means to bring forth, i.e. to abstract
or, better, to isolate a part of the whole and to transfer it into another dimension.29 Extending Nielingers insight, without endorsing her portrait of Adorno, Nono can in fact be seen
to combine a German critical tradition of resistance to reification with an Italian activist
tradition of resistance to imperialism (we know that Nono read Antonio Gramsci, for instance). This serves to situate Nono fascinatingly within both the German language Marxist
aesthetics debates of the 1930s, which included Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukacs, and
their resumption in the art and life debates of the 1960s up to the present day.30
Given that Stockhausens Darmstadt presentation (Musik und Sprache) focused on the
settings of Il canto sospeso, Adorno may not have been familiar with the instrumental movements of the work, which is scored for soprano, alto, tenor, mixed chorus, and orchestra.
See Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verhaltnis.
sthetische Theorie, 39 (trans., 21).
Adorno, A
sthetische Theorie, 723 (trans., 445).
Adorno, A
See, On Astrology (1932), Doctrine of the Similar (1933), and On the Mimetic Faculty (1933), in Benjamin,
Selected Writings, vol. 2.
29 Cited in Nielinger, The Song Unsung, 136.
30 See Taylor and others (eds), Aesthetics and Politics.
25
26
27
28

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 87

No. 4 follows the concluding line of no. 3, falling into silence: Your son is leaving, he will
not hear the bells of freedom . . . . Strings enter with extremely long durational values. But
so as to pre-empt sentimentality, small instrumental groups and solo instruments, including
percussion, interrupt those strings violently. Dialectically, these interruptions serve to heighten
the erstwhile static character. Nielinger is attentive to this stoic staticism, a fundamental
and indeed very expressive characteristic of Il canto sospeso. We can say that the work is
simultaneously an exponent of pointillism, each instrument sounding few notes, and an
Aufhebung of pointillism, in that Nonos polarization leads to a paradoxically moving stasis.
A surprising sense of unfolding is eked out, arguably anticipating Nonos later use of the
fermata. As we shall see, Nono will subsequently deny any characterization of Il canto
sospeso as pointillist on the grounds that pointillism equates with socially reactionary atomism.
But this defence can itself be read as a symptom of the fraught, mimetic treatment of stasis
that is at play. This is achieved through the combination of existing Klangfarbenmelodie with
a new understanding of duration, something that will resonate with Adornos aesthetic
theory.

Reification and mimesis

Evidence of a thaw in Adornos relationship to the younger generation is most readily found
in Vers une musique informelle:
I have been favourably impressed by works of the Kranichstein or Darmstadt School
such as Stockhausens Zeitmae, Gruppen, Kontakte, and Carre, as well as Boulezs
Marteau sans matre, his Second and Third Piano Sonatas and his Sonatina for Flute.
I was also deeply moved by a single hearing of Cages Piano Concerto played on
Cologne Radio, though I would be hard put to define the effect with any precision.31
Adorno had already heard the Boulez Second Sonata at the time of giving The Ageing of
the New Music. The piece was then deemed legalism.32 Now he is favourably impressed.
Diary evidence unearthed by Zagorski indicates that Adorno in 1960 may not have been any
more favourably impressed with Boulez than he was (with Goeyvaerts?) in 1955. There is
truth in Zagorskis notion that Adorno sought to appear aktuell, up to date, without meaning it,33 which would contradict any notion of a genuine turn. However, there is little doubt
that at one level Adorno accepted the necessity of the avant-garde project. For instance,
both Nielinger and Zagorski capture Adornos earlier conflation of serialism with reification. But even in Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947) it is clear that
resistance to reification is possible only by means of working through it, not by opposing
sthetische Theorie, the
it romantically.34 Art is the myth of myth. As Adorno will say in A

31
32
33
34

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 494 (trans., 270).

Adorno, Das Altern der Neuen Musik, 151 (trans., 187).
Zagorski, Nach Dem Weltuntergang, 695.
Zagorski, Nach Dem Weltuntergang, 689.

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88 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

artwork is not mimetic in spite of rational construction, but rather by virtue of it; otherwise,
there is no mimesis of the hardened and alienated. The advanced artist must remain
mimetic and technically advanced. By the late fifties, we find Adorno contemplating the
possibility of a new mimesis through the current (and aged?) state of musical material.
Unlike most manifestos, Vers une musique informelle is not able to provide any programmes.35 Rather, an informal music is pursued through the negation of existing, failed
approaches, notably serial and aleatory techniques. It is worth noting, therefore, that however many correspondences we may find between post-war music and Adornos music
theory, the latter cannot in principle accept any example as having lived up to the concept
of an informal music. Informal music is a regulative idea, a little like Kants perpetual
peace.36 The texts idealism is both its strength and its weakness. That said, all three of the
main problems identified across Das Altern der Neuen Musik and Vers une musique
informelle (preformed material versus free experience, becoming versus stasis, history versus
nature) are addressed in several of Nonos works. To return to no. 4 of Il canto sospeso,
Nono fetishizes neither the quasi-mathematically derived series nor natural-acoustic Being.
Perhaps we should caution against Nielingers stoic staticness, insofar as stoicism invokes a
moral attitude that fails to grasp the critical-rational status of resistance that is dialectically
expressed in its mimetic comportment. This mimesis constitutes what Adorno elsewhere
terms a new form of apperception, requiring conscious engagement on the part of the
listener.37 Fundamentally, the social and political significance of the stasis derives from
Nonos Gramscian organic intellectual sense of time as constituting an extramusical problem.
Mimetic stasis resists only as a resistance to reification, or the detemporalization of time,
as Adorno writes in Negative Dialektik (1966).38 The ageing of the new music is somehow
symptomatic of the ageing of the world. Perhaps this is why half of Adornos writings are
devoted to music.
With Il canto sospeso, not only are Adornos complaints about the crossover from
technique to experience misplaced, but the composer anticipates the mimesis of the hardened and alienated as a response to the problem of ageing. Becoming in other words,
temporalization may be achieved by way of mimetic stasis, the temporalization through
space suggested by the same Metzger whose a-serial music would later be endorsed by
Adorno. Fundamentally, such a reading of Nono is not unwarranted once we consider the
role of Lachenmann. There are two items of evidence to consider here: (1) Lachenmanns
discussion of Il canto sospeso, and (2) his ghost-writing of the German Geschichte und
Gegenwart in der Musik von heute, read out by Nono at Darmstadt.39
Adorno eventually signals the mimetic approach to stasis in Wagners Aktualitat. In the
pre-war monograph Versuch uber Wagner Adorno had taken the line from the Transformation Scene of Parsifal: You see, my son, time here becomes space, to emblematize Wagnerian
35
36
37
38
39

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 496 (trans., 272).

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 540 (trans., 322; translation modified).
Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 494 (trans., 271).
Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 324 (trans., 331).
Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 132, n. 84.

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 89

phantasmagoria or reification.40 Once again Adorno radically revises his stance, avowedly
in response to Darmstadt: In the most recent music, which draws so near to painting and
the graphic arts, the trend toward the static becomes quite marked here, too, something is
fully realized that Wagner had envisioned earlier [. . .]. Colour itself became architectonic.41
In the context of the contemporaneous Darmstadt talk Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik,
Adornos remark invokes a new possibility, not limitation, in new musical spatialization.
Of course the integral serialism of Il canto sospeso would already guarantee its failure in
Adornos ears. Yet he surely underestimated Nonos inventive use of the technique. The
composer uses the all-interval wedge series, generated by jumping between chromatic
scales in opposite directions from a nodal pitch. From such raw materials, David OsmondSmith notes, Nono could stamp out the shapes often bristlingly architectonic to which
his immersion in the visual abstraction of post-war painting made him feel akin (the reference is surely to Nonos comrade Emilio Vedova, who painted the sets for Intolleranza
1960).42 The elementary nature of Nonos material gives him more freedom rather than
less, since there is no pretence towards games that remain forever hidden. Jeannie Maria
Guerrero has even shown how Nono transcends the preformed row through systematic
interruption (sospeso can also mean interrupted), meaning that the interruption is not
itself preformed but rather, in Adornos terms, mimetic. Even back then, Nono later
explains, I was not writing what the press called totally organized music [. . .]. [C]omposing
was never for me merely the concretization of preformed structures. Improvisatory moments
always played a part; I left decisions open until the last instant.43
In Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute, the text formulated for him by
Lachenmann, Nono faults the ahistorical concept of musical material that he now associates
with Joseph Schillinger and John Cage (or at least, Cages followers). But it is likely that in
doing so Nono was lamenting the influence of his former friend, the increasingly mystical
Stockhausen, to whom the moral-political leadership of Darmstadt seemed now to have
fallen. At stake were two opposing visions of the advanced artist: one socially conscious,
the other pseudo-subversive.44 In a line that could have come from Adornos pen Nono
states, The proposition I am space, I am time comes as a kind of moral stimulant which
spares the individual the problems of historical responsibility.45 Nonos emphasis upon the
historical basis of music chimes with Adorno. Each denies the meaning of sound outside of
its relations to other sound and (for Nono, at least) to other non-sound: relations that
change in time and place.46 In another theoretical correspondence Adornos attack upon

Adorno, Versuch uber Wagner, chapter 6, 10720 (trans. 7485).

Adorno, Wagners Aktualitat, 5535 (trans., 5934).
Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 3.
Nono, Gesprach mit Hansjorg Pauli, in Luigi Nono: Texte, 200; quoted in Guerrero, Serial Intervention in Nonos
Il canto sospeso .
44 Lachenmann, Von Nono beruhrt, 299 (trans., 22).
45 Nono, Geschichte und Gegenwart, 36 (trans., 42).
46 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 508 (trans., 286).
40
41
42
43

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90 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

unconstrained musical nominalism47 can be found in TextMusikGesang (TextMusic

Song, 1960), the talk in which Nono corrects Stockhausens claim that the Italian had
atomized the phonetic material of Il canto sospeso according to a serial principle.48 In 1971
Nono would attack atomism in social terms: for me, it has always been clear that a human
being can realize himself only in his relations with other people and with society.49
Given this theoretical context, it is surprising that it should be Stockhausen and not
Nono to whom Adorno will extend the greater sympathy with regard to the problem of
musical time: My first reaction to [Stockhausens] Zeitmae, in which I relied exclusively
on my ears, involved me in a strange interaction with his theory of a static music which
arises from a universal dynamics as well as with his theory of cadences.50 Adorno refers
here to Stockhausens essay . . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . . (. . . how time passes . . . , 1957),
which sets out the above-mentioned critique of anachronism in the parameters of development and rhythm: most people who today write pitches in this system [of Schoenberg] are
not aware that they are giving form to time-proportions.51 And yet here, as in Musik und
Sprache, Stockhausen surely pursues a positivist mysticism of sound that is anathema to
Adorno. It is on this point that the stases of Nono and Stockhausen may be differentiated.
Stockhausen will, in 1961, define his moment form as a vertical slice dominating over any
historical conception of time and reaching into timelessness.52 Of course this is not to say
that Stockhausen should be taken at his word, or that his work cannot be interpreted
against the composers intentions.
For Lachenmann, It is particularly in a work like Il canto sospeso that one can see the
beginnings of the gap (now a gulf) between composers like Stockhausen and Nono.
Lachenmann recalls that his teacher had been accused of giving up on the avant-gardist
path: as a West German composer put it in 1960 [. . .] Nono had ground to a halt.53
Could this West German composer have been Stockhausen himself ? Lachenmann nevertheless turns this grinding to a halt from a limitation into a quality:
Structural purification of a new, terse expressiveness which is almost archaic in
quality, and thus liberated from its conventional reification this was what Nono
had ground to a halt in. Or, perhaps one should say [. . .] Nono in the late fifties
had remained clinging to a rough, inhospitable landscape of naked signs from which
others were striving to find their way to more homely surroundings forwards,
backwards or sideways [. . .]. In those days Nono did not move further on he
went deeper.

47 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 496 (trans., 273).

48 What impressed Stockhausen about the work, in fact, was that, [w]e are dealing [. . .] with an autonomous musical
serial structure in all parameters (Stockhausen, Musik und Sprache, 49; trans., 53).
49 Nono, Il Canto Sospeso, ix.
50 Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 271).
51 Stockhausen, . . . wie die Zeit vergeht . . ., 14 (trans., 11).
52 Worner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, 467.
53 Lachenmann, Von Nono beruhrt, 2967 (trans., 19).

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 91

Nonos student does not refer to wilfully mystical depth here. Rather, the processes of
structuring and differentiation were ultimately determined by their function of driving
music into space.54 Such driving of music into space becomes a temporalization through
space.
Lachenmann confirms in the same essay that his concept of reification comes from
Lukacs.55 Clearly it is senseless to suppose that Nono was seeking to enact the future ideas
of his student. At issue is more likely an elective affinity something in the air whereby
Nonos intellectual and political concerns tallied with a stream of German as well as Italian
radical cultural theory. We recall that Lachenmann has remained curious about why
Adorno had so little to say about Nono, that the AdornoNono complex remains unfinished business. Lukacs forms a part of this complex, since it is he who put the concept
of reification on the map (the term was not used by Marx). The commodity form degrades
time to the dimension of space, he states in History and Class Consciousness.56 This characterizes Das Altern der Neuen Musik also. But, under the influence both of Darmstadt and
of his editing of Benjamins writings for Suhrkamp, Adorno changes his verdict from the
late 1950s onwards on the relation between the arts of time and space, now suggesting that
music may paradoxically find its salvation in painting, yet without being painting. Something of this relation can be sensed in Adornos use of the term informel, a movement in
post-war painting throughout Europe, including Adornos Frankfurt.57
ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei (On Some Relationships
The essay U
between Music and Painting) now makes clear a double possibility: The convergence of
music and painting [. . .] opens up the possibility of crass infantilism, at least in music; it
is possible to stave off this element only to the extent that it reflects it within itself, as an
expression of decay, and composes it out, so to speak.58 However negatively, Adorno
acknowledges the productive possibility of the spatial in music, if we take expression of
decay in Adornos own, full sense of the term to refer to the mimetic relation to ageing
already grasped (according to this reading) in Il canto sospeso. Against his previous verdict
Adorno now considers the productive aspects of musics spatiality in terms of colour and
ecriture.
If the disadvantage of ecriture is its syncretism (since all the arts can be understood in
terms of this single principle, again taken from the writings of Benjamin), then its advantage
is an acknowledgement of the external space of music. Ecriture is three-dimensionally con ber das gegenwartige Verhaltnis von Philosophie
structivist. In an exceptional passage from U
Lachenmann, Von Nono beruhrt, 298 (trans., 21).
Lachenmann, Von Nono beruhrt, 303 (trans., 27).
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 89.
Adorno mentions the Frankfurt informel painter Bernard Schultze, but unfavourably. His preferred moment of
modernist painting is Picassos synthetic Cubism; the later essay on music and painting is dedicated to Picasso
collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Moreover, the term musique informelle was chosen by Adorno as a small
token of gratitude towards the nation for whom the tradition of the avant-garde is synonymous with the courage
to produce manifestoes. Hence, the name does not refer to the specific manifesto of art informel (namely Tapies
An Other Art). See Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 495 (trans., 272).
ber einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei, 631 (trans., 68; my emphasis).
58 Adorno, U
54
55
56
57

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92 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

and Musik (On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music, 1953) Adorno
writes that musical space springs from the collective implications of all music, the character
of something that embraces groups of human beings, which is gradually carried over
to the sound as such.59 Adornos thinking on this theme is much informed by Ernst
Kurths Musikpsychologie (1931, second edn 1947). Kurth found that music gives rise to a
strongly felt [. . .] analogy to the outer60 music constitutes an enigmatic [. . .] spatial
presentation, but that the localization of the sound has nothing to do with the inner
musical space.61 However, he takes this opposition of inner and outer to be absolute, meaning that external, social space takes place only in the inherent musical material itself, in
keeping with his musical modernism. As a result Adornos evaluation of musical space
remains restricted, even from a Kurthian perspective. In Vers une musique informelle we
thus read:
The site of all musicality is a priori an interior space and only here does it become
constituted as an objective reality. [. . .] It is precisely the most subjective aspects
of music, the imaginative, associative element, the idea content and the historical
substance that is present in all music that point back to externals, to the real world.
Music negates psychology dialectically.62
In Adornos thinking, Kurths opposition becomes one of autonomy and heteronomy: the
real world is mediated into the musical material by way of imagination. For Nono, on
the other hand, the opposition is itself internalized into the work, as an externalization
itself. Nono repeatedly asserts the relationships (by no means consonant) between inherent
musical space, external performance space, and the social spaces introduced through the
texts and voices. This experimental pursuit of a new music theatre continues through the
1960s and beyond.

Young and full of life

In tracking this transition to the 1960s, the best-documented examples would include
Nonos first political azione scenica, Intolleranza 1960. Importantly, this work employs
a whole section of no. 4 from Il canto sospeso, contradicting any sudden break with the
Darmstadt era, including Nonos interest in the static. For the purposes of the foregoing
argument our representative work from this period is A floresta `e jovem e cheja de vida
(The Forest is Young and Full of Life, 19656), for soprano, three reciters, B@ clarinet,
copper plates, and eight-channel tape, which lasts for around forty minutes. The texts,
selected by Giovanni Pirelli, document liberation struggles from around the world. It is
dedicated to the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, and its title comes from the

59
60
61
62

ber das gegenwartige Verhaltnis von Philosophie und Musik, 166 (trans., 150).
Adorno, U
Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 120.
Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 128.
Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, 521 (trans., 301).

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 93

words of an Angolan freedom fighter: they cannot burn the forest because it is young and
full of life.
An immediate and crucial difference from Il canto sospeso is that these are explicitly contemporary struggles. Nono regarded fascism as an ongoing danger. But some within the
economic miracle of West Germany may have mistaken Il canto sospeso for a cathartic farewell to a past problem. After all, where Il canto sospeso was well received on its Cologne
premie`re (with its bourgeois audience, as Metzger was at pains to point out), the 1960s
works were received with far more difficulty, the performance of La fabbrica illuminata
(1964) even being censored by Italian radio for its protest against factory working conditions.63 The work opens with the words of a repair mechanic from Bergamo: As Marx
said, we are in prehistoric time. A second difference to Il canto sospeso is that Nonos spaces
of resistance now exceed the European context, given the international struggles cited.
Beginning in Cologne, Nonos exploration of electronic music was no celebration of
technology for its own sake. The composer was attracted to magnetic tape for its capacity
both to bring the contemporary world into music and to take music out of the concert
hall back into the world, including the factory.64 Moreover and this aspect has not aged
at all the acerbic sonorities of the tape medium remain appropriate to an anti-sentimental
realism. In A floresta we can say that Nono carves out a barren landscape from which sites
of political struggle rise and fall. That which sounds the most bereft of life promises to be
full of life. This promise is to be understood in terms of hope, and not expectation. As with
Il canto sospeso and, above all, Al gran sole carico damore (1975) promise is combined
with mourning. A floresta in no way regards its revolutionary spaces as utopias. It is their
present activity of resistance that might rather be termed utopian.
In one respect this electronic work of music-theatre (the speakers were originally actors
from the Living Theatre company) cannot be compared with the non-electronic and serial
Il canto sospeso. This is not to say that A floresta is harmonically ambivalent: the harmonic
context is given in its separation of the material around fourths and fifths, combined with
micro-intervallic variations in the soprano. But the main continuity lies in its polarization
of duration through the dramatization of timbral relations, constituting a newly spatialized
time. Indeed, the tape medium allows Nono to polarize further still, not being limited to the
all-too-human confines of live instrumental production; or, rather, it is precisely the crossover between the live instruments and the recorded ones that presses the new technology
back to the human-social context. The reworked instruments and voices, combined with
the copper sheets and the Flatterzunge of the clarinet, realize this contrast between a quasispatial continuum and the convulsive movements of protest.
What is new, therefore, is the interaction of that inherent spatialization (the mimetic
stasis considered above) and the real spaces of resistance introduced programmatically (a
written programme that, as ever with Nono, accompanies the performance as a crucial
aspect of it). Resistance to reification is brought into conjunction with resistance to imperialism and oppression. Against Adorno, Nono knows the socio-representational limits of
63 Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 63.
64 See Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 4.

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94 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

absolute music. With Adorno, Nono upholds that absolutist moment of the Zeitkunst
as a crucial element of his overall music theatre. Nonos upholding of the potential for
both spaces of music, inner and outer, can be sensed in his slightly earlier Notizen zum
Musiktheater heute (Notes on Music Theatre Today, 1961).
Criticizing the single perspective of stage action (I see what I hear and hear what I see),
Nono cites Moses und Aron as a work of anti-opera, the burning bush scene especially, in
which the singers are hidden or dispersed. Nono refers to both the external production and
the musical structure here: Schoenberg has to find a new spatial dimension of the tonal
[Raumdimension des Klanglichen] and introduce an element whose focus until now has
been centred in the orchestra and on the stage.65 Anticipating Prometeo, Nono refers to an
electroacoustic cori spezzati. For A floresta Nono arranged the loudspeakers spatially to
achieve this new idea of space. What results is another level of spatial interaction, between
the polarized, static-eruptive music and its movement about the performance space. But
this does not confuse matters, since the effect is one of pulling the listeners attention out
of the stage, out of the concert hall, and into a world of concrete problems, problems that,
according to Nonos music theatre, this engaged consciousness might begin to address.
Nonos avant gardism thus differs from that of Adorno, for whom the task of art is to
negate the existing space and not to propose solidarity with any new one. For the critical
theorist the artwork shows that the world could be other than it is.66 This other remains
perpetually negative, and the neglect of concrete spaces, in art as well as in political situations, remains a problem with the critical theorist (examples of architecture are scarce in
Aesthetic Theory, for instance).
When, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that the modern artwork is the determinate
negation of a determinate society, he is playing on a double sense of determinate: logical
and political. Society is determinate (already determined) in the sense of being fixed, or
even ageing into a new barbarism. But the all-too-unified world is determinately negated
by the disruptive unity of the advanced artwork, albeit as semblance. What is paradoxically unified in the artwork is that which has become disenchanted: experience (Erfahrung).
As Adorno knew well, Hegelian logic states that determinate negation, unlike abstract
negation, gives rise to something new in the process of mediation. This something new
would be the alternative objectification to reification. Hence Nonos critique of formalism
at the end of the 1950s leads him to a music theatre that brings these possible objectifications (all too empirical for Adorno) into aesthetic experience itself. Yet, equally true to
Adorno, Nono is aware that this remains an aesthetic experience semblance and not an
immediately revolutionary act. Nono even outdoes Adorno by acknowledging the positing
as well as negating character of determinate negation: the critique of reification must
suggest other spaces for life if that critique of reification is not to be merely abstract, if it is
really to resist the determinate society.

65 Nono, Notizen zum Musiktheater heute, 64.

sthetische Theorie, 208 (trans., 138).
66 Adorno, A

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 95

In a final, biographical encounter between the two men, Adornos attitude to Nonos
direction in the 1960s would become all too clear. Nielinger tells us that, When asked for
a letter of support in the context of the ill-fated premie`re of Henzes Das Flo der Medusa in
1968, Adorno responded positively at first but changed his mind after having heard that
such letters had already been written by Nono and [Peter] Weiss.67 Whereas in the early
fifties we find Adorno pitted against the youth of Metzger and Nono, by the late sixties we
find Adorno and Metzger, who had dismissed Nonos use of political texts in 1962, pitted
against Nono. Again, Adornos dismissal cannot simply be accounted for in terms of the
artists political commitments, insofar as Nonos musical language remained dissonant,
and because Adorno cannot really have dissented from many of those concerns (Adorno
refers to Vietnam and South Africa in his lectures of the 1960s).68 What is strange is that
whereas the Adornian Metzger would outline a turning point in Nonos development in
1981 (back to the avant-garde fold, perhaps) we can just as easily discern a new direction
within an ongoing, political investigation into art, space, and utopia.69

A tragedy about dwelling today

What has subsequently been regarded as a late turn concerns Nonos musical politics: I
had the need to think anew my whole work and my whole existence as a musician today
and as an intellectual in this society, to discover new possibilities of knowledge and creation.70 Nono had become wary of the ideological and had avowedly turned inwards. But
Osmond-Smith reminds us that Nonos work of the eighties onwards continued to resonate
with the perception that social evolution is achieved by subverting subjective priorities.71
Nonos turn has been attributed equally to his friendship and collaboration with the
philosopher Massimo Cacciari. During the 1960s Cacciari had been an active trade unionist.
By the 1970s, however, he had moved towards a more generalized critique of capitalist
modernity that bore some similarity to Adorno (the centrality of Weberian rationalization,
for instance). Cacciari nevertheless avoided the critical theorist, opposing negative thought
to any form of dialectics, including negative dialectics. Coming, along with his friend
Manfredo Tafuri, from a background in architectural theory, Cacciari investigated the
nihilist project of the metropolis, founded upon a rationalist determination of space.
Urban spaces have come to be determined by exchange relations alone, the Venetian philosopher observed, in a manner that ideologically conceals real social divisions. The ideal place
without content was a no-place, in line with the dialectical-idealist utopia. Cacciaris
response was an architecture of nihilism,72 that which attempts to articulate the contemporary, near-impossibility of dwelling as non-dwelling.73
67
68
69
70
71
72
73

Nielinger, The Song Unsung 92.

See Adorno, Metaphysik, 160, 202 (trans., 101, 130).
See Metzger, Wendepunkt Quartett?.
Stenzl, Luigi Nono, 978.
Osmond-Smith, Break-Out from the Concert Hall, 4.
Much of this material can be found in English in Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism.
Cacciari, Eupalinos or Architecture, 111.

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96 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

With Cacciaris thinking about Prometeo in the early 1980s as well as in it, since he
ber den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept
compiled its texts, including Benjamins U
of History, also known as Theses on History, 1940) the project of determining place as
geometrical space is traced through a history of the performance spaces of European music.
In a conversation with Nono, included in the programme for the Venice premie`re of
Prometeo, Cacciari makes the following remarks:
In parallel to the cemeteries, asylums, and prisons are built the theatres and concert
halls [. . .]. The concentration and homogenization of space, the disappearance of
the multi-spatial possibility of the musical event, is closely related to the obvious
reduction of polyvocity, of the multivocal possibility of directions in listening:
[. . .] listening and the space of listening coincide, are apprehended together. All
this during what one could perhaps call the bourgeois era of listening.74
However, just as possible as reading the later Nono out of Cacciaris philosophy is reading
it, along with the early and middle-period works, in relation to Adornos aesthetic theory.
What sounded striking about Fragmente-Stille in 1981 was its fragility: a departure from
the strident theatrical-political works. But this was, in a sense, a strident fragility. The way
in which Nono invited the musicians to determine the weight and length of each fermata,
for instance, was new or rather, said the detractors, old: a return to subjectivist expression.
But this is once again Lachenmanns terse expressiveness. The fermata is not ornamental,
externally imposed upon the materials unfolding, but rather of that unfolding. Here lies
the affinity to Il canto sospeso and A floresta. Nonos fermata the term comes from the
Latin firmare, to stop is a coming-to-a-standstill. Hence, in their interpretation, Nono
asked the Arditti Quartet to play the fermatas ever longer.75 At stake is not contemplative
slowness but rather a quasi-spatial immersion into the material. The composer now radicalizes
some of the insights of his earlier Notizen zum Musiktheater essay: the use of a nongeometrized space [. . .] runs up against the dissolution of normal time, of the time of
narration and of visualization.76
This inner spatialization comes into its own when brought into play with the possibilities
of outer spatialization in Prometeo. Music, on account of its spatial ambiguities, can offer a
different experience of space. The singers, speakers, chorus, solo strings, solo winds, glasses,
orchestral groups, and live electronics are arranged around the audience. But, unlike the
former works, the estrangement of inner and outer, of the musical space and the space of
the music, is refused reconciliation. The editor of Nonos writings in French suggested that
the music composes the space.77 But this is too phenomenological. How can such space be
composed in an already composed space, namely (in the case of the Venice premie`re) the
deconsecrated San Lorenzo? The harmonic material of Prometeo is polarized between close
74 Bertaggia, Conversation, 133. The original Italian text appeared in the concert programme of the Prometeo premie`re:
Verso Prometeo (Venice: Ricordi, 1984).
75 Arditti, Nonos Fragmente-Stille . . . , 7.
76 Bertaggia, Conversation, 138.
77 Laurent Feneyrou, cited in Pape, Nono and His Fellow Travellers, 60.

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Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex 97

intervals, including micro-intervals, and expansive ones the promethean fifth being a
constant amidst similarly polarized pitch and dynamics. Nono exploits height and depth.
Similar figures are repeated in different instrumental groupings, again recalling Il canto
sospeso, but this time moving across the physical space from different sources. There is a
polarization of the smallest transition within the musical material and its external transition about the performance space. In other words, the mimetic stasis of the music resonates
dissonantly with its environment, comprising a peculiar spatio-temporal experience. The
fermata dwells on the performance space as its incontrovertible reference, only for the
listener to be confronted with the space of its non-dwelling: an instance of the presently
reified world. Heard in relation to A floresta, this tragic non-reconciliation corresponds to
a heightening of the utopian task, not its renunciation.
In Cacciaris thinking, an expression of non-dwelling hints at the possibility of dwelling
anew: a new space. The thinker relies upon the post-active nihilisms of both Benjamin and
Heidegger. Cacciari is interested in the figure of the wanderer Robert Musils man without qualities because only the wanderer may circumvent the no-place of utopia. Through
the polarization of inner and outer, the contemporary contradiction within the concept of
place is expressed both as a problem and as a chance. With Prometeo subtitled tragedia
dellascolto, a tragedy in or about listening Heideggers concept of dwelling has philosophically displaced the humanist utopia,78 supposedly characteristic of the earlier Nono. But the
possible valorization of the wanderer in Nonos mobile sound (without any place of dwelling) remains problematic, philosophically and politically. It even replicates the problems
found in Adorno, in terms of an infinite deferral of real objectification.
Adorno upholds the Bilderverbot on representations of utopia, since totalizing visions
block the utopian task itself. The artwork, however, constitutes a peculiar, negative unity,
and therein lies its utopian meaning. The artwork is Leibnizs monad: the inner is inner
qua different outer. Nonos later corrective to Adorno concerns the nature of the inner
outer dissonance (since they agree that autonomous art is socially dissonant). Of course
the outer reference of Prometeo is no longer the explicit site of existing social struggles.
The danger for the later Nono, therefore, is that non-dwelling might lapse into no-place.
At one point in the libretto Cacciari quotes Moses und Aron: we are invincible in the wasteland. The wasteland is the attempted mimesis, not tautology, of no-place. But why leave
the wasteland at all? And how? There is a way, once we listen in relation to his previous
works: the programme of Prometeo is not, after all, so far from Nonos political concerns.
Prometheus the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar, as Marx
wrote in 1841 remains a symbol of a certain humanist project, however much that view
may have been revised by anti-humanist philosophies.79 Prometeo can be regarded as an
experiential investigation into the conditions for the possibility of concrete possibilities,
such as those heard in the resisting voices of A floresta. Possibility was Nonos favourite
word during the 1980s. Without the inaugurated transformation of experience, the maximal
78 On his concept of dwelling see especially Heidegger, Bauen Wohnen Denken.
79 Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, 31.

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98 Phillips Spaces of Resistance: the AdornoNono Complex

imperative of possibility does not of itself take place. But without actual possibilities,
existential conditions of possibility remain pseudo-subversive. Against those who present
the later work as quietist, Prometeo continues Nonos musical-political journey. The three
periods the three extra-musical treatments of time and space interrupt one another as
an unfinished whole.

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