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.Footnote 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 für 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 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’.Footnote ³

Adorno contributed to the Ferienkurse nine times between 1950 and 1966.Footnote 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 Boulez's Second Piano Sonata, one of Adorno's stated targets.Footnote ⁵ Adorno had taken exception to Goeyvaerts' concept of musical material only to extend this to all and any serial technique.Footnote 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 Adorno's ‘engagement’ with post-war music, Marcus Zagorski identifies a ‘predictable element’ in Adorno's critique of Materialfetischismus.Footnote 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 Adorno's staggered return to Europe also suggests, the critical theorist's 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 Adorno's mind with the theoretical question of the obsolete and the new. The young generation shared Adorno's insistence on an advanced musical material, and his feeling that anything less was 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 teacher's 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 Webern's 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 composer's daughter, Nuria.

Adorno would have heard Nono's 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 première of Polifonica–Monodia–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 Adorno's 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁹ Since Adorno addresses ‘the 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’.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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’.Footnote ¹² Two essays on this relationship, dating from around 1950 and 1965 respectively, illuminate the adjustment in Adorno's 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 Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica remains an early example. The reference of musical ‘pointillism’ to painting was, ever since Schoenberg's Klangfarbenmelodie, explicit: Reginald Smith Brindle, for instance, commented on the ‘almost static atmosphere’ of the opening of Polifonica.Footnote ¹³ But in Adorno's thinking of the time the ‘static’ is treated purely pejoratively:

The sense that Adorno was not ready to listen to the young generation was concretized in Metzger's 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 Metzger's critique to heart, and by 1961 was confessing that ‘informal music’ is but an expression for ‘Metzger's term – an a-serial music’.Footnote 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 Adorno's own phrase only to turn it against its author: ‘There are indeed cases in present-day production in which a “schematic spatial presentation” takes on an unusual value.’Footnote ¹⁶ This somewhat vague ‘unusual value’, we shall suggest, finds particular meaning (going beyond Metzger's 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’.Footnote ¹⁷ Where Mila posits a simple opposition between Adorno and Nono, a dialectic should be proposed. Nono's work takes on the genuine criticisms of Adorno's polemic in a manner that might even be seen as anticipating Adorno's subsequent repositioning. This reading must proceed by way of Nono's 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’:

Adorno goes on to describe the première of Nono's 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 Adorno's violinist friend Kolisch commissioned and premièred Nono's Varianti.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁰ Adorno and Kolisch were taken with Nono's deconstruction of the violin's ‘beautiful tone’ and his expansion of its possible timbres. Together with other, later essays, these lectures display Adorno's tentatively new position on music's relationship to painting. Referring to the 1966 lectures, Alistair Williams has spoken of ‘Adorno's conviction that sound colour becomes a crucial part of structure when music, as he puts it, has “cut its connecting cables” (Verbindungsdrähte), by which he means when it has dispensed with established methods of organizing components such as pitch and rhythm.’Footnote 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, Adorno's lectures were informed by Ligeti's 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 Ligeti's Atmosphères, a work with profound temporal implications, appears in the ‘Funktion der Farbe’ lectures.Footnote ²²

Nono and Adorno seem to have missed each other on crucial occasions. First and foremost, it is doubtful that Adorno attended the Cologne première 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 Adorno's acquaintance with at least its programme, as we shall see. Secondly, Adorno did not attend the 1959 course, the occasion of Nono's ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart’ polemic. And finally, it is not clear that Nono heard Adorno's 1961 lectures on an informal music, given that Nono had cast himself adrift with the just-cited talk (though he surely knew of Adorno's subsequent essay). Steinecke's 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.Footnote 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 course's value.

Two of Adorno's 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:

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 Adorno's emphasis on expression is by no means dismissive of the work's historical significance. Expression names the artwork's mimetic relation to a reified society. Being mimetic (in Adorno's 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.Footnote ²⁵

Expression and mimesis are two of the most important categories of Adorno's unfinished Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). Art ‘is modern art through its mimesis of the hardened and alienated’.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁷ In three texts dating from the 1930s, Walter Benjamin defined mimesis as original appropriation, a prototype being child development.Footnote 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 Nono's 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.’Footnote ²⁹ Extending Nielinger's 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 Lukács, and their resumption in the ‘art and life’ debates of the 1960s up to the present day.Footnote ³⁰

Given that Stockhausen's 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. 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 Nono's polarization leads to a paradoxically moving stasis. A surprising sense of unfolding is eked out, arguably anticipating Nono's 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 Adorno's aesthetic theory.

Reification and mimesis

Evidence of a thaw in Adorno's relationship to the younger generation is most readily found in ‘Vers une musique informelle’:

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’.Footnote 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 Zagorski's notion that Adorno sought to appear aktuell, up to date, without meaning it,Footnote 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 Adorno's earlier conflation of serialism with reification. But even in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947) it is clear that resistance to reification is possible only by means of working through it, not by opposing it romantically.Footnote ³⁴ Art is the myth of myth. As Adorno will say in Ästhetische Theorie, the 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’.Footnote 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 Adorno's 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 Kant's perpetual peace’.Footnote ³⁶ The text's 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 Nono's 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 Nielinger's ‘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.Footnote ³⁷ Fundamentally, the social and political significance of the stasis derives from Nono's 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).Footnote ³⁸ The ageing of the new music is somehow symptomatic of the ageing of the world. Perhaps this is why half of Adorno's writings are devoted to music.

With Il canto sospeso, not only are Adorno's 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) Lachenmann's 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.Footnote ³⁹

Adorno eventually signals the mimetic approach to stasis in ‘Wagners Aktualität’. In the pre-war monograph Versuch über Wagner Adorno had taken the line from the Transformation Scene of Parsifal: ‘You see, my son, time here becomes space’, to emblematize Wagnerian ‘phantasmagoria’ or reification.Footnote 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.’Footnote ⁴¹ In the context of the contemporaneous Darmstadt talk ‘Die Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’, Adorno's 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 Adorno's ears. Yet he surely underestimated Nono's 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 Osmond-Smith 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 Nono's comrade Emilio Vedova, who painted the sets for Intolleranza 1960).Footnote ⁴² The ‘elementary’ nature of Nono's 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 Adorno's 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.’Footnote 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, Cage's 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’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In a line that could have come from Adorno's 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.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Nono's 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.Footnote ⁴⁶ In another theoretical correspondence Adorno's attack upon ‘unconstrained musical nominalism’Footnote ⁴⁷ can be found in ‘Text–Musik–Gesang’ (Text–Music–Song, 1960), the talk in which Nono corrects Stockhausen's claim that the Italian had atomized the phonetic material of Il canto sospeso according to a serial principle.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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 [Stockhausen's] Zeitmaße, 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.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Adorno refers here to Stockhausen's 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.’Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 composer's 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”.’Footnote ⁵³ Could this West German composer have been Stockhausen himself? Lachenmann nevertheless turns this ‘grinding to a halt’ from a limitation into a quality:

Nono's 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’.Footnote 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 Lukács.Footnote 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 Nono's 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 Adorno–Nono complex’ remains unfinished business. Lukács 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.Footnote ⁵⁶ This characterizes ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ also. But, under the influence both of Darmstadt and of his editing of Benjamin's 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 Adorno's use of the term informel, a movement in post-war painting throughout Europe, including Adorno's Frankfurt.Footnote ⁵⁷

The essay ‘Über einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei’ (On Some Relationships 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.’Footnote ⁵⁸ However negatively, Adorno acknowledges the productive possibility of the spatial in music, if we take ‘expression of decay’ in Adorno's 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 music's spatiality in terms of colour and écriture.

If the disadvantage of écriture 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. Écriture is three-dimensionally constructivist. In an exceptional passage from ‘Über das gegenwärtige Verhältnis von Philosophie 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’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Adorno's thinking on this theme is much informed by Ernst Kurth's Musikpsychologie (1931, second edn 1947). Kurth found that music gives rise to a ‘strongly felt […] analogy’ to the ‘outer’Footnote ⁶⁰ – music constitutes an ‘enigmatic […] spatial presentation’, but that the ‘localization’ of the sound ‘has nothing to do with’ the ‘inner’ musical space.Footnote 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 Adorno's evaluation of musical space remains restricted, even from a Kurthian perspective. In ‘Vers une musique informelle’ we thus read:

In Adorno's thinking, Kurth's 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 Nono's 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 Nono's interest in the static. For the purposes of the foregoing argument our representative work from this period is A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida (The Forest is Young and Full of Life, 1965–6), 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 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 première (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.Footnote 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 Nono's spaces of resistance now exceed the European context, given the international struggles cited.

Beginning in Cologne, Nono's 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.Footnote 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 d'amore (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 quasi-spatial 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 ‘absolute’ music. With Adorno, Nono upholds that ‘absolutist’ moment of the Zeitkunst as a crucial element of his overall music theatre. Nono's 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.’Footnote 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 listener's attention out of the stage, out of the concert hall, and into a world of concrete problems, problems that, according to Nono's music theatre, this engaged consciousness might begin to address. Nono's 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’.Footnote 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 Nono's 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.

In a final, biographical encounter between the two men, Adorno's attitude to Nono's 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 première of Henze's Das Floß 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.’Footnote 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 Nono's use of political texts in 1962, pitted against Nono. Again, Adorno's dismissal cannot simply be accounted for in terms of the artist's political commitments, insofar as Nono's 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).Footnote ⁶⁸ What is strange is that whereas the ‘Adornian’ Metzger would outline a ‘turning point’ in Nono's 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.Footnote ⁶⁹

A tragedy about dwelling today

What has subsequently been regarded as a ‘late turn’ concerns Nono's 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.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Nono had become wary of the ‘ideological’ and had avowedly turned inwards. But Osmond-Smith reminds us that Nono's work of the eighties onwards ‘continued to resonate with the perception that social evolution is achieved by subverting subjective priorities’.Footnote ⁷¹

Nono's ‘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’. Cacciari's response was an ‘architecture of nihilism’,Footnote ⁷² that which attempts to articulate the contemporary, near-impossibility of dwelling as ‘non-dwelling’.Footnote ⁷³

With Cacciari's thinking about Prometeo in the early 1980s – as well as in it, since he compiled its texts, including Benjamin's ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘On the Concept 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 première of Prometeo, Cacciari makes the following remarks:

However, just as possible as reading the later Nono out of Cacciari's philosophy is reading it, along with the early and middle-period works, in relation to Adorno's 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 Lachenmann's ‘terse expressiveness’. The fermata is not ornamental, externally imposed upon the material's unfolding, but rather of that unfolding. Here lies the affinity to Il canto sospeso and A floresta. Nono's 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.Footnote 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 non-geometrized space […] runs up against the dissolution of normal time, of the time of narration and of visualization’.Footnote 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 Nono's writings in French suggested that ‘the music composes the space’.Footnote ⁷⁷ But this is too phenomenological. How can such space be composed in an already composed space, namely (in the case of the Venice première) the deconsecrated San Lorenzo? The harmonic material of Prometeo is polarized between close 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 Cacciari's 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 Musil's ‘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 dell'ascolto, a tragedy in or about listening – Heidegger's concept of dwelling has philosophically displaced the humanist utopia,Footnote ⁷⁸ supposedly characteristic of the earlier Nono. But the possible valorization of the wanderer in Nono's ‘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 Leibniz's ‘monad’: the inner is inner qua different outer. Nono's 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 Nono's 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.Footnote ⁷⁹Prometeo 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 Nono's favourite word during the 1980s. Without the inaugurated transformation of experience, the maximal 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 Nono's musical-political journey. The three periods – the three extra-musical treatments of time and space – interrupt one another as an unfinished whole.