A Carlo Scarpa architetto…

Luigi Nono
A Carlo Scarpa architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili (1984)
for orchestra with microintervals.
Sinfonieorchester des Südwestfunks, Michael Gielen, direction.

To Carlo Scarpa the Architect, to His Infinite Possibilities is the work of the Venetian composer's last dizzying creative season, marked by absolute formal freedom, by a musical texture made of excruciating fragments and crucial silences of various nuances, of anticipations and tensions towards what is still missing, towards what is barely audible.

After thirty years of a splendid creative season, with highly human and political content, Nono arrives at Wittgenstein's Unklangbar, at the expressive violence of the irresonable (as the Wittgensteinian neologism can be translated). The composer, a truly revolutionary soul, weaves his pianissimo scores (up to seven p!) against not only the acoustic violence of contemporary everyday life but also against the violence of an often-suffered musical past, seeking a "far-off and mysterious world [...] to dream of various possible futures".

Compositional work is increasingly done with others, whether in the Hyperuranion of elevated minds that inhabit the composer's studies, readings, and intellectual labors, or physically in the experimental work done with performing musicians, now consubstantial with the creative idea: "listening in silence to others, to the other".

Sound is charged with a sense of being, and its natural clarity, unconstrained by formal reasons, creates a state of permanent tension felt as the only authentically human one. Evidently, there is nothing superfluous in these sonic spaces of risky imagination. If the eloquent concentration and reserve of Canto sospeso had already been noted, the islands of sound of his latest production, "infinite colors-sounds-echoes-spaces," are the illuminations of a mystic. And Nono found the motto for his latest cycle of works, "caminantes, no hay camino, hay que caminar," in Toledo, in the cloister of an 18th-century Franciscan convent.

In A Carlo Scarpa, the utopia of infinite possibilities resonates, perfectly in tune with the creative work of his architect friend, who similarly used space as a compositional element. An aristocratically artisanal nature, a genius for technological detail, a refined sensitivity to materials, and a creative drive toward possible (and impossible) spaces bring Scarpa closer to Nono, who, in his work in memory of his friend, creates his fragments on just two notes moved by micro-intervals of 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 of a tone, on the halos and "infinite colors-sounds-echoes-spaces" derived from an impressive range of dynamics: "Micro-intervals of pitch and dynamics are technically possible by avoiding banal approximations and the polluting effects of octaves, articulating technique and quality of sound, varying degrees of its presence-thought, various possible gradations, all to be heard".

The orchestra is carefully conceived: the oboes and tuba are missing, while the flutes and trombones are reinforced. The ascetic percussion group (bells, timpani, and seven triangles of varying pitches) is like a Zhou orchestra. (China 1075-221 BC), and the strings, without second violins, are eight per section. The result is a hieratic work, with dark and sacred spaces that could be occupied by silent and mysterious rituals.

Scelsi's name cannot be ignored when speaking of a work on the microtonal variations of two unique sounds, and all in all, Scelsi's name sheds light on Nono's extreme journey, tied to many alchemical fascinations, bordering on inexpressibility—a process that Cacciari, who so often found the words to express in Nono's late years, defines as kenotic, a process of emptying. Thus, Nono, too, is moving toward a reduction that opens the way to listening to unheard-of times and spaces; the search for sonic spaces inhabited by a tension toward the infinite brings Nono closer to Scelsi, and to Scarpa, like Scelsi, more aware of the Orient present in this journey. Yet for Nono, unlike Scelsi, it is not a liberation from the world but a liberation of the world, from the imposition that condemns it to the evil of insignificance or the mechanical nature of events, dreaming of a concretely possible future, like Carlo Scarpa's infinities, so as "not to say goodbye to hope."

[Luciana Galliano, my translation]

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