Luigi Nono and his fellow travellers

Abstract

In this article, I explore the inspiration that Nono drew from a number of his ‘fellow travellers’, that is, other composers who were on similar musical and spiritual walkways as Nono: Vincenzo Bellini, for his innovative approach to the voice and his extraordinary use of silence as a spatial device; Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and Thomas Tallis for their composition of choral and instrumental music specific to the acoustic properties of each performing space, including spatially separated choral and instrumental groups, such as Spem in Alium, that explore the space, make the space “live”, and make the space “sing”. In his search for the ‘mobile sound’, the living, non-fixed, musical sound that would correspond to the underlying complexity of micro-tonal movement within all sound, Nono also paid homage to 16th century avant-garde composers such as Nicola Vincentino and Don Carlo Gesualdo for their exploratory uses of chromaticism as a way out of the fixed, extremely limited world of exclusively diatonic music. The article also considers the relevance for young composers today of Nono's search for the ‘mobile sound’ projected into a multi-directional listening space, as part of a broader orientation of ‘composing with the sound’.