Rethinking the Ornament with/in Luigi Nono’s Late Electroacoustic Works

Abstract

This paper aims at examining the manifestations of the ornamental phenomenon in the musical project that Luigi Nono developed in the last ten years of his life. Indeed, despite the fact that the musical language of his late style seems to be in contradiction with the presence of any kind of ornamentation –whether because of his inheritance from the Viennese modernism or his rejection to any kind of figurative musical discourse –, certain features of Nono’s late style echo in some way an ornamental logic, as it is set as a general aesthetic category since the 18th century. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that the first manifestation of the “mobile sound” is related to a shifting of the traditional techniques of ornamentation, and then tries to enlighten the expression of the musical discourse in the late spatialized works from the perspective of an ornamental logic.