'The wide-awake self' Luigi Nono's stage action 'Al gran sole carico d'amore' and its utopian reality

Abstract

The phenomenon of the wide-awake self, referring to that most tense level of consciousness that emerges from an attitude of full attention to life and its demands, is problematized in this work in the context of a quite specific composer's script that, although belonging to the avant-garde circle of the Darmstadt generation, actualized the issue of political and social engagement in the domain of music. Namely, the work of Luigi Nono is interpreted as a sort of "composer's metaphor of a contemporary, undogmatic engagement/acting in art and culture", as the acting of the self in modo presenti, that is, as participation in class struggle. I will attempt to find "traces" of that class struggle in Nono's choice of (musical) material itself, and, by extension, in his compositional technique, which Nono himself saw as a consequence of his choice of material, using his stage action Al gran sole carico d'amore (1974) as an example.