Con Luigi Dallapiccola: Per 6 esecutori di percussione e live electronic (1979) - Nono, Luigi 1924-1990 (Milan Ricordi, 1988)
6 Percussion instruments: 3 Timpani, 2 Marimba, Crotales, 3 Slabs, 3 Tubular Bells, 3 Big Boxes, Lion's Roar, 3 Tom-Toms, 7 Triangles, Turkish Cymbal, Chinese Cymbal, 3 Wood blocks, 3 Temple blocks, Bamboo Tube, Rattles; Live electronics: 2 Loudspeakers, 4 Pickups, 3 Ring Modulators, 3 Electronic Sound Generators
‘Pick-ups are contact microphones,’ writes Nono, ‘that are used very often by rock bands: their main characteristic is that they immediately pick up the vibration emitted by the instrument without it passing through the air. In this way, it is enough to touch the instrument (in the case of Con Luigi Dallapiccola, these are metal plates) for the vibration to be picked up at its root and amplified immediately. Ring modulators in combination with frequency generators, on the other hand, act differently: you have on the one hand the vibration of the instrument and on the other a frequency produced by the generator. The ring modulator intervening gives you a different acoustic spectrum in which you have the subtraction and the sum of the two acoustic signals [...].The new beginning, inaugurated with ...sofferte onde serene..., continues in this work. A further radical reduction of the starting musical material (only the three notes quoted from Dallapiccola's work), a fascinating poetics of silences from which the most diverse sound events emerge and to which they return, with the use of pauses as a measure of music as an element of formal construction (the work closes with the gradual ‘letting go’ of the sound motto from the Prisoner on a long crown), and finally a renewed spatialisation of sound through live amplification are the salient aspects of this work that heralds Nono's new and restless path of the last ten years. (Translated with DeepL.com)
First performance in Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 4 November 1979
Keywords: Percussion; Electronic music