Luigi Nono – A Carlo Scarpa, architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili (1984)

I don’t know Nono’s music very well, but the few pieces I’ve heard have left me scratching my head — the one exception being La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1989), a long and sometimes overwhelming but often eerily beautiful piece for violin and electronics.  A Carlo Scarpa is much shorter, but it doesn’t have any of La lontananza‘s sensuous textures;   instead it’s extremely slow and spare.  Every note is a microtonal variant on either C or Eb (called S in German, meaning that these are Scarpa’s initials);  Nono writes not only quarter-notes and eighth-tones but even sixteenth-tones, commenting ambiguously at the beginning of the score that these microintervals are “technically possible.”  The piece is full of long pauses, both metered and unmetered.  The overall intention seems to be to create large blocks of sound that evoke the work of the architect the piece is dedicated to.

What I can’t get past, though, is how un-blocky the blocks sound.  Thanks to Nono’s extreme pitch restrictions, there are no full harmonies, just microtonally altered octaves.  At its densest, the piece sounds more like wheezing machinery than panes of glass or stone walls, and even that effect is undercut by the pauses that come every few measures.  Nono obviously felt very strongly about what he was doing — some of the indications in the score are written in all caps with multiple exclamation points — but I find it hard to hear any of that intensity in these thin, scratchy sounds.

To be fair, though, this might be a recording problem.  I found four different recordings of the piece in the library, and all of them were live recordings from festivals, recorded in mono and with mediocre sound quality.  In the two that I listened to all the way through, you can hear the audience coughing and the musicians shifting in their chairs during the pauses, and the string players don’t always cut off at the same time when the blocks end.  I know it’s possible to evoke large architectural spaces using orchestral instruments and long pauses, because Andriessen did it in Mausoleum.  Maybe if I heard a beautifully produced studio recording of A Carlo Scarpa, with all the entrances and exits cleaned up, the extraneous noises removed, and most importantly, the sounds of the instruments put under the studio microscope, I would find it much more effective.  But considering that everyone who loves the piece now has been listening to the same lousy recordings that I have, maybe this piece just isn’t for me.

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