Luigi Nono: Caminantes … Ayacucho

In 2014 it will have been 90 years since the Italian Luigi Nono (1924-1990) was born. He was one of the greatest European composers of his time. Almost a quarter of a century after his death, his music is seldom performed. Having organised similar projects dedicated to the music of Varèse (2009), Xenakis (2011) and Cage (2012), this year the Holland Festival honours Luigi Nono with a mini festival featuring, over the course of a long weekend, highlights from his extensive and varied body of work. As well as three full-scale concerts, there will also be an intimate late-night performance of La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, a two-day conference entitled “… Hay que caminar …” - Luigi Nono’s musical paths between politics and art, and the exhibition Luigi Nono 1924–1990 - Maestro di suoni e silenzi, which will be accompanying the concerts held at the Gashouder. This year's annual free concerts in the underpass of the Rijksmuseum by conservatory students will be fully dedicated to Nono's music. Musical direction for the three central concerts at the Gashouder will be in the hands of the conductor and Nono expert Ingo Metzmacher. A very special highlight will be the contribution made by the Swiss composer, conductor and sound engineer André Richard, who worked in close collaboration with Nono for years and who gave his name to one of Nono's compositions, entitled André Richard.

One of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde, Nono, together with contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, for years spearheaded the New Music movement. He also married Nuria Schönberg, daughter of Arnold Schönberg, the founder of twelve tone music. Still, the historical inevitability of serialism as advocated by the avant-garde, was never sufficient for Nono. Viewing music as a system which was not self-contained, Nono wanted his music to be open to the world from the start, looking for ways to change political consciousness through sound. To Nono, radical music could never stand on its own, but is always the inevitable outcome of radical, political ideas.

During the last ten years of his life, the physical space in which music is performed became increasingly important to Nono – which is evident in his approach of Prometeo. There is a long history of experiments with spatialising sources of sound; in Nono's city of birth, Venice, as early as the late 17th century composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli developed an advanced form of polychoral music, in which singers and musicians were placed in different parts of the San Marco cathedral. Gabrieli's technique of cori spezzati (literally, broken choirs) is an old precursor of Nono's sophisticated approach to the acoustic space, which will take centre stage on the concluding day of the Nono weekend.

After Prometeo, in the mid to late 1980's, Nono composed a number of works inspired by an aphorism which he had encountered written on one of the walls of a monastery in Toledo: ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’, meaning 'Travellers, there are no roads, there's only travelling'. From this series of works, Caminantes… Ayacucho (1986-87; performed at the Holland Festival 2008) and No hay caminos, hay que caminar... Andrej Tarkovskij (1987) will be performed, interspersed by parts from Gabrieli's Sacrae Symphoniae for cori spezzati. In these works, the space is an integral part of the music and the divide between audience and performers is blurred; the listener has become a traveller in time and space, an ear surrounded by sound.