Das Atmende Klarsein (1980/81) for small chorus, bass flute, live electronics a

AMG Review of Das Atmende Klarsein (1980/81) for small chorus, bass flute, live electronics a

"Blue" Gene Tyranny
All Music Guide

Excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies" and ancient Orphic fragments (in Greek, Italian and German) were arranged by the Venetian philosopher and librettist Massimo Cacciari for Das Atmende Klarsein, a subtle, conceptual work by Nono. This piece maintains a profound sense of mystery which is necessary to spur the creative imagination, but as a central working image we may be guided by a passage from the German author Robert Musil's famous novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) that Nono quotes in his notes: "If there is a sense of reality, then there must also be something that can be called a sense of possibility...Despite this, in summary or on the average, there will always remain the same possibilities, which repeat themselves, until someone comes for whom a real thing is no more significant than an imagined one. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning and their determination and he awakens them."

Nono employs the chorus, bass flute, live electronics and tape as physical realities, and yet "in the same instant" also generates their "changing into something else, germinating both as a compositional spectrum and as a spatial dynamic." This sense of a grand simultaneity (of events and levels of thought and matter) propelled Nono toward a deep re-vamping of his aesthetic outlook in his last works during the 1980s: "We must learn to live with the plurality of times and spaces, with multiplicities and with differences." This is a modern sensibility in a way, a maturing of consciousness into a universal view.

The composition "...sofferte onde serene..." (" ... serene waves endured ... " ) for piano and 2-channel tape was written on the occasion of deaths both in Nono's family and that of his friend the pianist Maurizio Pollini (for whom this piece and others were originally composed.) The taped piano sounds, played with sustaining pedal always down, resonate like the sounds of bells reverberating over the lagoon and the sea near Nono's house. The overall impression of the piece is that life goes on, and one necessarily endures.

According to Nono, "Con Luigi Dallapiccola" (for six percussionists, four pickups, three ring modulators and three frequency generators) is not an homage to the composer Dallapiccola, but "is an attempt to convey the manifold spaces of his musical thought." The approximately 19-minute work continuously unfolds a rich spectrum of serenely transparent to aggressive to otherworldly timbres. The electronic extensions of the percussion sounds are also remarkably well thought out; for example, the transparent electronic sustains match the small bells and shakers without actually trying to imitate their sounds.