Luigi Nono was an established composer who had already created several electro-acoustic works that merged manipulated electronic sounds with live sources, most notably his Il Canto Sospeso (1956), which derived its texts from letters exchanged between victims of wartime oppression. Such politicised music led to a 1965 invitation to compose the incidental music for a West German production of Peter Weiss’s Holocaust drama, Die Ermittlung (The Investigation). The result was Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto ad Auschwitz (Remember what they did to you at Auschwitz), which Nono released as an autonomous piece in 1966. Within it, Nono employs the concept of constant acoustical change, in which various sound blocks emerge and fade in a series of calculated crescendos and decrescendos. Different textures bleed into one another, mixing electronic sounds (reverb, echo effects, amplitude modifications, static pitches) with live or recorded sources (choir, taped sound effects). The effect is a constantly changing sonic space that seems to represent musically the surfacing of images from the recesses of traumatic memory. Nono himself considered Ricorda problematic on several fronts. Aesthetically, he wondered about the appropriateness of his juxtaposition of electronic media with the purity of the human voice. From a representational standpoint, he also questioned with scepticism the ability of art to depict trauma, especially within the electronic medium. As Nono himself concluded, his music could never describe the system of Auschwitz, but it could speak to what it signified for him. (via goo.gl/wHrILq)
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 10:53:48 +0000
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