Luigi Nono and the Darmstadt School: Form and meaning in the early works (1950–1959)

Abstract

Three works from the first decade of Nono's career — Variazioni canoniche, Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica and Il canto sospeso — are discussed both analytically and within the context of the evolving aesthetic of the 1950s avant-garde and the ‘Darmstadt School’. Particular attention is given to Nono's developing serial practice in these works and to Nono's use of existing musical models to locate his work both politically and within history. The role of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für neue Musik as a forum within which modernist thinking was reinstated in European musical culture after the Second World war is discussed. The article concludes with an account of the aesthetic disputes between Nono and Stockhausen between 1958 and 1960 which marked the effective dissolution of the ‘Darmstadt School’.

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