The nostalgic-utopian distance 

is friend to me and despairing  

in continuous restlessness 

Luigi Nono was a lifelong Marxist. Brought up in Mussolini’s Italy, he joined the Italian Communist Party in 1952, and early works—Il canto sospeso, Intolleranza 1960, La fabbrica illuminata—demonstrated Nono’s desire to create socially engaged art. He ploughed an individual furrow which few followed (though, in Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado, he had some high-profile supporters): an enthusiastic proponent of serial techniques, Nono was also driven by the belief that all artistic creation should be motivated by egalitarian principles. He was a keen proponent of using the most up-to-date technologies available to him, under the belief that this was the only way to best speak to the current moment. 

La lontananza is crammed full of ideas, both musical and philosophical. Subtitled “madrigal for many wanderers with Gidon Kremer,” the “wanderers” idea refers to a section of a poem by Antonio Machado that Nono discovered on a wall of a cloister in Toledo—“Wanderer, there are no ways, only the wandering”—that Nono reflected on in other late works. (La lontananza was one of the last works he wrote before he died.) The “wanderer” also refers to the mechanics of La lontananza’s realisation. Sheet music is divided across multiple music stands, and the performer travels through the space. (The first performer, Gidon Kremer, is imbued directly into the work, with recordings of his speech and other off-cuts from Nono and Kremer’s recording sessions making it into the final tape recording. Performers today wander with Nono and Kremer together.) 

The title, meanwhile, references a complicated bit of Marxist thought. Its dedicatee, the composer Salvatore Sciarrino, explained it as follows: “the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance (lontananza).” It seems that Nono, through this piece, is prefiguring ideas of hauntology popularised by Jacques Derrida, and later Mark Fisher. But for contemporary audiences, where future nostalgia is an ever-present part of pop culture, and where the radical, futuristic dreams of previous generations fade further into the distance with each passing day, perhaps this idea isn’t as complicated as first thought. 

The piece lasts for a maximum of sixty minutes. The solo violinist is accompanied by eight channels of tape, controlled by a sound technician who must be as attentive as the soloist. And, across the eight tapes, it’s not just other violin sounds that are heard, but everyday ephemera recorded during the process too (doors, voices, words, chairs). La lontananza is a haunted essay on time—looking forward, falling back, remembering, dreaming, and remembering how to dream. 

Hugh Morris 2024