Jamuna Samuel

Forthcoming in proceedings of 2016 Tufts-Harvard conference, *Utopian Listening: the Late Electroacoustic Music of Luigi Nono: Technologies, Aesthetics, Histories, Futures.*

Nono’s *Con Luigi Dallapiccola* sketches include a note to a “continuous presence of a brother of great human moral and musical rigor,” then citing the imminent *Prometeo*. My paper explores Dallapiccola’s influence, intertextually and through a larger, ethical model, which I claim figures crucially at the threshold of Nono’s final period. To highlight this shared worldview, I first explore Dallapiccola’s wider influence on the immediate postwar Italian avant-garde by reassessing the relationships between compositional process and ethical import.

As noted by Alessandro Mastropietro, Nono’s term “brother” alludes to the “Brother” motive from *The Prisoner* (1948), permeating both scores. Nono’s homage goes beyond that, however, to unfold a dense, memory-like narrative of the staged psychological drama, including the evocation of other *Prisoner* leitmotives, for example those representing a bell and a lantern. A “futuristic nostalgia” develops through the percussion ensemble fused with live electronics. The subtraction of pitch foregrounds rhythm and timbre, underscoring features of Dallapiccola’s craft often overlooked; at the same time, the electronics dis- and re-orient the listeners’ time-space sense. In this and other ways, what at first seems an introspective, intimate meditation evolves into a theatrical, even revolutionary work, absorbing the musico-dramatic characteristics of Dallapiccola’s experimentally twelve-tone opera into a new language ("linguaggio specifico," in Nono’s words).  The prisoner’s struggle emerges from the soundworld, his alternating entrapment and liberation through listening, within a maze-like physical and psychological space. Nono had pushed the concept of genre with *Intolleranza,* similar to *Prisoner* for the boldness in dramatic innovation; *Con Luigi Dallapiccola* continues in the same vein, emphasizing the ethical rather than the political.

Nono’s “con” acknowledges a singular influence, distinguishing this work from other dedications, in his and others’ outputs, that are “to” or “for.” “Con” evokes a presence, a present, a journey together; a dialogue, however, not just of technique and form. Nono’s musical language itself, I propose, embodies liberation, similar to the freedom inherent in Dallapiccola’s serialism. Both composers--at significant junctures of life, work, and political path--communicate a “new beginning” (nuovo inizio) through a narrative in which language and ethics are one.

Forthcoming in Gregory Decker and Matthew Shaftel, eds.,
*Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera.*

Dallapiccola is known for his pioneering use of the twelve-tone technique in Italy, particularly in his 1948 opera, The Prisoner. Although recently his music—especially this work—has received more attention in performance and scholarship, one aspect of the opera remains neglected: the arguable connection between the theme of protest against tyranny, also relevant in his other works, and the musical technique used. That is, Dallapiccola employs dodecaphonic serialism in ways that might express and embody a reaction to Fascist ideology, his protest encoded in the musical surface and deeper structures.  My essay uncovers such an analytical narrative, bringing post-tonal tools to bear on our understanding of this complex staged drama.
I approach the opera from three complementary angles that highlight how the music intrinsically carries dramatic and ideological meanings. First, I reveal how a network of twelve-tone rows and combinations (nonlinear motivic aggregates) projects specific sounds and gestures that are developed over time, acquiring and bestowing meaning through associations, disassociations, and re-associations with text and characters.
Second, I investigate how significant words emerge as “theatrical words,” in the sense of Verdi’s parole sceniche. I trace how word-music dyads develop reciprocal meanings and how the recurring variation of individual, detached components lend momentum to the psychological drama.
Third, I highlight moments of overlapping semantic meaning, i.e., moments in which meaning-filled musical motifs and/or text phrases combine to create a subplot of motives, an inner action displayed by the music, in counterpoint with the drama. In other words, I argue that the musical process provides a teleological direction that the action might not present.

Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75)—a pioneering figure as serialist, composer of protest music, and trailblazer for the avant-garde—wrote his Greek Lyrics song cycle (1942–5) as an apparent escape from wartime anxiety. I locate the Lyrics in a context of engagement through a nexus of technique, text setting, and ethical meanings. That complex resonated with the younger composers Berio, Nono, and Maderna; each responded in the postwar with settings from the same collection, Quasimodo’s 1940 free translation of classic Greek lyrics. I examine Quasimodo’s ethics, placing the poetry and Dallapiccola’s settings within Gramsci’s notions of language, modernism, and justice.

Using as a case study the 1948 opera The Prisoner, written over five years in Dallapiccola’s first phase of twelve-tone writing, I investigate the unique interweaving of the composer's experimentation with the twelve-tone method, his setting of dramatic text, and his manipulation of the octatonic collection. After discussing the impact that the octatonic scale had on Dallapiccola during his early formation, I examine how octatonic structures are built into the network of rows used in the opera, and analyze excerpts that show how octatonic segmentations strongly support text setting, in essence replacing tonality as a small- and large- scale organizing force.

Forthcoming (in Italian).
While it has long been accepted that Calvino largely bases his creative process on the visual (Belpoliti 1996), a neglected issue in the scholarship on the Ligurian writer is his grappling with the power of hearing. It is indeed difficult to critically highlight the sense of listening, compared to that of seeing, because often the heard implies the absence of the signified object, implying a code that activates relationships that are invisible, acquired, or assumed. “Seeing is believing,” but listening?

This essay traces Calvino’s use of the aural through several novels and stories, beginning with his first, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), and including Il barone rampante  (1957), Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979), Il Conte di Monte Cristo (from T con zero, 1967), Le città invisibili (1972), and Palomar (1983). The investigation culminates with a study of the short story Un re in ascolto (1982), also in its form as a libretto for Luciano Berio’s opera by the same title (1983).  Throughout these works, I argue, the act of listening emerges as an act of desperation, a last recourse for characters trapped in literal or metaphorical prisons. Listening thus is an act of enormous effort and even a source of anxiety for the protagonist, but also for the reader, perhaps for the writer, and ultimately for the composer.

I place Un re in ascolto in the context of an essay that Calvino had in mind (and about which he had spoken with Berio) before writing his experimental story: Roland Barthes’ “Ascolto,” which identifies three types of listening, beginning with the physiological and the psychological. Calvino draws on all of them, but reserves a full use of the most sophisticated type—the psychoanalytical one, in which the object of listening is the unconscious—for Un re. 

Finally, I contextualize my interpretation of the Calvino/Berio opera in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2002 influential essay À l’écoute.  Nancy suggests a “visual sound,” a concept that helps in understanding why Calvino’s short story could be transformed into a musical-theatrical staged work.