A revolution through listening

A major figure in the musical avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century, Luigi Nono (1924-1990) always linked his activity as a composer to his political commitment. I want," he wrote in 1975, "to change the consciousness of my fellow man. To achieve this goal, I must use the acoustic means of our time. For this "musician-activist", changing consciences meant questioning and modifying perceptions of the world, by reaching out, as an "organic intellectual", to audiences not destined for contemporary music by social-cultural cleavages (workers, peasants), but also in the very conception of his music - aesthetic and ethical soil from which he strove to germinate, from the "infinite-possibilities" of sound and the subtleties of his writing, the seeds of multiple new worlds.

By analyzing the inherent relationships between work on auditory perception, new forms of writing and the political dimension in Luigi Nono's work, this book sets out to show how the composer, over and above his militant activity, set out to transform the world and give rise to new utopias from the experimental laboratory of his compositions.