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`New Music' between Search

for Identity and AutopoiesisOr, the `Tragedy of Listening'

MaÂrio Vieira de Carvalho

THE SO-CALLED `NEW MUSIC' in Europe after the Second WorldWar, which was based on the idea of `progress', similar to `techno-logical progress' and related to it, aimed at a complete rationalization

of composing and supposed `structural listening' (Adorno, 1976, 1988). Atthe same time, as I have argued in other articles (Vieira de Carvalho, 1994,1995b, 1996a), the concept of musical composition as autopoiesis seems tohave become already in the early 1950s ± that is to say, many years beforethe concept was coined in biology and sociology by Maturana (1993) andLuhmann (1984) ± inherent to this development and, in particular, toStockhausen's and Goeyvaerts' serial thinking. It supposed a kind of com-munication ùpon' music as a rei®ed object ± not by chance in accordancewith Luhmann's (1996) recent theory of art as well ± which opposed music-making and listening as communication `between' partners. Kept apart fromthe lifeworld and conceived as a self-referential system, `new music' shouldthus represent not only the logical achievement of the historical develop-ment of European music, but also the universality of Western musicalthought in the more developed countries (like the USA, France, WestGermany), its superiority over the music cultures of the whole world.Ìntegral serialism', which ruled the musical compositions as autopoieticsystems, became in this way a form of `symbolic power' (Bourdieu, 1977)within the musical ®eld and in correspondence with similar forms ofdomination within the economic, political and technological ®elds. How-ever, as I argue in this article, some European composers among those whoemerged as representatives of Darmstadt, the centre of `new music', rejected

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this trend. For instance, the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924±90)explores in his works the dialectic between subject and object, technologi-cal development and critique of technology, àvant-garde' and critique ofprogress, globalization and anti-imperialistic resistance. Counteracting al-ready in the early 1950s the ideal of autopoiesis which was implicit both inintegral serialism and in Cage's aleatorics, Nono's strategy had in mind atthe beginning Gramsci's and later Benjamin's critique of aestheticism too.Search for identity and a certain localism are matched in his music with theattempt to reconstruct within musical communication the feedback to thelifeworld, and, consciously and ostensively, to make aesthetics inseparablefrom politics. Regarding musical processes as allegories of social processes,as I ®nally argue, Nono is concerned in his late works, namely in Prometeo(1984), with the `tragedy of listening', which is just such an allegory of thecontemporary human condition.1

Subject±Object Dialectic vs Autopoiesis

Adorno's emphasis on the idea of `new' in music as musical òbjectivation ofdynamic subjectivity' is already delineated in Rousseau's criticism, namelyin the identi®cation pattern which was carried out by a `new music', leadingfrom the emp®ndsam style to the so-called sonata forms, a music whichbroke with the mechanical conception related to the idea of a givenHarmonia Mundi. As far as the emancipatory communicative potential ofart claimed by the Frankfurt School has here its origin, it seems evident thatthe Dialectic of Enlightenment ± and especially the chapter on the `cultureindustry' ± is concerned with the problem of how the identi®cation patternevolved into a kind of `second nature' (as a static and unchangeable order)and became a device of an ideology of domination or of ideology as falseconsciousness, instead of being the ful®lment of emancipatory self-con-sciousness (Vieira de Carvalho, 1994, 1995a, 1995b).

The introduction into this discussion of the concept of autopoiesis(taken from Maturana's theory of living systems and adopted by Luhmann inhis theory of social systems) throws new light upon the theory of new musicin the 1950s, which is dominated by this concept years before the term wascoined in biology and sociology. In fact, while the musical expressionism ofaround 1910, insofar as it gave rise to a new musical language which shouldemanate from the depths of subjectivity, led the identi®cation pattern to amost radical level, the serial and the aleatoric music from the 1950s aimed,on the contrary, at the suppression of the composer's subjectivity from theprocess of composition: each work should organize itself as a self-referentialsystem, either by means of a serial principle, or by means of aleatoricdevices.2 This clari®es Adorno's critique of serial thinking in his well-known article `Das Altern der Neuen Musik' (`The Aging of New Music')published in 1956 (Adorno, 1988). Here he condemns in the new music thetendency to replace the work by the formula, that is to say, exactly what hecondemned in the `culture industry': putting an end to `free expression, as avehicle of protest against organization'. According to Adorno, new music, to

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be new, should continue to be the objectivation of dynamic subjectivity.Letting it crystallize into a static and unchangeable `second nature', meant itwas growing old.

Luigi Nono, who was regarded in the 1950s ± like Boulez and Stock-hausen ± as one of the most representative serial composers, converged withAdorno insofar as he rejected what we could now de®ne as autopoiesis, anddiverged, insofar as he stood for serial thinking. Multiple or integral serial-ism did not mean for Nono a return to a kind of a static system of rules ± areturn to formula or to mechanical composition ± but a `historical progress'which opened new possibilities of expression. Precisely because of theemphasis he placed on freedom as inseparable from expression, he stressedalso the moment of free decision (which the composer should conserve atevery moment of the composition), and accordingly rejected not only a strictserial determinism, but Cage's aleatorics as well. Insofar as Nono postulatedin this way the subject±object dialectic throughout the whole compositionprocess, he was among the main serial composers from the 1950s, the onlyone who put into practice at that time Adorno's philosophy of new music(Vieira de Carvalho, 1996a, 1996c).

There is, however, a level at which Nono and Adorno diverge radi-cally. This is over the relationship between art and ideology. While forAdorno a work of art should provide the truth and in this way opposes orresists ideology as false consciousness (this was precisely the core of histheory of the avant-garde), for Nono art was inseparable from ideology andthe artist had to take sides in the class struggles. Nono started from aGramscian concept of ideology, no longer negative as in Adorno, but neutral(see Larrain, 1991), so that taking sides was the decisive question. Helinked his music with an ìdeology of liberation' opposed to other ìdeol-ogies', included the ìdeology' of an àpolitical' or politically `neutral' music,that is to say, against `the political act of depoliticizing music' ± in the wordsof a recent article by Philip Bohlman (1993), where Musicology's theoreticalapproach is discussed (Vieira de Carvalho, 1996b).

Another Gramscian concept ± that of hegemony ± also played a rolehere, by linking the Adornian subject±object dialectic with Nono's politicalcommitment. Concerning new technical acquisitions, Nono meant theyshould neither be glori®ed as a sign of historical evolution or progress, norrejected as bourgeois, but critically assimilated, evaluated and ìncorpo-rated in creative ability' (in schoÈpferische FaÈ higkeit einverleibt) aiming at thehegemony.

Avant-Garde and Localism

Hegemony in the Gramscian sense opposed ± as counter-hegemony ± theidea of the ìnferior Other' (Holub, 1992), which was implicit in thepretensions of new music to abstract-universal validity like other rationaland techno-logical achievements of European culture. Not by chanceSchoenberg himself had spoken in the 1920s ± when he developed thetwelve-tone technique ± of the supremacy this new device would ensure for

Vieira de Carvalho ± `New Music' 129

German music for the whole century. Nono reacted precisely against thisideology of domination and against the cultural colonialism or imperialismit was linked with. He stressed not what revolutionary alternatives to a givenestablishment or to the world order could have in common, but rather thepluralism of historical and local contexts. As a composer rooted in thelifeworld of the Italian working class, Nono was persuaded he could andshould not prescind, in creating his music, from the most advanced elec-tronic technology. At the same time, however, he supported the standpointof South American composers who opposed the spread of electronic studiosin their countries, insofar as they regarded them as instruments of culturalcolonization by the USA. Nono clari®ed his point of view by differentiatingbetween the idea of a ùniversal absolutism' of `pure technology' which was`mechanistic' shifted into the local cultures, and `the need for studying andanalysing the original technique of communication' of these cultures. Notmerely getting into step with new technology, but deciding on the actualcontext, which instruments should be used to give rise to a new or analternative culture, was at stake: `Technique alone still does not make anavant-garde' (Nono, 1969a: 203).3

This localism was valid for his own music. As a Venetian composer,Nono started from the `knowledge, analysis, choice' of music elements andtechniques of communication which were provided by the Venetian tra-dition. His music should be seen as resulting from cross-cultural references,in which the trends of European and national development, or from otherhistorical and spatial contexts, were not merely appropriated but assimi-lated from the point of view of the search for a Venetian musical identity. Hefound, in the acoustics of San Marco and in the corresponding dividedchoirs (cori spezzati) from the Renaissance, something of importance for hisown engagement in a new music culture. He put this acquisition from theVenetian Renaissance into a productive relationship with some contempor-ary ideas (in the meanwhile much expanded in the European avant-garde)such as montage and Brechtian epic structure (see Vieira de Carvalho,1996b). He pre®gured a new kind of communication in which the decen-tring of the musical events during the performance would stimulate thebalance between identi®cation and detachment. The decentring wasintended to counteract the asymmetry of the identi®cation pattern inheritedfrom the Enlightenment and reconstruct complexity on the side of reception.Neither the mere identi®cation strategy, which the culture industry, adver-tising, political propaganda (and propaganda through art) and media ingeneral misused world-wide as a manipulation device, nor autopoiesis,which suppressed communication between partners and reduced music toa rei®ed sound object, were compatible with his aim. Nono strived for amusic which was able to promote ± in Gramscian terms ± meaning-produ-cing listeners:4 a music in which all the various partners (composer, inter-preters and listeners) were creatively involved, insofar as it should mediatefeeling and thinking about actual human existence, in short, a music whichdemanded a strong emotional and at the same time intellectual or critical


feedback from the listener. While the identi®cation pattern had suppressedthe `structural listening' (postulated by Adorno, 1976), and while autopoi-esis had suppressed identi®cation (the subject±object dialectic) includingevery feedback to the lifeworld, Nono looked to reconstruct both `structurallistening' and identi®cation in a kind of `dialectic listening', in the samesense as Walter Benjamin's `dialectical seeing' (see Buck-Morss, 1989).

Despite Nono apparently only taking notice of Walter Benjamin in thelate 1970s, his Gramscian way of thinking ± namely ideology understoodneutral ± already implicitly linked him with Benjamin (see Vieira deCarvalho, 1996a, 1996b). The Politicization of art as a Marxist alternativeto aestheticism, namely to the aestheticization of politics, and a criticalevaluation of the `technical reproductibility of art' are convergent with manyof Nono's statements on contemporary music. Also, the Brechtian in¯uencebrought Nono closer to Benjamin. More important, however, is that aprocess which belongs from the early 1950s to the core of his poetics andhis technique, and which is intrinsically related to his search for a musicalidentity (as a locally contextualized identity), seems directly taken fromBenjamin's Philosophy of History. This process consists in looking at thepast and discovering in an epochal fragment of musical history the present itpotentially entails.

In his Philosophy of History Benjamin speaks of `blasting open thecontinuum of history' to take a fragment of the past which seems as if it wasloaded with Jetztzeit (now time). According to Benjamin this was a momentinherent to any revolutionary crisis, to the attempt to re-open what thecontinuum of history has closed, that is to say, to re-open the chance ofliberation. In fact, for Benjamin, history was not a process of liberation, buta continuum of oppression, insofar as all revolutionary liberation attempts inthe past had gone wrong or failed. The comparison with Nono's concept ofhistory in the 1950s and 1960s helps to make visible the contradictionbetween Nono's discourse on social and musical history as liberationprocesses connected with one another (and almost as linear developments),and his own actual approach not only to composition technique but also tothe political problematic, as both are expressed in his works. This meansthat, for a time, Nono still thought in a linear way in his statements abouthistory, while he had already given up linear thinking by composing and bydealing in his music with political problems. Like Benjamin's àngel ofhistory' Nono looked not at the future, but to the past, and it was by lookingat the past that he dreamt of a new music. The history of music seems to havebeen always for Nono (like political and social history for Benjamin) acontinuum of academicism, in the sense that the moment of innovationdisappeared or was absorbed in the chain of tradition. In Benjamin's terms,he `blasted open' from the continuum of musical tradition `the new whichonce ¯ashed', which has disappeared in the continuum of the musicaltradition: the new appears as a ¯ash which is immediately over. What wasat stake was to catch this new which once ¯ashed and to update it, that is to


say, to reopen the possibility which the musical tradition has closed (Vieirade Carvalho, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c).

In this sense, the fact that in the late 1970s Nono assimilatedBenjamin's in¯uence ± and to such an extent that in his opera Prometeo:Tragedia dell'ascolto (Prometheus: Tragedy of Listening) (1984) he even setto music some fragments of Benjamin's Philosophy of History5 ± seems to bemore of a revelation of a course he had always followed as composer, ratherthan a change of direction (see Vieira de Carvalho, 1996b). In any case, thisassimilation retrospectively throws new light upon all his music. WhatWalter Benjamin meant by the idea of ùpdating history', and which impliedboth fragmentation and montage, becomes the key to understanding thefunction of musical quotations in his work ± as, for example, in the case of aBrazilian negro rhythm which plays a structural role in Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica (1951), one of his ®rst serial compositions.6

In Canto sospeso (1956) ± a vocal and instrumental work based onfarewell letters of anti-fascist resistance ®ghters condemned to death by theNazis, and in which the looking backwards to the choirs of the VenetianRenaissance is also evident ± the processes of montage which arousedialectic listening stand out on very different levels of the composition andlead, for example, to the so-called de-linearization of the text, that is to say,to a consequent dissociation between sound and meaning, which cannot butremind us again of Walter Benjamin and his theory of allegory in theGerman baroque tragedy (see Vieira de Carvalho, 1996b).

In a late statement, Nono linked his interest to live electronics in the1980s with the way à past explodes' for him, that is to say, as ècho-contrasting ideas, overlaying on one another', and this in so unlimited a way,as live electronics combined with computer was able to transform everyauditorium into hundreds of St Peters in Rome. In this new step theomnipresence of Benjamin's Philosophy of History mixes with the extensionof the principle of montage to the relationship between sound and space aswell as between performance and audience ± an extension which began inthe 1960s but only in the 1980s was more consequentially, or more system-atically, explored. The aim was to subvert the communicative systemcrystallized in the traditional concert hall, which Nono had always criticizedbecause of the limited and rigid horizons it offered to the articulationbetween sound and space and, and therefore to the audience's opennessand awareness towards new possibilities.

At the same time the active role of the performers in the creativeprocess emerges also more consequentially in his late works. While in the1960s the works in which all of the sound material sprang from the commonresearch of composer and performer were still rare, in the late 1970s and the1980s this kind of creative dialogue became more and more the rule, and ±with live electronics ± was extended in a crucial way to the sound tech-nicians. The composer left the isolation of his home to work with techniciansand performers in the electronic studio. This means that during the concep-tion and the performance sound technology should not lead to rei®ed sound


effects, virtually unchangeable or self-generated according to a logic ofautopoiesis, but rather to the intensi®cation of the subject±object dialectic,to new possibilities for musical objectivation of dynamic subjectivity.Technological progress in sound production and diffusion was testedtherefore in its human quality as a tool of creative freedom, in an emanci-patory ± or, in Gramscian terms, counter-hegemonic ± perspective.

In Prometeo: Tragedy of Listening, `listen to' is an appeal repeatedagain and again by the singers. It demands a meaning-producing listenerwho is invited to explore the in®niti possibili. . . . `Listen to' new sounds andbeyond the sounds ± perhaps as an allegorical appeal to listening to `theOther' in an ìdeal speech situation' ± means certainly for the composer thatneither Prometheus is dead nor history at its end.

Notes

1. As this article, ®rst presented at the TCS Berlin Conference in 1995, gave rise totwo other, more developed papers (Vieira de Carvalho, 1996b, 1996c) and someaspects dealt with in it are already more thoroughly analysed in a third paper aswell (Vieira de Carvalho, 1996a), I decided to preserve in this printed version thecondensed form of its oral presentation at the TCS Conference.

2. For a detailed discussion see Vieira de Carvalho (1996a, 1996c).

3. `The lesson that I brought from South America [from the meetings with SouthAmerican composers] is the need to surpass the ethnocentrismus, of which we arevictims because of different reasons. This West European culture, which becomesmore and more egocentric, which represents itself in a more and more orthodox andimperialistic way as a dominant and in a North American sense ef®cient one, whydoes it claim to prevail as a determinant factor?' (Nono, 1968: 195; see also Nono,1969b: 212f).

4. Referring to Gramscian theory, Holub (1992) speaks of meaning-producingreaders.

5. These fragments of Benjamin's theses on history were included by the Venetianphilosopher Massimo Cacciari in the assemblage of texts that he prepared forNono's Prometeo.

6. This interest of Nono in a negro rhythm as a structural device ± quotation ascontamination (see Vieira de Carvalho, 1996b) ± is especially relevant within theserial music of that time; it bears testimony to his assumption of multiculturalism incontrast with the idea of the self-suf®ciency or self-referentiality of Europeanculture; in this way he assumed ± one could say in terms of the approach ofBoaventura de Sousa Santos (1999) to multiculturalism in the discussion of thehuman rights ± the ùn-completeness' of the European culture. Not collage ascolonial appropriation, but structural fecundation by a musical Other ± similar toDebussy's attempt to make his music derive structurally from principles inspired byGamelan's slendro and pelog tone-systems ± are here at stake.

References

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Vieira de Carvalho, MaÂrio (1995a) `From Opera to ``Soap Opera'': On CivilizingProcesses, the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Postmodernity', Theory, Culture &Society 12(2): 41±61.

Vieira de Carvalho, MaÂrio (1995b) `New Music between Autopoiesis and Ex-pression of Subjectivity: An Approach to Luigi Nono (1924±1990)', lecture givenat King's College, University of London, Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, 6June.

Vieira de Carvalho, MaÂrio (1996a) `No hay caminÄos? ± Luigi Nonos VerhaÈltnis zurGeschichte', pp. 187±219 in Das aufgesprengte Kontinuum: UÈ ber die GeshichtsfaÈ -higkeit der Musik (Studien zur Wertungsforschung, vol. 31), edited by OttoKolleristch. Graz and Vienna: Institut fuÈ r Wertungsforschung and Universal Edi-tions.


Vieira de Carvalho, MaÂrio (1996b) `Towards Dialectic Listening: Quotation andMontage in the work of Luigi Nono', Contemporary Music Review 18(2): 37±85(1999).

Vieira de Carvalho, MaÂrio (1996c) `Neither Prometheus is Dead, nor History at theEnd: An Approach to Luigi Nono', in Folia Sociologica, edited by KazimierKowalewicz, LoÂdz [in print].

MaÂrio Vieira de Carvalho is Professor of the Sociology of Music and Headof the Centre for Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) at theUniversidade Nova de Lisboa. His recent publications include `Denken istSterben' ± Sozialgeschichte des Opernhauses Lissabon (Kassel: BaÈrenreiter,1999) and Music and Otherness (forthcoming).


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