“Conscience, Feelings, Collective Reality”

Abstract

This section is devoted to Nono's characteristic expressions as a “political” composer of the 1960s and 1970s. It considers the urgency of grounding the work of composition in an understanding of the historical emergence of social configurations, and represents the logical development of the program announced in 1959 with “Historical Presence of Music Today.” This, in fact, is the prelude to the passionate resumption of the Sartrian question “Why write?”, which, at the turn of a decade, is transformed into a harsh and thorough polemic against contemporary European avant-garde music. During those years, his orientation toward a politically focused musical production was sharpened and radicalized. It was aligned both with an agenda derived from a “progressive” reading of national culture and with that of the international workers' movement.