Luigi Nono
A Floresta é jovem e cheja de vida

The emotions evoked by listening to this long piece of electronic music by Luigi Nono (1924-1990) are not easily stirred. For him, music was a way to intervene in his time, to engage in politics if necessary: "A Floresta é jovem e cheia de vida," created in 1966, is a full demonstration of this.

On magnetic tape are recorded, besides the electronic framework elaborated in the studio, the sounds of a clarinet, soprano vocal parts, sounds of beaten copper plates, and voices of actors (at the time, those of the Living Theatre, the mythical New York avant-garde theater group). In a live performance, even more intriguing compared to a sterile CD listening experience, these performers appear on stage, thus doubling their acoustic presence and enriching the piece with visual and gestural components. This is how Nono conceived this music born day by day with the collaboration of the performers.

The result is a sonic magma that besieges the listener for 40 minutes, sometimes with the enchanting intertwining of voices, more often with violent bursts of sound that turn into noise. The sounds of the clarinet (however "distorted") and the copper plates provide anchors throughout the piece, serving as reference points for the listener, helping them not to get lost in the dense sonic fabric.

If electronic music in the '50s and '60s represented the means to try to shed the conventions of an oppressive musical tradition, Nono realized that even electronic music risks being ensnared by convention (the rhetoric of "new sounds," for example, or the temptation to retreat into a kind of artificial paradise) and thus uses it with a critical spirit, against the "system" that produced it.

Hence the non-literary texts used in the piece, drawn from workers' and partisans' testimonies, phrases from Fidel Castro, or statements from a military specialist from the U.S. Department of Defense (in this case, obviously to highlight its inhumanity). Hence the very title of the work, from a phrase spoken by a guerrilla fighter belonging to a liberation movement, forced into hiding with his comrades: "They want to set fire to the forest and force us out into the open, but they cannot destroy it because the forest is young and full of life".

Music of great emotion in the feelings from which it is inspired, today it appears somewhat weighed down by its extreme ideological tension.