Luigi Nono
La fabbrica illuminata

“Comrades, there is a cultural and political matter of great importance. I understand the reasons for the boos, and I also understand a certain difficulty.
We must use all means, not just guitars. Communist culture is a serious matter. We need all means if we want to achieve the hegemony of the working class”.

These are some of the words spoken by Luigi Nono during a 1975 concert organized by the Italian Communist Youth Federation. Amidst various folk guitar strums and monologues by Proietti, it's the turn of the Venetian composer, who performs “Non consumiamo Marx”. A few minutes in, and a burst of boos breaks out amongst Nono's sophisticated electronic artifice.
The audience is not pleased. Nono is not pleased with the boos and loses the match. He stops the concert and starts speaking. He explains.
His musical discourse is mortified by his verbal saying. He has to explain, he has to defend himself.
And as a defense, he chooses to attack, in earnest and slightly bitter.

Luigi Nono is not John Cage, who transformed boos into proto Markov chains.
Different leagues, different ways of interpreting art — if you like — and everything surrounding it.

It is no coincidence, and I am sure of it, that in the institutional manual of Music History (four volumes), the only critical moment concerns precisely the chapter dedicated to the American composer, which contains a severe critique by Luigi Nono.

The sense is: “You here laughing and joking, while in the world the workers...”. Predecessors of “share if you are angry”.
Not being able to find another way was, for Italy, a cultural defeat.
If in a hypothetical timeline, you could start from John Cage and arrive at Lou Reed, starting from Luigi Nono, you arrive at Luigi Nono and there you stop. Paying tribute to him, as is fitting for an extraordinary composer. Extraordinary indeed, but self-contained.

Over the years, I have tried to strip those words the composer dedicated to the booing audience, and this is the result:

“'Ignorant! We must make communist art, we must create cultural necklaces, but I realize that you, subproletarians, are unable to understand my art and prefer by far the little guitars and the rhetoric of certain trallallero poetics. You deserve Paolo Pietrangeli. We need all means to achieve the hegemony of the working class. Especially I, need means, because otherwise, it ends up doing four festivals for a few close friends and nobody buying my records or coming to my concerts. Damn it! What do you want? That I go clowning on Lascia o Raddoppia like John Cage?”.

Premise: I really quite like Nono's aesthetics (excluding soprano). The musical one, to be clear. The intents and various “I'll teach you life”, I look at with suspicion. Suspicion on Nono, on Pasolini, on Saviano today, and on Diosolosacchì tomorrow.

Luigi Nono was an educated communist composer. Which by itself means little or nothing.
And all his art, all his commitment, today, is filed away in a nostalgic and dusty past, revived during tribute concerts — it must be said — well-received like a Nouvelle Vague film retrospective at the cinema.
To see how it was. Certainly not to see how it is. And much less how it will be.
There are those who see it as a great lost opportunity. The most burning artistic defeat that left the artistic-political step to De Gregori, Venditti, and other opportunistic left-wingers, sending into mothballs not only Luigi Nono but also the entire “I dischi del sole” collection.
Paradoxical. In that learned art – popular art dichotomy, “Pablo” won (but Pablo who?), Venditti's “Paolo Rossi was a boy like us” won.

• But Paolo Rossi who? The footballer? But then what does the year of the 1986 World Cup have to do with it? Paolo Rossi was the hero of 1982

• No, no. Paolo Rossi. A student belonging to the UGI, killed in 1966 while distributing flyers at the Faculty of Letters in Rome.

• Ah.

• Yes, inside the Italian Goliardic Union; there were also Craxi, de Michelis, Giulietto Chiesa!!!1!!1

• Ah :(

So was Nono right? Was it better to convince oneself that those treated sounds and with the addition of the strident soprano were the only possible hope to create a left-wing musical culture? Better that or the quote from Paolo Rossi that everyone thinks is the footballer? Or perhaps it was better not to succumb to the pop charisma from the cover and pay more attention to Fausto Amodei, Giovanna Marini, Ivan Della Mea?

Luigi Nono was considered a subversive. The Fabbrica illuminata was boycotted by Rai: an opera produced within Rai’s phonology studio was boycotted.
Radically inexplicable paradoxes.

The lyrics of La Fabbrica illuminata, in fact, were considered dangerous. Offensive, even. Too bad that listening to them, those lyrics, you can't understand a thing.
Mother Rai could have slept soundly, even if this work had been used as the news theme.
But reading them, on the other hand, yes, the words are understood and they're a genuine punch in the stomach. Written by Giuliano Scabia, with two added fragments from a text by Pavese, those words harshly describe the condition of the workers in the Cornigliano factory (and in factories in general).

Alienation, sadistically sweetened by hypocritical communicative conviviality, in reality, death camps for men-machines prone to noxious fumes: a theater of death awaiting death generated by hope for life.

The simple recording of natural sounds (factory sounds and workers' voices) did not convince Nono, who preferred to complete the work by adding, in post-production, other sounds elaborated on magnetic tape and the classic cultured-soprano atonal (but why? but why?).

What a pity. Nono's necessity to escape any rhetoric; the fear, perhaps, of being a little more comprehensible, leads us today to be deprived of some important historical documents.
If he had hit the target, works like these would not be semi-unknown to the entire audience. Communists and not. Music lovers, more or less prepared. They would be history, they would be common discourse heritage. And they are not. He may sell out in festivals for a few close friends, but that's where it stops, and I am sure his intentions were different.

Perhaps it took little, to transform subproletariat boos into applause, without offending the clique of intellectuals, those of “we sing it and play it for ourselves”. It took little. It was enough to think about them too, the “workers' power”, those young people who Nono, in a moment of tension, blamed for being “incapable of understanding”, considering they were also the Italsider of Genoa, without a camel jacket.

Telling discomfort from the pulpit, as many intellectuals of the late twentieth century did, has simply led to an even more unjust and unexpected class detachment.

There is nothing left to do but to pick up certain literature and attempt to re-propose it, lowering the brow of “look at me, how cultured I am”. Try to make it pop, for everyone. Give the vinyl to those who speak of revolution and do not know “Il Quarto Stato” (this happens too, lovely). Joke about it, take off the outfit of touchiness. Listen to the boos and the dissent in a period where communication wins through incisive and deceptive pay-offs; convince oneself that this literature, even that of Luigi Nono, although recognizing some intent limitations, can and should be an opportunity to open a temporal wayback machine that slowly brings back to a more careful study of our contemporaneity.

Listen to La Fabbrica Illuminata

factory of the dead they called it
workers' exposure
to burns
to noxious fumes
to large masses of molten steel

workers' exposure
to very high temperatures
out of eight hours, only two are pocketed by the worker

workers' exposure
to projected materials
human relations to accelerate the times

workers' exposure
to falls
to dazzling lights
to high voltage currents
how many MAN-MINUTES to die?

and HANDS do not stop attacking
UNINTERRUPTEDLY that empties the hours
to the BODY naked they seize
dials, faces: and do not stop
stare STARE fixed eyes: eyes hands
evening turns of the bed
all my nights but dry orgasms
ALL the city of the LIVING dead
we continually PROTESTS
the crowd grows talks about the DEAD
the cabin called TOMB
they cut the times
factory like a lager
KILLED

mornings will pass
agonies will pass
it will not always be so
you will find something else