Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (roughly: “The nostalgic utopian distance of the future”) is the second-to-last composition Nono completed. It is part of Nono’s later work concerned with the “tragedy of listening,” to quote the subtitle of Nono’s opus magnum Prometeo (1981-85). After his beginnings in Darmstadt serialism and avant-garde work with heavy political and communist leanings, Luigi Nono entered the sphere of highly sensitive soundworlds where rhythmic orientation, melodic/harmonic structure, and formal development are denied. The listeners are left alone with their attempt to decipher or synthesize musical meaning from isolated cells, long silences, barely perceivable soft pedal tones, or contrasting outbursts of harsh beauty.
Nono reports being struck by an inscription on a wall in a monastery in Toledo: “Caminante, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar.” – “Wayfarer, there is no path. Yet you must walk,” a line by Spanish poet Antonio Machado (published in 1912). La lontananza seems to live in this space where the situation of performer and listener becomes a contradictio in adjecto. A path is nowhere to be found – it is created by walking. The score specifies that “the tone is moving in microintervals below 1/16 – searching for itself or for the tone, always varying.”
The tape of La lontananza was created in the Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung of SWF Radio in Freiburg, Germany. It is based on recordings of violinist Gidon Kremer playing and talking in the studio that were only mildly processed. During a performance, the solo violinist moves between music stands that are arranged on stage and around the audience and plays the six notated movements, while the performer of the tape allows intuitively for “imaginative, autonomous relations [to emerge] between the nine parts (8 tracks and soloist).”
