Quick Analysis No.1
Luigi Nono, Sará dolce tacere - for Eight Solo Voices
I’ve decided to take notes and commit to writing short, semi-analytical pieces about the music that I listen to and score-follow. This is largely just to make sense of my thoughts and keep a document of some of my active listening habits, but also to offer some quick insight into what I find compelling about the notated music that I study for those who may also be interested in (predominantly) 20th and 21st Concert Music. I hope to be adding to this series quite regularly and writing short articles whenever I spend time score-following. There will be no pattern or logic to what I cover, and no particular order other than what I choose to pull out of the library and sit down with. And with that preamble out of the way:...
Sará dolce tacere by Luigi Nono is a remarkably beautiful and strangely subdued and soft work from 1960. I say strangely subdued and soft since this was the year of Intolleranza and Canti di Vita e d’amore; two much more violent and smashy works for solo singers, chorus and orchestra.
Sará dolce tacere is almost uniformly quiet and subtle in texture, say for a few swells into fortissimo, and its exploded chromatic pointillism provides an eerie and beautiful yet stark harmonic language for this textural and dynamic reservedness. A cursory glance at the first four bars shows all twelve tones present in the music within a matter of seconds, suggesting some kind of serial organisation at play, but initially with a weighting towards C-natural and a prominent relationship with the open fifth G-natural, providing an albeit very fractured tonal heart among all of the exploded semitonal chromaticism.
The writing looks and feels almost entirely pointillistic: single tones floating in space of different durations, set against one another in a gradually unfolding cascade. It’s rare that a single voice will sing any two notes that sound sequentially, or any two notes will be articulated to appear to follow melodically from one another, which contrives to produce an almost entirely fractured feeling within the music.
Also completely fractured is the text: the score rather strikingly lays out the text at the bottom of each page in a large font beneath the dual-system of the eight voices grouped into two symmetrical groups of four. This text writ large is broken up syllabically and shared among the voices, the score also displays how the text is fragmented with a dotted line that traces words across voices and time, darting sharply between staves and sometimes even arching back on itself in instances where sequential syllables happen in near synchronicity.
Perhaps the most beautiful section to my ear unfolds over the last few pages, where each voice settles briefly on a single note and repeats an all together more legato passage of rhythms and syllables, creating the effect of a single, crystalline musical object slowly refracting in the light, with different points glittering, before subsiding again into pointillism. This brief stretch presents a wonderful eight-note chord of F, B, E-flat, C, F-sharp, C-sharp, A-flat and D. A complex chord full of close chromatic voicings as well as resonant wider intervals.
This short piece is a real gem from Nono’s relatively early output and shows some tantalising signs of the direction in which his work would later head.
