Luigi Nono 1: Fragmente-Stille

We can still ponder this quartet written for the Bonn Festival in 1980. It has a wonderful quality of longevity. Many thought with this light work Nono had abandoned his lifelong passion for the Marxist struggle. But the perception and manipulation of timbre in and of itself was always Nono's lifelong love. He relished in the facts and processes of dodecaphonic complexity in the early serial phases of the Fifties writing impressive works of engaging complexity until the utilization of text struck a chord awakening in him a passion for the timbre of the human voice.

Arditti fully understood what Nono wanted: not a pretty but rather a threadbare timbre, unfinished and ugly, carrying the weight of the 20th century horrors and its challenges; Am Steg, like fingernails slowly descending down a chalkboard, the string body pulverized into fine particles of timbre not dissimilar to Penderecki's masterpiece on the subject of nuclear terror. While modernity may have died, Nono still lives on, for his departure always seem to give rise to another beginning of his impassioned love for unshackled timbre.