Routledge Handbook to Luigi Nono and Musical Thought by Jonathan Impett (review)

The annoying stuff first. It would be irresponsible to review this book without commenting on the eye-watering price, which will challenge many hard-pressed academic libraries, let alone individual readers. And what makes this volume—which is monographic in content and authorship—a 'Routledge Handbook'? If both price and titular branding simply reflect the exigencies of British academic publishing, they nonetheless seem especially incongruous in the context of a composer so suspicious of profit-oriented commerce and so concerned to engage with wider social inequalities. Some measure of justification for each of these aspects of this publication can nonetheless be found. It is a truly monumental publication, comprising 500 pages of close-set type; it would be nearer 1,000 in a more standard font. There is certainly bang for your library's buck. And the 'handbook' moniker does at least correspond to a central claim for this book's significance, namely, as the first study in any language to offer detailed examination of the entirety of Nono's compositional output. From this perspective alone, Impett's is an essential contribution. It joins a recent, sudden flourishing of English-language publications on Nono, a very welcome complement to Carola Nielinger-Vakil's elegant monograph Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which is more selective in its coverage, and the English edition of Nono's writings Nostalgia for the Future(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Proceeding strictly chronologically through Nono's career, Impett addresses each work in turn, the shorter works being grouped under shared concerns ('Song'; 'New spaces'; etc.), the larger works (Il canto sospeso; Intolleranza 1960; Al gran sole carico d'amore; Prometeo) given chapters of their own. Lightly-sketched biographical details are offered throughout, but the focus is unashamedly on compositional process and structure. Impett is fearless in his engagement with the inner workings of each score, offering accounts that reconstruct in detail the processes documented in Nono's sketches. The book is unusually generous in its reproductions and transcriptions of the sketches themselves, even if sometimes one wishes for more in order to follow the fine detail of Impett's account.

A question about readership immediately springs to mind, as one immerses oneself in Impett's discussion. At one level, the approach is introductory. Impett's notes and bibliography are testament to his comprehensive grasp of the existing Nono literature, which is particularly extensive in Italian and German. However, this learning is worn lightly: Impett is not pursuing a grand thesis or revisionary perspective, and largely refrains from extended debate with the arguments of other writers, preferring instead passing references to their key findings. Nor is there any real engagement with the preoccupations of contemporary musicology. His preference is always to reach first for the primary materials.

This works best for the music that, in the U.K. at least, is least well known. How wonderful, for instance, to have, finally, detailed accounts of the militant works from the 1960s and early 1970s, which up to now have been almost entirely neglected in English-language publications, and little studied in other literatures. The richly textured accounts of Nono's last works, which are not considered by Nielinger-Vakil, are also greatly welcome. Impett's nuts-and-bolts approach is a little less compelling for works that have enjoyed a long history of close scholarly attention. The chapters on Il canto sospesoand Intolleranza are disproportionately short, given these works' iconic significance, as if in acknowledgement that the fundamental ground has already been thoroughly trodden. In the chapter on Prometeo, although Impett's discussion of the work's philosophical background is substantial—demonstrating once again the remarkable spell that this piece tends to cast over its exegetes—there is a good deal of duplication with Nielinger-Vakil's discussion, and hers proves the more satisfyinglydetailed when it comes...