Uploaded May 2011 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century. Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero in 1941 at the Venice Conservatory where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—who gave Nono further tutelage and was an early mentor and advocate of his music.
It was Scherchen who presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg in 1950, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt—a centre for the rediscovery of modern music after the devastation of dictatorship and war. The Variazioni canoniche, based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 41, including the Ode-to-Napoleon hexachord, marked Nono as a committed composer of anti-fascist political orientation. (Variazioni canoniche also used a six-element row of rhythmic values). Nono had been a member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War (Schoenberg-Nono, 2008). In fact Nono's striking political commitment, while allying him with some of his contemporaries at Darmstadt such as Henri Pousseur and in the earlier days Hans Werner Henze, distinguished him from others, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Nevertheless, it was with Boulez and Stockhausen that Nono became one of the leaders of the New Music during the 1950s. A number of Nono's early works were first performed at Darmstadt, including Tre epitaffi per Federico García Lorca (1951--53), La Victoire de Guernica (1954)—modeled after Picasso's painting as an indictment of the war-time atrocity—and Incontri (1955). The Liebeslied (1954) was written for Nono's wife-to-be, Nuria Schoenberg (daughter of Arnold Schoenberg), whom he met at the 1953 world première of Moses und Aron in Hamburg. They married in 1955. Nono had enrolled as a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1952 (Flamm 1995).
The world première of Il canto sospeso (1955--56) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra brought Nono international recognition and acknowledgment as the legitimate successor to Webern. "Reviewers noted with amazement that Nono's canto sospeso achieved a synthesis—to a degree hardly thought possible—between an uncompromisingly avant-garde style of composition and emotional, moral expression (in which there was an appropriate and complementary treatment of the theme and text)" Nono's last masterpieces, such as Caminantes... Ayacucho (1986--87), inspired by a region in southern Peru that experiences extreme poverty and social unrest, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988--89), and "Hay que caminar" soñando (1989), offer poignant comment on the composer's life-long quest for political renewal and social justice. Toward the end of his life, Nono came across an inscription on a monastery in Toledo attributed to Antonio Machado, which became a kind of motto:
" Traveller, there is no pathway, there is only traveling itself. "
Nono died in Venice in 1990. After his funeral, the German composer Dieter Schnebel remarked that he "was a very great man" —a sentiment widely shared by those who knew him, and those who have come to admire his music . Nono is buried on the island of San Michele, alongside other such artistic luminaries as Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Ezra Pound..
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century. Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero in 1941 at the Venice Conservatory where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—who gave Nono further tutelage and was an early mentor and advocate of his music.
It was Scherchen who presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg in 1950, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt—a centre for the rediscovery of modern music after the devastation of dictatorship and war. The Variazioni canoniche, based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 41, including the Ode-to-Napoleon hexachord, marked Nono as a committed composer of anti-fascist political orientation. (Variazioni canoniche also used a six-element row of rhythmic values). Nono had been a member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War (Schoenberg-Nono, 2008). In fact Nono's striking political commitment, while allying him with some of his contemporaries at Darmstadt such as Henri Pousseur and in the earlier days Hans Werner Henze, distinguished him from others, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Nevertheless, it was with Boulez and Stockhausen that Nono became one of the leaders of the New Music during the 1950s. A number of Nono's early works were first performed at Darmstadt, including Tre epitaffi per Federico García Lorca (1951--53), La Victoire de Guernica (1954)—modeled after Picasso's painting as an indictment of the war-time atrocity—and Incontri (1955). The Liebeslied (1954) was written for Nono's wife-to-be, Nuria Schoenberg (daughter of Arnold Schoenberg), whom he met at the 1953 world première of Moses und Aron in Hamburg. They married in 1955. Nono had enrolled as a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1952 (Flamm 1995).
The world première of Il canto sospeso (1955--56) for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra brought Nono international recognition and acknowledgment as the legitimate successor to Webern. "Reviewers noted with amazement that Nono's canto sospeso achieved a synthesis—to a degree hardly thought possible—between an uncompromisingly avant-garde style of composition and emotional, moral expression (in which there was an appropriate and complementary treatment of the theme and text)" Nono's last masterpieces, such as Caminantes... Ayacucho (1986--87), inspired by a region in southern Peru that experiences extreme poverty and social unrest, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988--89), and "Hay que caminar" soñando (1989), offer poignant comment on the composer's life-long quest for political renewal and social justice. Toward the end of his life, Nono came across an inscription on a monastery in Toledo attributed to Antonio Machado, which became a kind of motto:
" Traveller, there is no pathway, there is only traveling itself. "
Nono died in Venice in 1990. After his funeral, the German composer Dieter Schnebel remarked that he "was a very great man" —a sentiment widely shared by those who knew him, and those who have come to admire his music . Nono is buried on the island of San Michele, alongside other such artistic luminaries as Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Ezra Pound..
![Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qG9ItqMVdk/mqdefault.jpg "Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]
Devant une neige un Etre de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde fontmonter, sélargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré, des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier. Et les frissons sélèvent et grondent et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, - elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! nos os sont revêtus dun nouveau corps amoureux.
O la face cendrée, lécusson de crin, les bras de cristal ! Le canon sur lequel je dois mabattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de lair léger !
Arthur Rimbaud
Hans Werner Henze (born 1 July 1926, Gütersloh, Westphalia) is a German composer of prodigious output best known for his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life.[1] His music is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.
Henze is also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. He lives in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and still travels extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Italy. In 1945, he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and was able to continue his studies under Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg in 1946.
Henze had some successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success in 1946 with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schotts, the music publishers. He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques. At the 1947 summer school, Henze turned his thoughts more thoroughly to serial technique, and it seemed for a while as if he might become a leader of young German composers in this idiom.")
![Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-1956), First Movement [2 of 2 total]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8nL5pkmdbc8/mqdefault.jpg "Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-1956), First Movement [2 of 2 total]
Billy Jim Layton, an innovative American composer of the 1950s and 60s who was well known in his prime but abruptly stopped composing and concentrated on academic pursuits, died on Saturday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 79.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his daughter, Daphne Layton.
Mr. Layton, who became the first chairman of the music department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was widely recognized in his time as a fresh musical voice. He wrote well-crafted pieces in a style he termed new liberalism, which he described, according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as a new, rich, meaningful, varied, understandable and vital music which maintains contact with the great cultural tradition of humanism in the West.
Reviewing a performance of Mr. Laytons work in The New York Times in 1960, Eric Salzman wrote, Billy Jim Laytons String Quartet is as vital, as startling, and as overwhelming as if nobody had ever written a quartet before.
Born in Corsicana, Tex., on Nov. 14, 1924, Mr. Layton started out in music as a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist before joining the Air Force and serving in a B-29 bomber in World War II. After the war, he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, going on to Yale for his masters degree and Harvard for his Ph.D.; his teachers included the composer Walter Piston.
It was at the New England Conservatory that he met his wife, Evro Zeniou, a native of Cyprus, whom he married in 1949.
From 1946 to 1964, Mr. Layton wrote a number of well-received pieces, including Three Dylan Thomas Poems and Three Studies for piano; and won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1966, Mr. Layton was appointed chairman of the new music department at Stony Brook, which he helped to establish as a dynamic presence on the music scene, bringing in important composers and performers, in a tradition that remains alive today. In 2002, Brian Wise acknowledged the Stony Brook music department as small but vital in The New York Times.
In 1992, Mr. Layton retired and moved with his wife to Cambridge to be near his two children, Alexis and Daphne, and two grandchildren, all of whom survive him.
This recording of the String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-56) is by the Claremont String Quartet.
We apologize humbly, profusely, and on our bended knees for the execrable sound quality of this 1950s thirty-three-and-one-third revolutions-per-minute long-playing microgroove recording.")
![Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements, Second Movement [2 of 2 total]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8ssmcYKEIXo/mqdefault.jpg "Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements, Second Movement [2 of 2 total]
ABOUT the String Quartet in Two Movements, composer Billy Jim Layton has this to say: The
quartet was written during 1955 and early 1956 while I was at the American Academy in Rome as a
Rome Prize Fellow. It is a composition to which I devoted a great deal of thought and effort and, as
I look back on it, it seems to me that it represents a kind of summation of my artistic development
and convictions up to that point. In it my aim was to achieve the widest range of expression possible
without lapsing into incoherence, by always maintaining the strongest formal control.
The thought and effort expended by Layton on this work has resulted in a Quartet which holds
qualities of extraversion and introversion in an unusual balance, with areas of high emotional
tension and vigor being set off against other statements of the utmost passivity and inwardness,
sometimes almost expressionist in esthetic. A highly complex treatment of rhythmic resources is
always in evidence, whether the music flows along with an ethereal line singing above a lightly
punctuated counterpoint, or steps out in jazzy, muscular syncops. Indeed, rhythm would seem to
be the real heart of this Quartet. In more than one section, it constitutes the entire subject under
discussion. Instrumental color, however, is another string preoccupation of the composer. The
resources of his medium are constantly exploited to the full, bringing into combination writing con
sordino and senza sordino; non vibrato and molto vibrato; col legno plus high and low pizzicato.
There are even trills beginning as whole-step intervals and gradually contracting to quarter-tones.
Every measure of the score bespeaks meticulous handling of all materials; a high consciousness of
the potency of timbre, and a delight in its manipulation.
about the composer:
Billy Jim Layton was born in Corsicana, Texas, in 1924. He studied at the New England
Conservatory of Music in Boston, Yale University, and Harvard. Several scholarships and prizes
were awarded him by these institutions. He has also held the Hertz Travelling Fellowship from the
University of California and the Rome Prize, 1954-57. In 1958, a grant in recognition of creative
work in music was awarded him by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in connection with
which the present recording is issued. He has received several important commissions, including
one by the Koussevitsky Foundation. Performances of his music for solo, chamber, orchestral, and
choral combinations have been given in many cities of the United States and Europe.
Claremont St ring Quartet
Marc Gottli eb, violin
Vladimi r Weisman, violin
William Schoen, viola
Irving Klein, cello
We apologize must humbly, profusely, and in a virtual paroxysm of self-deprecation, for the poor sound quality of this 1950s thirty-three-and-one-third revolutions per minute micro-groove recording.")
