"Der Kontrapunkt der Linien ist durch den Kontrapunkt der Klangflächen abgelöst". I modelli policorali storici nella prospettiva di Luigi Nono

The work and thinking of Luigi Nono involved a complex interplay of references to music from other epochs and cultures. References to composers, works and contexts of polychoral and cori spezzati repertoire from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emerged at the beginning of his career in the early 1950s. During the following decades until the end of the 1980s, they evolved in parallel with the development of Nono’s compositional experimentation with acoustic space and electronics. This article brings together and discusses those references to Gabrieli, Striggio, Tallis and to the Venetian and Iberian polychoral traditions, as they appear in Nono’s writings, correspondence, notes and personal library. Three relevant phases are identified: his research on simultaneity in music, dating from the second half of the 1950s; a widening of perspectives suggested by his close reading of Paul Winter’s book of 1964, Der mehrchörige Stil; and the dissemination of Nono’s knowledge and views on polychorality and cori spezzati in his public discourse on Prometeo and other late works.