Luigi Nono – Complete Works for Solo Tape (2007)

At the end of his life, Luigi Nono habitually used pre-recorded tape and electronics in his works, combining them with live instruments to create a succession of delicate, increasingly rarefied sound worlds. But his exploration of the possibilities of technology had begun more than 20 years earlier and, through the 1960s, he had produced a series of works for tape alone, all of which are brought together in this comprehensive and scrupulously documented collection. The five-minute Omaggio a Emilio Vedova from 1960 was the first of them, and was to be Nono's only exploration of totally synthesised sounds; perhaps for that reason, it now sounds much more dated and cliched than the later works here. All Nono's subsequent tape pieces employed pre-recorded material, often text-based, from a variety of sources; the 1966 Ricorda Cosa ti Hanno Fatto in Auschwitz, for instance, a recomposition of material from his score for a play by Peter Weiss, creates a tapestry of colours from a children's choir and phonetic sounds sung by a solo soprano.
Contrappunto Dialettico alla Mente was originally commissioned for the Prix Italia in 1968, but because of the anti-American sentiments of the texts, it was eventually excluded from the competition. It's the finest of Nono's purely electronic pieces, a beguiling fusion of the sounds of his home city of Venice with a collage of poetic texts that brings his music much closer than usual to the world of his contemporary Luciano Berio. If 1969's Musiche per Manzo is less a finished composition than a series of short soundscapes which were originally intended to accompany a documentary film, then Für Paul Dessau, from five years later, was written for the 80th birthday of the East German composer. It weaves together sound bites from speeches by Lenin, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro with extracts from some of Nono's earlier works that Dessau particularly admired. It might be an occasional piece, but it's one put together with all Nono's usual concentration over every aural detail.