Symphonic Poems (II): Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, The Song of the High Hills, North Country Sketches (1911–1914)

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

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Translating the Orchestra: Liszt’s Two-piano Arrangements of His Symphonic Poems

Journal of Musicological Research ◽

10.1080/01411896.2016.1237823 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 299-323

Author(s):

Hyun Joo Kim

Keyword(s):

Symphonic Poems

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Symphonic Poems (I):

The Music of Frederick Delius ◽

10.2307/j.ctv136c0q0.18 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 291-314

Keyword(s):

Symphonic Poems

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‘Le Paradis Perdu’: in its time

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200031284 ◽

1980 ◽

pp. 58-60

Author(s):

Serge Moreux

Keyword(s):

Chamber Music ◽

Music Criticism ◽

Or Groups ◽

Small Orchestra

In Paris, between 15 October 1935 and 1 July 1936 there were:246 symphony concerts with full orchestra,30 with small orchestra (which is incredibly few),57 with chorus,115 chamber music concerts, not counting either sonata evenings or recitals by various instrumental soloists or groups, which make something like 700 performances to add to the above. Altogether, then, if I am to believe the Guide du Concert (from which I have taken these figures, adding a few concerts that were missed there), 1,144 occasions to exercise the reprehensible and avowedly useless profession of music criticism.

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Britten's ‘Nocturne’

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200044879 ◽

1959 ◽

pp. 14-22

Author(s):

Imogen Holst

Keyword(s):

Small Orchestra

Britten's Nocturne for tenor and small orchestra was written during August and September 1958 and was first performed at the Leeds Festival on October 16th, with Peter Pears singing the solo and Rudolph Schwarz conducting. The first London performance, conducted by the composer, was given on January 30th, 1959, at Friends' House, Euston Road, as a tribute to the memory of the late Erwin Stein.

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