Composed Space in Luigi Nono's Live-Electronic Composition Prometeo

Among the electroacoustical space compositions of the pre-digital era, Luigi Nono’s Prometeo, tragedia dell’ ascolto (1985) is extraordinary—not only because it is still performed regularly today, it is also an extremely complex work of the mixed category. Nono composed it as a texture of interwoven musical fragments, some based on lyrics that Nono had fragmented and rearranged from a libretto by Massimo Cacciari’s which itself was based on antique Greek mythologies, Ayschylos’ Prometheus tragedy, and modern literature excerpts from Friedrich Hölderlin and Walter Benjamin. Performing the work requires four orchestra groups, solo wind and string groups, a glass soloist (used as percussion), a mixed choir, a group of five solo singers and two speakers, a huge amount of equipment for live electronics (such as harmonizer, vocoder, reverb, delay, a sound motion device called Halaphon etc.), and at least twelve loudspeakers. Each group of musicians and each loudspeaker are placed on an individual position in the performance hall.

Because until today only little was known about precisely how space is involved in the composition and what its functions are therein, the focus of my research project on spatial composition in the analogue era lies, at the moment, on the spatial aspects and their composition and representation in Prometeo —and that is also the focus of this paper. As many spatial aspects as possible ought to be analyzed, as well as their interaction with other parameters of the composition.