La Fabbrica Illuminata for Soprano and Electronics Composed by Luigi Nono

Maeve Palmer - Soprano
Adam Scime - Electronics
Videography - Taylor Long
Sound Engineer - Dennis Patterson
Broadcast on October 28, 2021 from Koerner Hall in Toronto, Canada as part of NMC's Not Alone concert.
www.newmusicconcerts.com
La Fabbrica Illuminata Program Note:
La fabbrica illuminata (The illuminated factory) is a composition for voice and four-track magnetic tape dedicated to the factory workers at the Italsider steel plant in Genoa-Cornigliano, with texts by (and elaborated by) Giuliano Scabia and a fragment of Due poesie a T. by Cesare Pavese. Although it was written expressly for the opening concert of the Prix Italia 1964, it ws not performed on that occasion because the administration of the Rai foundthe strong political bias of the texts to be offensive to the Italian government. The first public performance consequently took place in Venice on September 15, 1964, during the XXVII International Festival of Contemporary Music - La Biennale, with mezzo-soprano Carla Henius as soloist and Nono as sound director.
When Nono received the commission from the Rai he had been working with Scabia on Un diario Italiano (An Italian Diary) of which La fabbrica illuminata was planned to be an episode. The motivating impulse behind the original, subsequently abandoned project was the composer’s view of the musical stage as a vehicle for addressing pressing social and political issues, which was inspired by both the Soviet avant-garde (including such authors as Vsevolod Emil'evic Mejerchol'd) and the political theater of Erwin Piscator. An Italian Diary should therefore have constituted Nono's second "stage event" after Intoleranza '60 (1961).
In May 1964 Nono, along with Scabia and Marino Zuccheri, the technician for the Rai Phonology Studio in Milan, went to the Italsider steel plant in Genoa to collect materials on the working and living conditions of the laborers there. They recorded industrial noises and sounds of the men at work, while Scabia wrote down some of the words, orders, and factory slang he heard and came away with union publications that would be useful for assembling the text.
Much of the musical and literary material that had already been generated for An Italian Diary was adopted and adapted for this new composition. Working with Scabia, Non replaced some of the choral texts with new ones based on the material collected at the Italsider plant, while a fragment of the second scene (Sogno incubo. 5 donne) became the basis of the third section (Giro del letto). Thus La fabbrica illuminata assumed the contours of an autonomous composition.
For the tape Nono used selections of music sung by the Rai of Milan directed by Giulio Bertola, “thematic” improvisations sung by mezzo-soprano Carla Henius, voices and noises from the Italsider plant, and was combined and electronically modified often beyond recognition. Nono described it thus: “No camouflage, no mirror images. No industrial arcadia. No popular or populist naturalism.” The live solo voice then intersects with the tape during performance to create a dialogue with the recorded text.
La fabbrica illuminata consists of four episodes:
1. Coro iniziale (Opening chorus) [Chorale I, II, III, and IV]
2. Solo tape
3. Giro del letto (Circling the Bed)
4. Tutta la città (All of the City) + Finale
The episode is choral, with live interpolations of the live solo voice; the second episode, for tape alone, consists of factory noises and workers’ voices; in the third episode (Part II) the live soloist interacts with the electronic material and Carla Henius’s deconstructed and highly elaborated recorded improvisations; and in the fourth episode (Part II and Finale) the soloist dialogues with the recorded voice and chorus, then the work concludes with a monodic section organized according to the well-known “latin square” technique, in this case generating a series of intervals in the order of 2- 2+ 3- 3+ 4.
- Luca Cossettini

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