I met the composer in Graz, Budapest, and Amsterdam and was moved by his cordiality. I was also embarrassed by it: it seemed obvious to me that it was due to my coming from a communist country; he appeared to assume that I, too, was an ardent adherent of the faith. (Nono had joined the Italian Communist Party in 1952 and as far as I know remained a member all his life.) I hated to disappoint him, so I suppose I just smiled and did my best to reciprocate his friendliness.

Nono readily agreed to reply to my three questions and after transcribing the tape, I sent it to him for approval. I never heard from him, and my reminders remained unanswered. I comfort myself that it is nevertheless authentic: after all, those are his words.

I.

When listening to the music of a contemporary composer, I try to understand the way he created it and the ideas he set out to realize in the piece. In new acoustic phenomena, I examine the new elements as if under a magnifying glass.

Every composition is of course a manifestation of our time, it has a structure peculiar to its language and it has an ideal. It is important for me to become acquainted with everything that characterizes our age.

The music of Josquin, or Giovanni Gabrieli, or Beethoven is, however, much more important. Not because having studied it I will compose differently but in order to understand a composer’s thinking in a given historical period, the kind of materials he worked with, his relationship to those materials, the compositional principles he developed, the sort of contact he established with his contemporaries and with the reality of his age.

II.

Nineteen sixty-eight was a significant year for the whole of Western Europe. The students’ movement played an important role, however different it may have been in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, or Italy.

In Italy, this movement emerged as a consequence of the long and difficult struggle that workers had been waging since 1960. The students’ movement then established a tight contact with the workers—a process which was not without its complications.