Abstract

The current debates about the politization of art often suffer from the fact that we take for granted what we understand by politics. I would like to take the controversies about the political in Luigi Nono’s music as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this peculiar category. I would like to differentiate first between three paradigmatic conceptions of the political in order to, secondly, examine the political content of Nono’s overtly political music from the 60s and 70s. The assumption that guides me is that the political content articulated in Nono’s works is linked to the idea of the political transcending itself.