2.1 Derridean Hauntology

Derrida is best known as one of the most important figures in the development of philosophical deconstruction, which is situated within the fields of poststructuralism, postmodernism and literary theory. A little introductory background on Derrida’s deconstructive thinking will help to place hauntology in its wider philosophical and artistic landscape. Deconstruction is a somewhat slippery concept, but, in brief, it aims to challenge and probe metaphysical binary oppositions by exploring areas of aporia within the Western metaphysical philosophical tradition. Derrida’s texts frequently engage with earlier philosophical thinkers, such as Plato, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Marx, as well as artists and scientists including Valerio Adami and Freud, which he uses to explore and confront a series of interlinked conceptions relating to the centre, the archive, pharmakoiFootnote ⁶ and other areas of undecidability, including hauntology.

Derrida was always wary of thinking of deconstruction as a ‘method’ or means of analysis, instead preferring to locate it within an ever-developing field of possibilities, pertaining to invention, experience and understanding in the broadest sense. As a field, deconstruction was always expected to evolve, with Derrida noting: ‘If the foundations are assured, there is no construction: neither is there any invention’ (Brunette & Wills, Reference Brunette, Wills, Brunette and Wills1994, p.27), and ‘if it were an identifiable and regulated practice, the same thing being recognized each time, then it would not have a chance. It would be stillborn, dead from the start’ (Brunette & Wills, Reference Brunette, Wills, Brunette and Wills1994, p.28). But is deconstruction really applicable to fields outside writing and philosophy, Derrida’s principal foci of enquiry? Derrida comments:

Furthermore, Derrida contends that the surface that carries the text, whether physical or spectral ‘paper’, also carries within it a much larger and more complex field of performative actions pertaining to sound, voice and body (Derrida, Reference Derrida2005, p.44):

This description is apt for tape and records, fundamental constituents of hauntological music of the twenty-first century and earlier. Physical recordings, like paper, ‘hold in reserve a volume’ of echoes, deeply embedded in their grooves of inscription. Thus, according to Derrida, from its very foundation onwards, any field or object of enquiry is open to deconstruction – indeed should be deconstructed – without which the alternatives are stagnation, ossification and the death of invention. Deconstructive approaches to diverse domains, such as theatre, film, architecture, music, law and the visual arts, are now commonplace within the academy and further afield.

But what exactly – or inexactly – is hauntology, which in much contemporary music practice appears to condense around a certain ‘atmosphere’ that is enabled by the importation of analogue technology into an often, but not necessarily, digital soundscape? To begin to answer this question, we must consider Derrida’s original conception of hauntology, and then examine how the term’s practical and theoretical usage has developed during the last three decades. Of course, whenever Derrida is brought into a conversation, the idea of a ‘beginning’ is a vexed one. Put simply, origins and centres are highly questionable; everything is coming from somewhere and going somewhere else, conceptually, linguistically, temporally and even physically in some instances, and this restless portability is nicely encapsulated by recorded music, in particular by analogue’s physical ‘housings’ of tapes and records. To observe the coalescing of Derrida’s neologism, we must return to the 1990s and Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Reference Derrida1996, p.1), Derrida’s extended musings on Marx, Marxism, history and lost futures.

A certain evolutionary quality – in that the ways in which we understand and use words changes according to their contexts, times and users – is central to contemporary understandings of Derrida’s neologism. The unstable developmental nature of meaning and usage aligns with and amplifies other deconstructive tenets of course, for it throws questions of authors, origins and centres into doubt, while also allowing for the permanent deferment of the arrival of a fully stable meaning or use, generating potentially endless hermeneutic permutations.Footnote ⁷ The word hauntology – derived from the French hantologie and ontologie – plays through contexts of difference, differences that can be read but not always heard, written but not effectively spoken; hauntology is thus caught up in the same net as différance, another of Derrida’s neologisms. As Wortham (Reference Wortham2010, p.36) notes: ‘différance is a … neologism coined by Derrida to establish the limits of phonocentrism. Différance combines and develops a sense of differing and deferral implied by the French word “différence”’. Wortham suggests that ‘Derrida frequently includes différance in an unmasterable chain or untitleable series that also includes the trace, the supplement, the remainder, writing, dissemination, pharmakon, cinder and so on’ (Wortham, Reference Wortham2010, p.37 [italic in the original]). Thus, although one of différance’s key attributes is what might be loosely termed its speech-curtailing properties, it is its capacity for an implied deferral that is of most relevance here. In French, the full play of différance is evident in the two spellings of hantologie and ontologie, which have an almost identical pronunciation.

Considering hauntology’s almost omnipresence in contemporary cultural usage, its first appearance in Specters of Marx occurs with little fanfare. Appearing just three times in the entire text, as a term, it is far from central to the main thesis – unlike ‘specter’, whose appearances are numerous throughout. The word ‘hauntology’ first appears when Derrida poses the question ‘What is a ghost?’

Derrida poses his ghostly question as though a series of riddles, presenting the ghost/event as unsettling temporal order, emerging from the past to haunt the present, yet also provoking apprehension in the future of its impending return, while this event/ghost is also capable of overturning spatial order – its presence – as Derrida questions the there between event and simulacrum. The first and last time of each manifestation defies conceptual order by coexisting in an endless movable chain of repetition and opposition, in a similar way to the supplement and the drug/poison of the pharmakon. It’s also worth considering that Derrida’s choice of the word ‘staging’ covertly implies the performative repetition of the supplement, an apt treatment for the theatrical housing of Hamlet’s ghost.

The second appearance occurs during an analysis of the ‘conjuration’ against Marxism:

Moving from ghostly ontology in the first quotation, Derrida now attaches ‘hauntology’ to a discussion of the ‘medium of the media’, especially where it concerns technology (the ‘techno’) – technology that contracts both space (‘tele’, meaning far or distant) and time. By adding ‘iconicity’ to his portmanteau word, Derrida draws in the concept of a word (or thing) that can refer beyond itself – its hidden ‘ghosts’ – while ‘discursivity’ implies not only an expansive use of language per se, but also the collection of accepted or hegemonic norms from a particular period, all at the service of the ‘techno-tele’. The movement of decentring continues, challenging fixed concepts of public/private, life/death and presence/absence, while also resisting reduction to a central fixed category. Hauntology overturns these conceptual oppositions, and Derrida’s use of neither/nor in this passage further emphasises this point. Of course, this is not new territory for Derrida: in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (Reference Derrida2004, pp.119–22) he uses the pharmakon’s qualities of ‘either/or’, ‘neither/nor’ ‘and’ paradox as a strategy to probe similar concerns more than twenty years before the publication of Specters of Marx. It is also worth noting just how well Derrida’s unfolding explication of hauntology aligns with the virtuality, one might even say ‘ghostliness’, of capital – that is to say, capital’s operation through promissory notes rather than barter or exchange, its status as revenant, passing from hand to hand, with each transaction part of an endlessly repeating ‘first and last’, it’s lack of traceability and its virtuality, present long before cryptocurrencies came into vogue.

Derrida’s third and final mention of hauntology occurs as an amplification of the undecidability already hinted at in the second quotation and the nature, or logic, of the ghost found in the earlier quotation. However, in the third instance, Derrida has vastly expanded the term’s field of operation:

Hauntology ‘has now come to reside within every concept, and its presence can be felt everywhere and in every time’ (Coverley, Reference Coverley2020, p.210). Hauntology no longer needs italicisation as an ‘outsider’ or ‘foreign’ import, for it is now an established part of the discourse, taking its place with ontology, theology, onto-theology and so on. This final passage also reaffirms the spatial (and temporal) undecidability of hauntology – ‘it does not mean to be present’ – but also confirms its status as an agent of temporal decentring, permeating being and time. In many ways, this returns to the domain of the pharmakon, not only as regards undecidability but also in the use of words that are closely aligned to the pharmakon (pharmakos/pharmakeus); that is, we return ‘into the very construction of a concept’, the différance of pharmakos/pharmakeus, hantologie/ontologie, with the clue to the pharmakon comprising Derrida’s use of the word ‘conjure’ in conjunction with ontology, which immediately draws the text into the orbit of the scapegoat (pharmakos) and the pharmakeus, the Derridean sorcerer of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, both of whom occupy liminal spaces at the edges of society. Both are simultaneously within and without that society. This passage also brings into play the exorcism: as idea, as ritual, as return and as promise. Additionally, it appears to confirm ontology’s coexistence with hauntology, if it is only through the act of exorcism that ontology opposes hauntology. An exorcism of what, though? In Specters of Marx, it might be an exorcism of ‘what may be’ or ‘what has been’, an exorcism of future possibility and past/present memory, an exorcism of the ‘undead’ (ghosts) rather than the dead, or any combination thereof. Would a post-exorcism world exist in a state of eternal ‘present’ or is ontology itself an exorcism, ridding the ‘now’ of both memory and hope through the ‘magically’ enabled return to conceptual order delivered by the sorcerer (pharmakeus)?

Associated with the concept of repetition, and in particular to its pharmakon-like qualities of first/last time, haunting is present in the construction of every concept, haunting is present in hauntology, and time being ‘out of joint’ is a theme that is woven into the fabric of much of Derrida’s work (not just Specters of Marx).Footnote ⁸ Also, if ‘it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept’ then the implication is that haunting would precede every concept, and that hauntology itself must be haunted by the ghosts of repetition. Origins and centres are no longer assured; they are unstable, always already there and yet in no fixed time or place. Thus, Specters establishes three key areas of initial hauntological problematicity: ontologies of the ghostly, the virtual (and therefore spatial) and the spatio-temporal, which are evident across a broad range of subject approaches in twenty-first-century writing about Derridean hauntology.

These areas of concern can be further refined in praxis:

• Decentring – time, space, presence, absence, ghosts and spectres (supplement and pharmakon) as embodied by musical technology.

• Repetition – the placing of first/last time within an endless thread of past/future possibilities, present in modern recording techniques and much mid-century (tape) compositional practice.

• Virtuality and the ‘medium of the media’ – including television, online streaming, CDs, radio, records, tape and print news.

Music and media have a long shared history, from concert reviews and interviews being a frequent component of print media from the eighteenth century onwards, followed by the introduction of mass participation through radio – often via the broadcasting of records and tape recordings – the concomitant rise of the DJ and later transference to television media, to the twenty-first century’s ‘live’ streaming revolution on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, especially during the 2020s COVID pandemic global lockdowns. Derrida’s emphasis on the word ‘medium’ raises further questions of ‘what’ exactly we are listening to, the performance or the medium itself? Crackles, pops, hiss and jumps foreground analogue media, while compression does the same for the digital. This question will come to dominate more recent developments in musical hauntology.

The decentring of time and space is easily mapped to any form of portable media. Recorded music allows us to endlessly share in a time and a place that is past and (usually) geographically distant, often engaging with both performers and composers who are already dead – they speak to us, but they cannot answer. Likewise, the musical ‘score’ is a blueprint for future performances, mute until activated through practice. The score also opens up the possibility of endless repetition within an unmasterable chain of ‘unique’ events. Every performance is first and last, even when we have a favourite recording on loop. This applies equally to live performance as to recordings, or where the two are combined, as can be heard in Cage’s 33⅓ and Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata. Finally, it can be mapped to the medium of the media: because the media’s principal function historically has been to convey ‘news’, it invariably decentres time and space – we see, listen to, or read reportage from an incident that happened yesterday, or five minutes ago, in a city halfway across the world. Very rarely are we at the centre of that reportage: tiny delays in dissemination make the truly ‘live’ and simultaneous broadcast a virtual impossibility. Since World War II, music recordings, including tape and record – unless they document a ‘live’ event – are mostly composed from myriad fragments, with individual takes occupying a much-expanded timeframe to a live performance; and parts may not even be recorded simultaneously, either temporally or spatially. Thus, the majority of musical sound documents – across all genres – represent a very different creative and aural experience for performers and listeners than a live concert would, in a process that releases both composers and performers from the constraints of narrative ‘concert’ time and place.

2.2 The Play of Hauntology: Crate Digging, Lost Futures and Radical Atheism

Aligned with the spectral, in which the word hauntology is inextricably entangled, another of Specters of Marx’s recurring temporal tropes is based around a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 1, scene 5, line 188), ‘The time is out of joint’, from which Derrida weaves a complex net of linking ideas of political economy, Marx’s legacy, Marxism’s legacy, time, space, inheritance, spectres, spirits and mourning. As a construct, hauntology required an appropriate context to facilitate its assemblage (the ghostly orbit of Spectres of Marx); but as Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.xvi) says, ‘a context, always, remains open, thus fallible and insufficient’, opening the door for further expansion in practice. As the Google search figure confirms, hauntology is well and truly established in the cultural lexicon currently in operation; virus-like, hauntology has seeped into much contemporary cultural discourse, from literature, music and the visual arts to broader philosophical-historical areas such as ruins studies, Anthropocene studies and posthumanism. The growth of other spectrality studies also coincides with revived academic (and wider) interests in the ghostly. Indeed, hauntology is such common currency now that an author such as David Cecchetto (Reference Cecchetto2013, p.14) can refer to a chapter as ‘conduct[ing] a hauntology of the positivist definition of life that Dyens extrapolates from Dawkins’ without actually referencing hauntology again in the main body of his text: thus, hauntology has added a system of critique to its other meanings.

Much twenty-first-century musical usage of the term has emphasised either lost futures or the (invariably electronic) sonic identity of hauntology – most frequently signified through the sound of the medium itself, either through wear and tear, or as a blank, a sonic ‘absence’ – in the work of various artists and subgenres, obvious examples including Ghost Box records, Aphex Twin, Burial, the Caretaker, William Basinski, Christian Marclay, hauntological pop, hypnagogic pop, glo-fi and chillwave. As explicated in the writings of Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher et al., this brings hauntology right back into the technological realm, to Derrida’s ‘techno-tele-iconicity’ and the dissemination of technologically recorded archives as symptomatic of ‘an ache of longing – for history itself’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2011, p.356).

‘Consummate scavengers, the hauntologists trawl through charity shops, street markets and jumble sales for delectable morsels of decaying culture-matter’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2011, p.328). Simon Reynolds’s Retromania (Reference Reynolds2011) brings hauntology into the twenty-first century, placing its focus firmly on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pop music’s obsession with recycling its recent past, creating music subgenres dominated by repetition (sampling and looping), nostalgia (children’s TV), lost futures (the UK welfare state, modernist creative practice), ghosts and the spectral, abstract noise (prog and psychedelia), decay and analogue techniques, instruments and media, mainly placed within a timeframe of the 1950s–80s. Recycle, retro, reuse, return, revenant, revolution … hauntology is the ology that just can’t let go, and through what we might term ‘haunted’ media – including radio – decay has been foregrounded across musical and material domains. Of course, noughties popular music is far from the first to use such processes of foregrounding; John Lennon’s ‘Revolution 9’ from the Beatles’ White Album (1968) is a collage of numerous ‘scavenged’ and overlaid recorded sound fragments, while the opening of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (Wish You Were Here, 1975) utilises radio static and fragments of programmes – recorded from David Gilmour’s car radio – as a prelude to the opening guitar chords of the song. Floyd also evoked early NASA radio transmissions in ‘Astronomy Domine’ (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967), although the effect was actually created by reading planets’ names through a megaphone. Similar earlier processes of overwriting are prevalent in dub music, where remixes of samples and existing tracks heavily manipulate vocal and rhythmic content, as exemplified by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (his 1968 single ‘People Funny Boy’ includes rhythmised samples of a crying baby), while hip hop’s love of sampling combined with the foregrounding of the sounds of vinyl, tape and radio as media themselves – their crackle, pop, hiss and static – also foreshadows hauntological music’s sonic lexicon.

For Reynolds (Reference Reynolds2011, p.335), ‘hauntology is all about memory’s power (to linger, pop up unbidden, prey on your mind) and memory’s fragility (destined to become distorted, to fade, then finally disappear)’. The mass of currently freely available recorded sonic detritus of earlier decades is the ideal starting point for this focus, with recordings acting as the ghostly aides-memoires to what has gone before (and where it has gone) even though they can still be accessed in the ‘now’, thereby contracting both time and space. The flipside to documenting era-specific cultural objects before they are lostFootnote ¹⁰ – as a process of preservation – is the importance of documenting processes of decay also, in what Reynolds (Reference Reynolds2011, p.336) describes as ‘the foredoomed nature of recording’s attempts at cultural embalming’, while the potential for damage caused during the storage and retrieval of sonic and visual documents is an important tool in hauntological music, layering nostalgia and loss as symptomatic of a yearning for lost futures and the stabilising power of history itself. As is amply demonstrated in the work of the Caretaker and Position Normal,Footnote ¹¹ the feelings of nostalgia and lost futures associated with memory as a concept make it a powerful creative stimulus, especially when it has been fractured by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, where the gradual erosion of the ability to retain memories of new events nullifies the present, leaving only the ghostly remains of the past, their histories played out through multiple layers of sampling. However, musical hauntologists do not have to restrict themselves to shellac, vinyl and tape to create the ‘crumbly smudges’ and ‘wavering, mottled quality’ of the antique (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2011, pp.331–32). As well as utilising vintage equipment (synthesisers, oscillators, tape decks and other analogue technology) as playback and creative tools, creating a deliberately ‘retro’ sound, antiquated sonorities can also be recreated through contemporary digital processes – masquerading as analogue sources – or by processing original analogue sources digitally, both creative approaches being reminiscent of W. G. Sebald’s photocopied ‘vintage’ images in The Rings of Saturn.Footnote ¹²

‘Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.120). Using the term ‘hauntology’ to describe various popular music genres around the same time as Reynolds,Footnote ¹³ Mark Fisher (1968–2017) brought a further updated understanding and usage of the concept to a considerably wider audience than Derrida’s original had ever achieved. As Derrida had emphasised the tele of technology, in both temporal and spatial terms, and the weight of loss, inheritance and mourning in Specters of Marx, Fisher developed these aspects of Derrida’s thought in assorted writings on his k-punk blog and subsequent book publication (Fisher, Reference Fisher and Ambrose2018) and in the book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Reference Fisher2014), developing hauntology’s usage in a new context with another parallel, and supplemental, interpretation. Thus, in a sense, hauntology itself was already generating ghosts, coming back to haunt Specters of Marx from the future as a revenant, crossing between texts and media, shaping content through contextFootnote ¹⁴ and entering the virtual in the realms of music, electronic communication, film and video.

I think it is worth pausing for a moment here to look at the word ‘haunting’, as its fluidity of usage forms an important part of its application to music. The title Ghosts of My Life appears to indicate a much more personal dimension to hauntology than in Reynolds’s discourse, where haunting and loss dominate. ‘Haunting’ is a slippery word, no doubt one of the reasons that it attracted Derrida in the first place. There is ‘haunt’ as place of return, for example, the ‘haunt of musicians’ referring to a particular locus, such as an after-concert meeting place. There is more abstract usage, such as ‘the haunt of lost souls’, indicating an imaginary – or possibly virtual – domain, while there is also ‘haunting’ as memory, a haunting strain of music, or scent, or taste. Then there is haunting as the act of a ghost or spectre, as can be read in the English translation of Marx and Engels’s 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, ‘a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ (Reference Marx and Engels1985, p.78); but, as Derrida comments in Specters of Marx, when Marx wrote the manifesto communism as a modern political movement had not come into being. Thus the spectre can apparently haunt from the future, as well as embody the memories of past events or people and the apprehension of their return. Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.10) sums up this temporal and spatial paradox when he asks, ‘What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it … persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading? … what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back’, thereby underlining the impossibility for Derrida of any originary signification in the construction of a concept, including ontology.

It is somewhat ironic that Fisher was not a natural acolyte of Derrida, finding his circumlocutions intensely irritating, and noting:

For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that Fisher chose to draw more inspiration from authors other than Derrida, most notably the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund. Fisher (Reference Fisher2014, p.17) introduces hauntology as ‘this concept, or puncept. The pun was on the philosophical concept of ontology, the philosophical study of what can be said to exist’, before continuing his examination of Derridean hauntological forerunners, such as the trace and différance, the main difference being hauntology’s engagement with the subject of time, most notably that of time that is ‘out of joint’. Fisher considers hauntology further through Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, particularly Hägglund’s (Reference Hägglund2008, p.82) assertion of the importance of the ghost’s relationality to ‘the no longer or not yet’. In Radical Atheism, Hägglund argues that, contrary to the readings of other commentators – such as John D. Caputo – Derrida never embraced an ‘ethical or religious “turn” in [his] thinking’ instead arguing that ‘a radical atheism informs his writing from beginning to end’ (Hägglund, Reference Hägglund2008, p.1). Taking Derrida’s engagement with time as a starting point, Hägglund develops this line of enquiry further, bringing Derrida’s work on ethics, desire, justice and identity into his reading. Although much of Hägglund’s text does not directly concern pop culture, which Fisher explicates in Ghosts of My Life, Derrida’s three mentions of hauntology in Specters of Marx are of considerable importance to Fisher’s interpretation, and for this reason, I think it is worth examining them in more detail. The first deals with ghosts, societal demarcation and economies of violence:

In the second occurrence, Hägglund says:

The final deliberation puts hauntology into conversation with notions of justice:

Taking these three passages together, Hägglund argues for relationality between a past that is lost and a future that is still to come, personified through the figure of the spectre. Because of this relationality, the spectre (as part of hauntology) is a consistent presence, and without the spectre, humanity would exist in an endless and ossified ‘present’ – echoing Francis Fukuyama’s liberal capitalist eschatology (see Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1992). Peace can only exist if it is simultaneously accompanied by the agent of change that is violence; and without the presence of past and future spectres (as regret/loss and hope), there can be no justice.

Fisher is particularly interested in hauntology’s reference to both the remnants of the past – often physical – and their associated memories, with a yearning for ‘lost futures’; so hauntology is

Fisher proceeds to consider the importance of hauntology as ‘materialised memory’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.21), emphasising the tactile material dimension of specifically analogue media, their use in music and their degradation and breakdown, which further accentuates the revenant’s ability to conjure up not only memories of ‘things’ (often distorted) but also memories of things that never were, an insatiable and melancholy longing for what did not come to pass – what Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.113) calls the ‘heirs … of a promise’. Vinyl ‘crackle’, the hiss of degrading tapeFootnote ¹⁵ and so on are not only representative of decaying past (and tactile) media; these sounds also foreground the media themselves, through their imperfections, all the while opening new sonic avenues where ‘loss’ is the driving force of creation.Footnote ¹⁶ Similar preoccupations can be observed in the visual arts, with artists such as Angela Chalmers and Chloe McCarrick interrogating women’s histories and the detritus of pop culture using the vintage photographic technique of the cyanotype,Footnote ¹⁷ while Walead Beshty used the same technique in his monumental 2014 exhibitionFootnote ¹⁸ at the Curve Gallery at London’s Barbican Centre, where he created more than twelve thousand cyanotypes. The cyanotypes were printed on the cellulose-based remains of exhibition-related social interactions (printed letters, contracts and emails) and other waste (paper, card and wood), while additionally depicting the studio and exhibition space and its activities, thereby opening up the processes of history (and artistic production) to the viewer and the meanings of objects that are no longer considered of financial or historical worth. As Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.67) remarks, ‘like all inheritors, we are in mourning’, … even when all we inherit is a ‘lost’ future.

Similar preoccupations that combine acts of memorialisation and loss with the ecological impact of the ‘throw-away society’ are evident in music, with the turntablist Christian Marclay (b. 1955) observing: ‘When there is excess, when there are thrift stores filled with books and records that are 25 cents apiece, it makes you think about objects differently’ (Gordon & Marclay, Reference Gordon, Marclay, González, Gordon and Higgs2005, p.19). Thus, the revenant becomes synonymous with reuse in this context. The endless ‘scavenging’ (as Reynolds puts it) of earlier material has hauntological implications for the current climate emergency, whereby, for example, oil-derived ‘plastic’ media (tape, LPs and radio sets) act as both the tactile, decaying ghosts of vintage means of production and dissemination, while also hinting at what ‘has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual’ – the impending climate disaster that is looming as a direct consequence of humanity’s overexploitation of natural planetary resources in the seemingly unquenchable desire for more possessions demanded by capitalism. Although often associated with the 1990s and early noughties, terms such as plunderphonics, crate digging and sampladelic, which describe various methods of creative recycling in music, resonate strongly with the current climate-crisis driven mantra of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. They have profound implications for the vexed relationship between music and capital, problematising issues of production and reception, ownership and authorship and access and decentring. They also echo many of the tenets of earlier movements in the visual arts, especially Arte Povera – the 1960s–70s radical Italian movement that embraced the usage of non-traditional and waste materials as both reflecting Italian economic instability and attempting to confront the capitalist model of the art gallery, represented by Piero Manzoni and Michelangelo Pistoletto among others – and Japan’s Mono-ha (school of things) movement, whose members included Jiro Takamatsu and Lee Ufan. Mono-ha’s rejection of traditional practices during the 1960s and later, replaced by a focus on the nature of raw materials, was used to challenge contemporary rampant Japanese industrialisation. Two musician-creators who encapsulate these concerns are Christian Marclay and the Caretaker. Marclay’s interdisciplinary work has consistently championed using materials for their own sake, while also challenging the industrial ‘culture machine’. Describing his museum works as ‘these flea-market-like installations’ (Sherburne & Marclay, Reference Sherburne, Marclay and Criqui2014, p.49), Marclay’s many creations for found objects (CDs, records, tape, photographs and video), such as Record Without a Cover (1985) and Shake, Rattle and Roll (fluxmix) (2004), problematise the ownership, bricolage and decay of physical materials, while the Caretaker’s obsession with ‘tomb-raiding pop’s cemetery, defiling the corpses’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2011, p.355) sees the reuse of abandoned physical sound documents in pieces as varied as Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999) and Extra Patience (After Sebald) (2012). Both artists either implicitly or explicitly emphasise the possibilities for ‘short-circuiting’ capitalism’s circulatory processes through networks of shared micro-autonomy.

Capitalism’s grip on early twenty-first-century culture was an important theme for Fisher, having already covered related ground in his Capitalist Realism (2009). In Ghosts, he raises the point that ‘the era of what I have called “capitalist realism” – the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism – has been haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.19), and uses the example of the exponential growth of cyberspace during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as the means of ‘reception, distribution and consumption of culture – especially music culture’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.20) as a fundamental part of this process. And yet, this virtual hauntological domain, contracting space and time, haunting from past and future, is what has allowed hauntological artists to converge in what Fisher (Reference Fisher2014, p.21) calls ‘an existential orientation’ and where, despite the apparent collapse of hope engendered by the disintegration of post-war modernist ideals, ‘the music constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future’Footnote ¹⁹ providing ‘a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism’. And this is one of the ways that hauntology, through vintage media technologies, is a radical form of decentring: it uses one of capitalism’s main avenues of commerce, the Internet, against capitalism, instead using cyberspace to create – through digital audio workstations (DAWs) and other digital technologies – and disseminate artistic products that are created through processes of bricolage and reassemblage from the discarded remains of previous eras, often acquired for little money or for free. Much of this work is also disseminated directly by the artists or through wider artists’ collectives, thereby eliminating the ‘middleman’ of the twentieth-century record company in a similar way to Arte Povera’s fight against the traditional gallery system. If free access to creative outputs is also available – via YouTube, UbuWeb and so on – then that radicality is increased, as the circle of exchange denies capital as an external force. However, Coverley makes an interesting counterpoint, arguing that Fisher (and Derrida) along with other left-leaning commentators, are blind to, what might be termed, the hauntology of the right:

Although few would argue with Coverley concerning domestic UK politics, I wonder whether this is actually true when it comes to music and the arts. Is there a creative hauntology of the right? What of Fashwave, whose use of appropriated ’80s synth sounds combined with a visual style of imperialist tropes, encompassing everything from Roman gladiators to Nazi knick-knacks, feeds into the alt-right’s current political narratives?Footnote ²⁰ As both Fisher and Derrida state clearly that Marx and Marxism(s) are dead in the capitalist realist state of politics that the early twenty-first century finds itself enmeshed in, I am not sure whether it is as much of a blind spot as Coverley suggests. Fisher (Reference Fisher2014, p.28) acknowledges the possibility for a more negative political tone in hauntology further when he explains: ‘There is the specific sense in which it [hauntology] has been applied to music culture, and a more general sense, where it refers to persistences, repetitions, prefigurations. There are also more or less benign versions’ (my italics). Both the decline of twentieth-century music culture’s role in imagining futures that are now lost and hauntological music’s signalling of the decline of these popular modernist ideals is placed alongside analyses of varying states of symptomatic nostalgia and melancholia, and what Fisher (Reference Fisher2014, p.25) sees as the false dehistoricising narrative of populist PR in the twenty-first century that asserts that ‘intensity and innovation are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods’.

2.3 Hauntology and Other Fields

Thus, developing Derrida’s initial remarks, Fisher et al. took hauntology from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, emphasising the queasy sense of dyschronia in late twentieth-century popular culture and millennial music, while bringing politics into the centre of their discourses. Unlike Derrida, who takes a decidedly non-Marxist view of Marx’s legacy – it was never his intention to present a new Marxist manifesto – Fisher is happy to place the blame for the exponential growth in nostalgia, symptomatic of wider cultural decline, firmly at the doorsteps of neoliberalism and the final death of the counter-culture’s revolutionary ideals towards the end of 1970s. Thus, raking through the recorded detritus of the near past and endlessly repeating it across other formats, coupled with the melancholy of futures that appeared bright with hope – politically, culturally and socially – but that never materialised, are key concepts necessary to an understanding of post-Derridean hauntology. Not that hauntology is confined to popular music culture. Representative views from other fields, many of which draw on Fisher and Reynolds work, reference similar foci, such as: ‘hauntology contrasts the spirit or essence of a thing with its countless materializations or specters, which allow for the persistence of spirit as memory’ (Banita, Reference Banita, Blanco and Peeren2010, p.97); ‘the concept [hauntology] allowed Derrida to use the philosophically problematic figure of the ghost – neither being nor non-being, both presence and absence simultaneously – to discuss the uncanny persistence of Marx’s ideas after the death of communism’ (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2011, pp.328–29); ‘the inscription of multiple temporalities within the time-image coincides remarkably with Derrida’s description of the effect of the chose, the thing called specter: “It desynchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony”’ (Cuntz, Reference Cuntz, Blanco and Peeren2010, p.119) and hauntology as ‘the idea that originary signification is an ontological impossibility because all meaning is informed, overshadowed and haunted by the ghosts of other meanings’ (Van Elferen, Reference Van Elferen, Blanco and Peeren2010, p.287). Persistence, repetition, ghosts, revenants, dyschronia and what Coverley calls the ‘technological uncanny’ (Coverley, Reference Coverley2020, p.15) all feature prominently in millennial and postmillennial definitions, but what of earlier manifestations? Is there an equally political ‘pre-hauntological’ hauntology, groaning under the weight of its own – recently – recorded past, from earlier in the twentieth century?

‘The whole performance was a montage of authentic speeches, essays, newspaper cuttings, appeals, pamphlets, photographs, and film of the War and the Revolution, of historical persons and scenes’ (Piscator, Reference Piscator1980, p.94). Although this description could apply to a post-war multimedia opera, such as B.A. Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1958–64), Nono’s political stage works – Intolleranza 1960, Al gran sole carico d’amore (1972–75/78) – or Joan Littlewood’s semi-musical Oh What a Lovely War (1963), in fact, the work under discussion is a production of Alfons Paquet’s (1881–1944) Fahnen (Flags) from 1924, and the author is the theatre director Erwin Piscator, originator of the so-called documentary play; yet the parallels with what has since become known as hauntology in the arts are quite remarkable. The influential director and actor Gordon Craig (1872–1966), whose radical approaches to dramaturgy drove many innovations in twentieth-century theatre-making, especially in what would become the field of theatre as social practice, was similarly inspired by technology, stating: ‘I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors’ (Innes, Reference Innes1972, p.67). Similarities to Craig’s vision of inclusive theatre with technology can be observed in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874–1940) revolutionary spectacles, whose re-enactments of key events from the Russian Revolution often involved entire towns as ‘sets’ and huge numbers of the general population as ‘actors’.Footnote ²¹ Cage too, experimented with audience participation: both 33⅓ (1969) and Address (1977) require the audience to act as ‘performers’ by operating machinery, while his ‘circus’ piecesFootnote ²² – Musicircus (1967), A House Full of Music (1981–82) and Musicircus for Children (1984) – can accommodate very large numbers of participants (A House Full of Music had 800 children playing at its premiere) in shared and inclusive experiences of music performance. Twenty-first-century music-making has taken the concept of the ‘non-actor’ even further, with digitally conveyed avatars standing in for living performers – the Abba Voyage show (2022–ongoing) uses a mixture of recorded vocals and digitally created holograms with a live onstage band – a multimedia approach that Craig and Piscator could only have dreamed of.

Piscator had found contemporary playwriting outmoded and struggled to find quality writing that dealt with political subjects, especially those that showcased Marxist ideology.Footnote ²³ His work was groundbreaking both in its experimental approach to the technicalities of theatre production and in its consideration of the social function of theatre, traits that will resurface in Nono’s work. Like Piscator, Cage also often juxtaposed his technology with a traditional framework. This would not be totally unexpected in a concert setting, but in an operatic one, such as Europera 5 (1991) – where a Victrola record player, a silent television and a tape machine are all visible onstage – it is far less the norm, drawing parallels between the internal and external spaces of the theatre, as the imaginary and ‘real’ collide in a melange of modernity. Hauntologically, Cage explicitly confronts the weight of the European operatic canon, combining live performances of arias with tape, historical opera recordings – played on a vintage turntable – radio and TV. Thus, multimedia use brings past and present, near and far, ghosts and the living into collision, questioning the future through technology, but allowing the past to speak through the same means. Cage’s choice of a Victrola playing shellac 78s underlines this point. By the 1990s, Victrolas were not particularly common, presenting difficulties in acquisition for performances, and one can imagine the average opera house puzzling over such a tech rider. Perhaps, it was another instance of Cage’s desire to showcase virtually obsolete technology – as with the test-tone records of Imaginary Landscape No. 1 fifty years earlier – to emphasise the temporal gulf between media and performance styles and implicit societal changes.

Piscator employed technology to ‘bring the street into the theatre and to link drama with the momentary and real events of the newspaper-world’ (Innes, Reference Innes1972, p.72). As with Nono’s overtly expressed political aims, and Cage’s experiential sound world, historical legacy is backed up with contemporary documentation and transmission, through film, newspapers, speeches and recordings, as exemplified by Piscator’s production of Luise Mühlbach’s (1814–73) The Merchant of Berlin, whose use of film was at the pinnacle of innovation for the time. In Piscator’s words, ‘The newspaper is the chronicle of the present instant … marks numbered in billions, flicker like a blizzard over the “fourth wall” … the antique chorus-form of “mass man” comes photographically, scientifically, objectively to life in this ghost-film of air and newspaper-clippings’ (Innes, Reference Innes1972, p.72). Piscator advocated a comprehensive multimedia approach to technology in performance, ‘spreading the load of factual data over all the channels of communication, visual and aural’ (Innes, Reference Innes1972, p.77). Projections, films, placards, speeches, photographs and loudspeakers could be observed in his work in an attempt to present objective and factual accuracy simultaneously, while also reflecting the position of technology in everyday life for an audience living in a highly mechanised and industrialised time. The inclusion of contemporary scientific developments in media and communication allowed him to embed politics, history and social commentary into the illusory medium of the stage. Thus, the projection screen – a theatrical tool also used extensively by Joan Littlewood in Oh What a Lovely War nearly forty years laterFootnote ²⁴ – was used to present factual information as a counterpoint to the live stage action.Footnote ²⁵ Piscator realised that film could be used to present sweeping yet disparate historical overviews, drawing parallels between different periods and between political and economic subject matter, thereby establishing relevance with the action on the stage. Cage also considered advances in technology as being vital to the continuation of his creative process, keeping abreast of developments in audio recording and dissemination such as radio, optical sound on film, turntables, records, tape and computers.

Piscator viewed his materials, including technology, as the starting points for an eventual dramaturgy, with form deriving from content – and thus open to constant variability – depending on the documentation available for each performance, supported by his extensive reliance on collaboration and improvisation. Last-minute alterations were common and, as Innes (Reference Innes1972, p.80) notes, ‘the final version of a play could only be created in rehearsal’. There are some resonances here with both Cage’s and Nono’s working practices. Nono’s approach to composition, trialling multiple fragments with his performers, is reminiscent of Piscator’s performer- and material-driven approach, while the vast majority of works involving recorded media will by necessity have a fragmentary approach either during their composition – field/recording, splicing/editing, over-recording/dubbing – or performance or both, while also seeking to emphasise the inherent tensions between recording and live performance. For both Cage and Nono, technological content was a principal component, often driving form, even if only in the sense of a timed ‘scaffold’ in which to collage multiple sound sources.

3.1 Recording as Hauntological Curation

As a temporal, ephemeral and frequently social practice, live music-making differs from the carefully curated approach adopted by most modern recordings. Contingency, ‘accident’ and greater or lesser ratios of performer agency throw the unpredictability of chance into the live experience; as Heaton comments, ‘wrong notes, untidy ensemble or imperfect intonation in live performance are, to some extent, the fragile nature of the business’ (Heaton, Reference Heaton, Cook, Clarke, Leech-Wilkinson and Rink2009, p.217), but performers and listeners should always be mindful ‘that a recording and a performance are two entirely different endeavours’ (Heaton, Reference Heaton, Cook, Clarke, Leech-Wilkinson and Rink2009). That the recording as object is inherently hauntological can be observed through its possibilities for spatio-temporal decentring, its ghostly ontology and its affinities with the ‘medium of the media’, but further hauntological layers are present within the process of recording itself. As Derrida observed in Cinders (2014, pp.7–8)Footnote ²⁷:

Thus, it is a double text – the score (or ‘book’) and the recording, complete and yet comprising multiple decisions, voluntary and involuntary, during the recording process. Added to this ‘live’ recording activity is the curation, or process, towards that final ‘singular interpretation’, comprising myriad recorded and archived ghostly revenants remaining as virtual fragments. This ghostly ontology is exponentially increased when multi-tracking is added to the mix, allowing performers to record simultaneously in different locations, or to duet with their own ghostly doubles, and even more so when a record is incorporated into another performance, or the record(s) are the performance, as in 33⅓. And let us not forget that the phonograph’s means of recording, whether cylinder or disc, revolves. It is a revenant itself, with an inbuilt cyclical ontology. The recording forces the live performance (which itself was a ‘fixed’ moment drawn from an endless lexicon of performative possibilities) into a format where it can be replayed until it breaks and is no longer audible. The immediacy and sociability of the original live event is gone, but as Christian Marclay (Reference Marclay and Criqui2014, p.25) says, ‘records are about dead sounds, but when I bring records into a performance and play with them, I change my role from a passive listener to an active player; the same is true for the audience. I give a new life to these dead sounds’. Whether or not listening is a passive activity is subjective, the social and performance possibilities for the audio-document – its ‘afterlife’ – open up many avenues.

3.2 Cage and Records

In his first collection of writings, Silence, John Cage advocated for a new approach to composition and, by extension, performance and reception. This new approach was to have been enabled by the application of technology to all aspects of music-making, and Cage already mentions most of the technologies that would come to hold a prominent position in his music practice. Cage (Reference Cage1961a, p.6) requested that:

During conversations with Joan Retallack in 1991, although the subject of discussion was ostensibly Cage’s approach to the visual arts, he drew parallels with earlier manual tape splicing techniques and that technology’s continuing appeal to him as a creative artist: ‘I’m still attracted, even at this point in technology, … to the idea of cutting things up and putting them together. … One of the troubles with some technology is that it makes it almost impossible to use collage. It makes it so easy to produce an effect with a blurring-over’ (Retallack, Reference Retallack1996, p.94). This wariness of the ease of technological ‘quick-fixes’ may go some way to explaining his prolonged use of ‘old-school’ analogue technologies, such as records, radio and cassette tapes, despite the ubiquity of the compact disc by the 1990s. As he happily embraced evolving computer technology until his death, there was an evident appeal to the challenges and sound-world inherent in analogue equipment, where the medium itself is prominent, and its sonic and hauntological identity is foregrounded through audible static, hiss, pops and crackles and obvious stops, starts and changes of record, cassette or radio station. Encompassing records, tape, radio, television, film and computers either in performance or to facilitate aspects of his compositional practice, or both, Cage’s use of technology was experimental and innovative, yet also backward-looking, embracing ghosts from the past as well as ghosts of the future.

From the 1930s, Cage extolled the importance of technology – turntable included – in music. In ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ he states: ‘Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide. to make music … will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments … which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard’ (Cage, Reference Cage1961a, pp.3–4 [emphasis in original]). Cage was insistent that such technologies should not in any way merely replicate existing acoustic instruments, or that their means and style of performance should be rooted in the past; rather, the variability and opportunities for control of a new, technologically generated sound world would revolutionise the production of sound for music-making, taking advantage of ‘photoelectric, film, and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music’ (Cage, Reference Cage1961a, p.4 [emphasis in original]).

Cage’s experimental approaches to recording media and technologies can be divided into six subsets:

1. 1. Instrument – where the turntable, radio set, tape player or television are used to either insert sonic found objects into a pre-existing acoustic structure, such as in Credo in Us (1942), or where technologically enabled sound content forms the basis for or totality of the work, such as Radio Music (1956) and 33⅓ (1969). Another approach involved the audience as performers, as can be seen in 33⅓ and Address (1977). Use of the word ‘player’ with both ‘record’ and ‘cassette’ gives a pharmakon-like play on words, for who is playing here, the machines or the humans or both? This is amply demonstrated in Improvisation IV (1980/82), where Cage asks for ‘three cassette players’ – both machine and human are ‘players’, with machine-as-performer built into the name.Footnote ²⁸

2. 2. Process – where inherent qualities present in processes of playing and/or recording technologies are exploited for musical means, such as in Cartridge Music (1960), while Lecture on the Weather (1975) involves live tape-mixing during performance.

3. 3. Deconstructed technology – where part of a machine is used for musical means, such as a record player arm or cartridge (needle head), as in Imaginary Landscape No. 2 (March No. 1) (1942) and Cartridge Music.

4. 4. Means or place of dissemination, or recording as performance – where a performance or recording space is a required part of the performance. Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) was intended to take place within a radio recording studio and to be performed as a recording or broadcast, while 27′ 10.554″ for a Percussionist (1956) can be performed as a recording. Cage’s Water Walk (1959) is scored for a ‘solo television performer’ (Cage, Reference Cage1961c, title page). Cage composed radio plays in the style of classic Hörspielen, including Fifteen Domestic Minutes (1982) and Empty Mind (1987), and other more traditional approaches to radio, such as his Music for ‘The City Wears a Slouch Hat’ (1942). He was a regular broadcaster on TV and radio, often in dialogue with other composers. Radio Happenings (1966–67), a series of four conversations with Morton Feldman recorded in New York and broadcast by WBAI, is one such example (Cage & Feldman, Reference Cage and Feldman1993).

5. 5. Technological ‘extras’ – Imaginary Landscape No. 1 utilises Victor Frequency Records (test-tone records) sliding between 10,000 and 30 Hz (Cage, Reference Cage1960b).

6. 6. Compositional aids – Cage used computers extensively, most frequently for generating I Ching numbers. HPSCHD (1967–69), in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, utilised the ILLIAC II computer mainframe at the University of Illinois, while Cage’s only sound and light installation, Voiceless Essay (1986–87), incorporated a computer-generated tape.

Cage’s first composition involving records, and one of the earliest examples of electronic music, was Imaginary Landscape no. 1 (1939) for four players. The piece, composed while Cage was at the Cornish School in Seattle, took advantage of the institution’s on-site recording and broadcasting equipment and facilities. The performance was housed in two studios, with sounds picked up by individual microphones and mixed separately in the control booth (Kuhn, Reference Kuhn and Kuhn2019, p.8). The orchestra, as Cage called it, consisted of a large Chinese cymbal, string piano, and test-tone records of constant frequency (Victor Constant Note Record No. 24 (84519 B)) and variable frequency (Victor Frequency Record 84522 A and Victor Frequency Record 84522 B). All three records were to be played on variable-speed turntables, at 33⅓ or 78 rpm, operating a clutch mechanism on the turntable to produce the effect of pitch sliding, while rhythm was articulated by lifting and lowering the needle head. In conversation with Thom Holmes, Cage remarked: ‘We had clutches on those machines that allowed us to produce slides. You didn’t shift from 33⅓ to 45 rpm, for instance, but you could go gradually through the whole thing’ (Holmes, Reference Holmes2020, p.274). Cage does not seem to have intended this work necessarily to be performed live. This was implied in a 1959 letter to Peter Yates, where Cage simply refers to Imaginary Landscape I as ‘on Town Hall record’,Footnote ²⁹ but Yates reinforced this position the following year in a review for Arts and Architecture, where he notes: ‘The first of several Imaginary Landscapes anticipates musique concrete [sic]. It is a composed recording, using telephone company testing records’Footnote ³⁰ and ‘Cage’s intention in Landscape No. 1 was to compose a work which would be as a recording the equivalent of an easel painting’ (quoted in Iddon, Reference Iddon2020, p.116). Cage was fully aware of the problems of technological obsolescence; the concept of Landscape No. 1 as a recording takes this difficulty into account, Cage noting that ‘the turntables that we had then one no longer sees’ (Kostelanetz, Reference Kostelanetz1988, p.157).Footnote ³¹ Hauntologically, Cage is operating in a number of complementary ways: using records in performance, and recording and broadcasting the performance for subsequent iterations, while the operation of the clutch mechanisms and needle-head constantly bring the medium itself to the foreground. For twenty-first-century performers, records are themselves symbols of ‘lost’ futurity, while in many ways Landscape No. 1 is also prescient of the techniques of contemporary turntablism, as exemplified by artists such as Christian Marclay, whose live disc-cutting and editing techniques can be traced back to an older heritage.

Cage’s choice of the word ‘imaginary’ in the title is an interesting one; conjuring up images of something unreal, or existing only in the mind, Cage’s very tangible ensemble seems anything but ‘imaginary’. In a 1973 letter to Peter Naumann, Cage explained: ‘I have always used the term “Imaginary Landscape” in connection with works involving technology. That is why they were not called Landscapes’ (Kuhn, 2016, p.438). Although Cage refers to a different selection of pieces in the letter – Winter Music, Water Music, Bird Cage and so on – the point is valid for his series of five Imaginary Landscapes, where sounds are captured and mediated before being deployed in a live concert or a simple playback context. The strangeness of the sound world may go some way to explaining the title also. Although Cage’s deployment of electronic media in Imaginary Landscape No. 1 is not that revolutionary, as Pritchett (Reference Pritchett1996, p.20) notes, it is ‘striking … for the effective and imaginative [my emphasis] musical use of these records’ that others would have regarded as ‘just a utilitarian test-tone recording’. Cage’s innovative piece was by no means the first to incorporate the turntable. Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) had experimented with a disc recording of nightingale song for a live performance of The Pines of Rome (Pini di Roma) in 1924, while both Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) and Ernst Toch (1887–1964) had made trials with the record player as an instrument in its own right, exploiting the medium’s playback possibilities by altering the speed, and consequently the pitch, of the material.Footnote ³²

An important hauntological consideration present in all these works is the foregrounding of the medium itself through the sonic identifier of ‘crackle’, a dominant consideration in contemporary musical hauntology. Although Cage did not deliberately choose to emphasise the sound of the phonograph disc itself, anyone familiar with vintage recordings will immediately associate those distinctive crackles and pops with the medium. If a disc is scratched or acquires more scratches during performance, then that identity is exponentially increased; the disc accrues a growing archive of damage on its ‘skin’ on top of the recorded archive that it already holds. Derrida (Reference Derrida1996, p.20) comments:

The scratches become part of the archive, and the record’s appearance changes as a fabric-like patination of warp and weft accumulates on its surface. In the same way that writing cuts into the surface of the paper, the action can be sensed through the absence left by the cut. As a spiral cut itself, the incision is a fundamental part of the recording process – thus a damaged record is a double cut and its archive speaks as music, crackle or both. Its sonic ‘ghosts’ are still, in a way, a ‘living’ presence, what Derrida (Reference Derrida1996, p.62) refers to as phantoms:

3.3 Early Works: 1939–1952

If we compare works by Cage that incorporate records with those that utilise tape (Tables 1 and 2), the newer medium of tape has a much greater place in Cage’s output. However, as Cage worked with records consistently in every decade from the 1930s to the 1990s – moving in step with advances in sound design and materials – we can assume he must have had some fondness for the medium, often combining it with other newer technologies too, as in the Europeras.Footnote ³³

In Cage’s second Imaginary Landscape,Footnote ³⁴ for five percussionists, again the turntable is used instrumentally, but here only a part – the phonograph tonearm (and cartridge) – is required, used as an amplifier for a coil of wire attached to it, which is played by plucking with a fingernail or stroking it with a handkerchief, an effect Cage had observed when working with radio sound effects technicians (Pritchett, Reference Pritchett1996, p.20). Referring to Imaginary Landscape No. 3 (1942), which uses the same technique, Cage later recalled ‘I worked with the sound effects engineer at the radio station in Chicago and he showed me the thunderous sound of the coil of wire in a contact microphone – which I loved’ (Kostelanetz, Reference Kostelanetz1988, p.158). Reminiscent of his earlier percussion ensembles, especially the Third Construction (1941), the instrumentation includes electric buzzers, tin cans, water gongs and conch shells. In the third Imaginary Landscape, for six percussionists, Cage combined tin cans and muted gong with an increased number of electronic sounds – oscillators, buzzers, amplified radio aerial (wire) attached to the needle head and a recording of generator whine – an amplified marimbula and, again, variable-speed turntables playing frequency records. These early examples of deconstructing technology for musical means echo the first Landscape, as non-musical elements – test-tone records, recordings of generator sound, record player tonearm, oscillators and buzzers – are subverted to musical ends in another truly ‘imaginary’ and hauntological use of technology. The medium of the media is showcased as Cage foregrounds the sonic identity of records, turntables and other technology.

Credo in Us (1942) presents a markedly different approach to the integration of media technology with acoustic performance. Scored for percussion quartet, who play among other things, tin cans, gong, tom-tom, electric buzzers, piano and phonographs or radios, it is a landmark piece, exhibiting Cage’s first insertion of recordings of music by other composers into his own work. The use of phonograph and/or radio, notated through indications of duration and volume, anticipates later media works such as Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952), Speech 1955 (1955) and Radio Music (1956). In the score’s preface, Cage suggests the types of music that would be appropriate for each kind of media: if using radio, ‘avoid news programs during national or international emergencies’, if using phonograph, ‘use some classic: e.g. Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich’ (Cage, Reference Cage1962, preface). In a 1982 letter to Larry Duckles, Cage describes Credo as ‘a suite of satirical character composed within the phraseology of the dance by Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman for which it was written’ (Kuhn, Reference Kuhn2016, p.515). This rather bald statement implies a multitude of possibilities, hauntological, historical, political and personal from US involvement in World War II to the beginnings of Cage and Cunningham’s personal relationship. The variability inherent in works utilising records and radio could be read as an all-embracing approach to culture, presenting the Us/US of Credo as an affirmation of humanity’s ability to ultimately transcend conflict during the dark days of World War II, or, as with the Europera series (1985–91), in a more nuanced approach to the reuse of existing music, both live and recorded. A Sebaldian reading would surely be bleaker in tone than Cage’s light-hearted remarks, emphasising the poisoned legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century (and earlier) European expansion, while reflecting on the far greater capacity for destruction and devastation presented by twentieth-century warfare. A haunted legacy indeed, where supposedly long-dead spectres have the power to rupture, unsettle and return to the present in a ‘plural manifestation of the many different ways in which our culture and our politics are shaped by the revisions and repetitions of the past’ (Coverley, Reference Coverley2020, p.20). The word ‘credo’ is an interesting choice too, overloaded with a Christian sense of linear temporality, yet placed by Cage in a deeply hauntological setting, where the revenant, more akin to conceptions of pre-Christian cyclical and mythological time, dominates. Was Cage’s suggested record choice merely pragmatic, or indicative of wider considerations of nationalism, revolution, freedom, censorship and constraint? Does Credo lay some of these hauntological ghosts to rest by chopping canonical works from Western music history into fragments and subsuming them into an exhilarating cacophony of hammered pots and pans, or does the cacophony merely serve to emphasise the indestructible weight of historical legacy?Footnote ³⁵

Created in 1952, the same year as Williams Mix, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 is Cage’s first use of magnetic tape, taking the form of an eight-track collage made from pre-recorded and spliced fragments of any forty-two phonograph records, and was made in collaboration with David Tudor and electronic film-music pioneers Bebe and Louis Barron. It was originally composed to accompany Jean Erdman’s dance solo Portrait of a Lady, and Cage’s record choice for his realisation was certainly important in this regard, echoing the influence of jazz in Erdman’s choreography and that of her dance class (Fetterman, Reference Fetterman2010, p.19). However, Cage also felt that using chance procedures to determine content might be a good way to remove issues of personal taste, especially concerning music not particularly to his liking, such as jazz (Fetterman, Reference Fetterman2010, p.20).Footnote ³⁶ Unlike Credo in Us, the score includes no suggestions as to which recordings to use, instead leaving the choice entirely at the ‘performer’s’ – compositor’s – discretion. The published score, a Feldman-like block graph, with each square representing three inches of tape, was constructed by Cage using the I Ching. Thus, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 is a chance-constructed framework in which to fit LP content that is performer-driven, and thus indeterminate. This is amply demonstrated by the plethora of versions currently available to listen to, ranging from classical and opera to jazz, pop, environmental sound and electronica, made that much easier by the options for splicing and arrangement now opened up by the DAW. Interestingly, although Cage, Tudor and the Barrons’ original was made for tape, Cage notes in the score that ‘the record, used in performance, may be tape or disc’ (Cage, Reference Cage1961b, unnumbered instruction page), although this may merely be a pragmatic suggestion for a more readily available medium for playback in early 1952. In some ways, it is quite surprising to find tape pieces that are open to infinite variation. However, even Cage’s more substantial tape works, such as Williams Mix (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958), have the potential to be newly minted, with scores existing for both works that could potentially be realised by others.Footnote ³⁷ Cage’s approach to variability and non-permanence changes the ways in which we think about recording technologies. Not only are they the media of ghosts, but the ghosts have the potential to change radically with each new visitation. Cage’s record (and radio) collages prefigure late 1990s and early noughties hauntological music, not only in their overall sound world – scratchy shellac (or vinyl), missed grooves, sudden dynamic alterations and extreme fragmentation – but also in their mode of operation. By scrambling a chance-derived mixture of inexpensive records, especially when these are combined with radio, Cage is laying the groundwork for hauntological artists such as the Caretaker, who will use vintage records fifty years later for a similar aesthetic, but through the interface of the DAW.

Considered to be the first proto-happening, and an important precursor to the field of performance art, is the ‘Untitled Event’ at Black Mountain College of 1952. Only scraps of what could loosely be termed a score remain, but what does seem to be agreed upon, via performer and audience recollections of the event, is that it was a multimedia, multi-performer collage of independent and sometimes simultaneous but unrelated events. Dance, poetry, theatre,Footnote ³⁸ a lecture, records and radio, a piano, film, slides, paintings and a small dog were all present, in a mix that foreshadows Cage’s multimedia extravaganza HPSCHD in the following decade. Cage noted that the audience was part of the event – ‘In each one of the seats was a cup, and it wasn’t explained to the audience what to do with this cup … but the performance was concluded by a kind of ritual of pouring coffee into each cup’ (Kirby & Schechner, Reference Kirby and Schechner1965, p.52) – prefiguring 33⅓ and Address, where audience participation is explicit in the published scores. Phonograph records were played by both David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg, the latter using an old-fashioned 78 rpm model with a horn. Record choice is uncertain, but Édith Piaf and popular music from the 1920s and 30s are both possibilities (Fetterman, Reference Fetterman2010, p.101). Two important trends emerge from the event: the record player as an instrument of (ghostly) disruption – building on Cage’s work in the 1940s – and its part in a wider mobile hierarchy of sensory experiences. The addition of records into an already complex event further adds to the sense of disruptive decentring, and Cage’s inclusion of fresh coffee means that the auditory, olfactory, visual, somatic and gustatory senses are all engaged. Cage summed up this sense of interpenetration in Composition in Retrospect, written nearly three decades later and composed in the form of a mesostic:

3.4 Innovation in the 1960s: Cage and the Cartridge

Cage had long been interested in using parts of the turntable, invariably in ways that involved theatre as much as music. Theatricality would become an increasingly important component of Cage’s practice from the 1950s onwards, coming to full fruition in the 1960s, a decade in which Cage composed a slew of pieces that are as invested in process and theatre as they are conventional music. These included works involving tape, records, radio, television and electronics, as well as more conventional instrumental means of sound production, with the resulting experience being akin to the sensory overload of the traditional three-ring circus, a comparison made by Peter Yates. In his review of Cartridge Music (1960) in ‘John Cage’s Weekend in Los Angeles’ (1962), Yates recalled:

This comment was triggered after Yates witnessed Cage and Tudor manipulating the prepared cartridgesFootnote ⁴⁰ through striking and rubbing, also producing unearthly shrieks and whines, as pieces of furniture were dragged across the floor, all amplified by the cartridges and contact mics, and relayed over a speaker system. The collage of variable sounds and actions, many repurposed from everyday life, recall artistic bricolage, a theme that is also of interest to Derrida as part of wider questions of decentring. Although bricolage is perhaps a term most usually associated with the visual arts, where it refers to the assemblage of items taken out of their normative contexts and repurposed for artistic ends, it may also be applied in other contexts. Bricolage encourages the general rather than the specific: within a given culture or heritage, objects, practices, sounds and so on can be combined and freely adapted to other uses, to new uses, even if they thereby contradict their original function or operation. So, bricolage works within and against a heritage: it undermines the system from within, like hauntology, it makes time out of joint by decentring discourse. In Cartridge Music Cage continues his odyssey of decentring music – and the turntable, literally – by embracing a plurality of sound and action. It’s no coincidence that Cage would also write his Theatre Piece (1960), the Variations series (1958–78), Musicircus (1967) and the apogee of Cage’s ‘circus’ and multimedia performance pieces, HPSCHD, during this decade.

By the time Cage composed Cartridge Music, turntable technology had improved enormously from his earlier experiments in the Imaginary Landscapes series. In a 1960 letter to David Tudor, Cage writes: ‘About the Cartridge Music (unwritten so far). I will bring cartridges with me, but the number we will use will depend on the loudspeakers and amplifiers available. These must be of good or excellent quality. … I will bring 1 or 2 dozen cartridges’ (Iddon, 2013, p.119). To the twenty-first-century musician, unless they are particularly invested in vinyl, reading a request for a ‘cartridge’ in one of Cage’s score can be somewhat perplexing. The cartridge is actually one of the six fundamental parts of a record player: the cartridge/styli, tonearm and counterweight, platter, record spindle, plinth and motor. Sitting at the end of the tonearm, above the stylus or needle, the cartridge is a crucial component in an analogue sound’s journey from record groove to speaker. The cartridge body holds the suspension and the stylus-housing cantilever, the coils (or magnets) that amplify the signal from the stylus and four output pins. Amplitude is dependent on whether the cartridge type is a moving magnet or a moving coil. Thus, when Cage asks for a ‘cartridge’ he is – to put it very simply – asking for a mini-amplifier or contact microphone, depending on the piece in question. Thus, the wire attached to the tonearm in Imaginary Landscape No. 1 uses the cartridge principally for amplification, producing the unearthly sounds that so attracted Cage in the radio studio. Although Cage does precisely identify what a cartridge is in the score of Cartridge Music – writing, ‘A cartridge is an ordinary phonograph pick-up in which customarily a playing needle is inserted’, and ‘Instead of a playing needle, any object that will fit into a cartridge may be inserted (e.g., a coil of wire, a toothpick, a pipe-cleaner, a twig, etc.)’ (Cage, Reference Cage1960a, instruction sheet) – by the 1970s, the performer was expected to know this, and no further explanation is given in the later scores.Footnote ⁴¹

Hauntologically, the cartridge is a loaded device, functioning on two separate levels. It is emblematic of the turntable as a machine, and the ghosts of its scientific and cultural history; it embodies the many different genres that have been played on it, from office dictation to orchestral classics, contemporary jazz to rock ’n’ roll, environmental recordings to sound art and the avant-garde. As a fragment of the machine itself, it also resonates with contemporary usage, the ‘crate digging’ of twenty-first-century hauntology, whose delight in repurposing the revenant – the lost, discarded and forgotten discs of yesteryear – aligns with the cartridge’s status as a component, no longer as a fixed part of the turntable but liberated and repurposed by Cage and Tudor as part of the act of performance and also as fundamental to creating the performance score. The score of Cartridge Music is like a kit, consisting of a sheet of instructions, pages with irregular shapes drawn on them and a number of transparencies.Footnote ⁴² The number of cartridges determines which pages of irregular shapes to use, with further details, such as cartridge changes, determined by the transparencies. Thus, everything depends upon that initial choice of cartridge, with resulting sounds being generalised rather than specific. The year 1960 also saw the composition of Theatre Piece, one of Cage’s most complex uses of indeterminate notation. Generated from the score of Fontana Mix (1958), Theatre Piece can be realised by one to eight performers for a duration of thirty minutes. The means to initiate sound actions are left to each player’s discretion, indicated by a choice of twenty words (nouns or verbs), to be interpreted as actions. David Tudor played phonograph records in the premiere – at New York’s Circle in the Square theatre (March 1960) – along with making tea, running around and crawling underneath the piano and playing with assorted items of party ephemera (Fetterman, Reference Fetterman2010, p.112). Cage reused the musicircus approach quite regularly during the 1960s, not least in 33⅓, and also in the works for the US bicentennial in 1976 – Renga and Apartment House 1776.

3.5 Cage’s 33⅓ (1969)

The genesis of 33⅓ began in the autumn semester of 1969 at the University of California, Davis, where Cage was engaged to teach a course for the music department. Student enrolment was impressive at 120, and Cage decided that such a large group would be better served by operating in smaller groups, each using the I Ching to both demystify the inner workings of the university library and create a diverse array of I Ching-derived outputs (recipes, compositions, films, poems and letters) from this exercise. Cage also decided that he would be more effective if he took on the role of student, rather than teacher, joining different groups as the semester progressed. By a process of I Ching-determined reduction, from an area of the library to a single title, Cage hoped that ‘one is less likely to be processed by the library’s efficiency in categorizing itself; it, on the other hand, is being processed by your efficiency in evading its categorical self-analysis’ (Dinwiddie, Reference Dinwiddie, Austin and Kahn2011, p.236). This idea resonates strongly with deconstructive approaches to the institution and its archives espoused by Derrida and John D. Caputo. Contained within a broader discussion of Derrida and the academy, Caputo (Reference Caputo1987, p.235) comments:

Not only did Cage’s course aim to bring the library – usually an institution’s largest structure – down to the individual human level, but also his methods were subversive in their radical use of chance procedures to disrupt a very non-chance organised body, replete with myriad text ‘ghosts’. In practice, the choice of materials led to some extreme results – as well as some extremely prosaic ones – with Dinwiddie noting the concern of one student who had created a chance-derived recipe that demanded prodigious quantities of chilli powder (Dinwiddie, Reference Dinwiddie, Austin and Kahn2011, p.236). Cage’s procedures, even though somewhat erratically organised in practice, embodied very effective strategies of decentring within a highly structured milieu – namely, the university.

Utilising 300 LPs and twelve phonographs and to be performed by the audience (Figure 1), the world premiere of 33⅓, given at the University of California, Davis’s music department on 21 November 1969, must have been quite an occasion. The premiere took place during an all-day music event – running from 5:40 a.m. to 12:40 a.m. – devised by Cage called MewantemooseicdayFootnote ⁴³ that included film screenings, readings, lectures and music performances, including selections of Satie’s Musique d’ameublement (Furniture music) and 840 repetitions of his Vexations, each preceded by a fixed period of meditation and played by a rotating team of pianists. All the events were free to attend, and the audience was encouraged to come and go at will, making the event experience more like visiting an exhibition than a standard Western concert. During Cage’s lecture readings, other sounds – equipment testing, sound checks and so on – were deliberately allowed to penetrate into Cage’s recitation, echoing his already firmly established use of ambient sound. The performance area allotted to 33⅓ was reached through a continuous orchestral concert of Musique d’ameublement taking place simultaneously in the lobby, eventually reaching a hall containing LPs and players ranged around the room, but no seating, as Cage had hoped for free audience-player circulation. The overall effect was ‘most of the time, a complex collage of music; however, at one point … an older gentleman proceeded to turn everything off, only to have them turned on again almost immediately by other, more gregarious audience/participants’ (Dinwiddie, Reference Dinwiddie, Austin and Kahn2011, p.237). The LPs available were chosen by chance, the selection process having been given to the manager of a local record store in Sacramento by Cage, probably resulting in a grand shelf-clearing exercise of difficult-to-sell items. After the performance, most of the LPs disappeared – taken as mementoes by the audience. Throughout the day, several events included the consumption of food as part of the activities, thereby making the audience experience multi-sensory, reminiscent of the coffee-drinking concept originally enacted at Cage’s 1952 ‘Untitled Event’ at Black Mountain College. Although composed for records, 33⅓ has remarkable similarities to the practice of the ‘mix tape’ in the 1970s. In effect, every participant gets to be their own DJ, in an emancipatory exercise in live curation.

Figure 1 Cage’s 33⅓, Oxford, 2024 performance.

From the beginning, 33⅓ is a collective ‘circus’ experience, where collaboration between participants and ‘composer’ and tension between the ‘live’ and the recorded coalesce in one great musical-cultural sonic collage. By giving the initial choice of records to the store owner in Sacramento, and then by further expanding this process during the performance, the premiere of 33⅓ echoes Cage’s course and its decentring of the university library. Chance plays a very important role in performance, with the audience having complete agency over the choice of recordings (from within the set of variables provided), the choice of which machine to place a record on and what speed to play it at, the volume, whether to change a record, where to sit or stand and when and where to move. The experience is truly immersive and mobile: not only do individual record choices affect the evolving musical collage, but also those bodies moving in space have a very real effect on the sound spatialisation by opening – or blocking – sonic pathways, depending on their movements. Hence, the ‘tele’ of ‘tele-technology’ is represented not only in the obvious form of the record but also for each member of that mobile audience. Sound will travel (bleed) from outside, from within the hall – including the natural conversation that ensues in the performance of such a piece – and between the twelve turntables.Footnote ⁴⁴ The ‘tele’ and the ‘medium of the media’ are central concerns, questioning notions of authorship, materiality and what it is to ‘perform’ within complex and mobile hierarchies.

Although Cage seldom referred to 33⅓, the few reports that do exist provide extremely useful documentary information for contemporary players. As the information written or spoken by Cage on this piece is rather limited, I shall include three of these sources, beginning with the score. The score, which is only an a posteriori description of events, lists the composition’s forces and duration, followed by a short description of the premiere:

Cage refers to 33⅓ again in a letter from 1977 to the US musicologist Wiley H. Hitchcock:

Thirteen years later, during an interview with William Fetterman in 1990, Cage recalled:

Cage’s comments provide ample information for performance, and readily available technology makes staging 33⅓ fairly straightforward today. No longer are additional speakers, wiring and cumbersome systems required; instead, portable record players with built-in speakers – echoing the vintage Dansette brand and similar machines from the 1950s and later – make for a considerably more compact set-up. Hauntologically, although vinyl is now much more popular than it was thirty years ago, obtaining 300 LPs is still a relatively demanding requirement, necessitating recourse to charity shops, garage sales, and rifling through boxes of inherited LPs. Thus, each culturally and historically situated realisation of 33⅓ is replete with ghostly revenants, perhaps damaged, mouldy, or missing their covers and sleeves – from the detritus of earlier eras to carefully preserved collector’s items, all have come ‘back’ into use. Many of them bear signs of water damage, small scratches and scuffs, and all are engraved onto a circular, repeating format.Footnote ⁴⁶ By placing twelve record players in a roughly circular design, Cage is imitating the clock face,Footnote ⁴⁷ again suggesting circular time, repetition, ghosts that return, and perhaps, also something a little more sinister. A certain sense of political indoctrination, of justice denied, or even the sonic bombardment of noise torture can be read in such a floor plan, and sonically this three-ring circus is no longer quite so innocent.

As Grubbs (Reference Grubbs2014, p.76) notes, it’s a perfect example of Cage as ‘a pioneer in the counterintuitive use of recording technology within live performance’ (my emphasis). Not only was this performance replete with a great many recorded ‘ghosts’, but during the performance, the ‘ghostliness’ of the medium itself would have become more apparent – in an audible demonstration of the passing of time – as needles bouncing on missed grooves and LPs carelessly placed on unfamiliar phonographs acquired a patination of new scratches affecting the sonic experience. Unlike Imaginary Landscape No. 5, where found objects are carefully curated and recorded in the studio, in 33⅓ sonic decay is built into the performance itself, balancing nicely with Satie’s direction that ‘furniture music should do two things: (1) occupy space and (2) age’ (Dinwiddie, Reference Dinwiddie, Austin and Kahn2011, p.235, my emphasis). Thinking back to Derrida’s techno-tele-iconicity and techno-tele-discursivity, 33⅓ fulfils both these basic hauntological tenets. The ‘tele’ permeates the entire work, with its recorded media embodying ‘tele’ in space and time, and its mobile audience experiencing a constantly shifting, and consequently ‘tele’, aural field; but what of discursivity and iconicity? Despite the record’s inability to answer back, the documentation of spoken words and music still allows the audience to immerse themselves in a conversation, albeit one-sided, rather in the manner of an answerphone or dictation machine. The voices of the ‘dead’ are still speaking, and even if spectral, they participate in the discourse, only the audience is now composed of eavesdroppers, occupied in activities closer to surveillance than conversation. ‘Iconicity’ resonates strongly with broader Marxist themes: the monetary value of goods, the commodification of music and playback systems and the surplus labour paradigm of mass production balanced against the need of ‘crate diggers’ and ‘completists’ to possess increasingly obscure versions of recordings and equipment, inflating costs as demand outstrips an ever-dwindling supply, occupying an orbit of ‘that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida2006, p.63). Hence, media as state apparatus of control, as communication without contact, media as both conduit and guardian of information, media to educate and/or indoctrinate and media as palpable manifestation of the public sphere. As such, Cage’s semi-happening is the embodiment of late capitalist society; a ‘happening’ that is spontaneous up to a certain point only, utilising, in the case of the premiere, newly purchased machines and materials, reselling the past as a nod to the future, where ‘music’ is imprisoned in a vinyl cage, while it is the surrounding environment and audience that supplies the variables of live ‘performance’. In 33⅓, time is indeed ‘out of joint’, the ‘no longer’ of the recordings juxtaposed with the ‘not yet’ of the yearned for utopian society of the future, where authorship is uncertain and traditional hierarchies are fractured and decentred. To record, to archive, is the promise of the future, to the future. The promise of the archive, as Derrida (Reference Derrida1996, p.18) commented in Archive Fever, ‘as wager [gageure]. The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future’. The record, as one of music’s ultimate archives, resonates perfectly with Derrida’s observation. Cage used recorded materials placed in the context of a live environment, and Nono incorporated acoustic material from a live environment, placed in tension with a live performer (singer), so although there are some apparent oppositions in working practices (live sound/dead sound, performer/audience) it is interesting to note that, fundamentally, both are seeking knowledge of a situation through sound, via practices of active listening.

3.6 Later Works

Cage never gave up on the record, with some of his most interesting, innovative and provocative multimedia works appearing during the 1970s to ’90s. In his last works incorporating records, the Europeras, Cage was very much anticipating the ‘historic recording’ revival – in academic and performance research – of the late ’90s, as well as the ‘recycle, reuse’ mantra of the twenty-first-century climate emergency. Expanding ideas already trialled in 33⅓ by adding tape to the hauntological mix, Address (1977) saw Cage combine two separate compositions: a performance of 33⅓, with the audience playing discs on twelve turntables as in the earlier work, and one of Cassette, with five ‘performers’ playing an electric bell as though panellists on a TV show and cassette tapes of Cage’s lectures. For good measure, the world premiere also featured simultaneous performances of Satie’s music in the ultimate Cagean live ‘mix tape’. The year 1977 was auspicious for the record, which received global attention when a ‘golden record’ of cultural and scientific earth data – including a substantial quantity of music – was launched into space as part of NASA’s Voyager probe. Emblematic of time that is ‘out of joint’, the medium of the media, the ‘tele’ in all its forms, the temporal implications of space travel, and the lost future of the – now somewhat tarnished – golden age of space exploration, not to mention the ultimate ‘mix’, it would be difficult to find a more exemplary hauntological object.

Further multimedia compositions by Cage followed Address, including Fifteen Domestic Minutes (1982) and the Europeras. A perfect example of hauntology in action, Fifteen Domestic Minutes, for speakersFootnote ⁴⁸ and records, increases the decentring of Cage’s classic radio plays but raises the stakes by playing the selected records on several different radio stations simultaneously. Rocks (1986) plays with sound spatialisation, delivered by a variable ensemble across combinations of three to five players and sound sources chosen from a selection of radios, televisions, records, microphones and ad-lib cassettes. Here, the sound sources are fixed, but by placing them around the performance space and varying the performers working at any one time, the sound moves around the room as though spatialised through a speaker array. Overlaps between groups are discouraged, presumably so that each sonic collective feels doubly centred: historically as a medium and temporospatially, coming from anywhere and anywhen. Explicitly juxtaposing contemporary and vintage technologies in ways that highlight the overturning of traditional narrative concepts of time and space, the last two of the Europeras series explicitly demonstrate Cage’s canny use of technology to problematise form, genre, heritage and legacy. Cage had already established a live ‘mix’ approach to opera in Europeras 1 & 2 (1987), using chance procedures to determine the unfolding and interpenetration of selected operatic overtures, arias and plots in an overt disruption of one of Western music’s most revered and still popular art forms. Cage makes this disruption evident through different means in each of the Europeras, using live orchestra, costumes, sets and props in 1 & 2; a completely stripped stage, disc recordings and no costumes in 3 & 4 (1990) and a multimedia approach in 5 (1991). Cage explained: ‘instead of having an orchestra in 3 & 4, or costumes, or sets, we have just record players which give the sound of the orchestra, but you get many orchestras at once, so that the obstruction increases’ (Retallack, Reference Retallack1996, p.226). In other words, by playing many recordings simultaneously, exactly as in 33⅓, any sense of musical, historical or story narrative is obliterated. All sound, whether historical or contemporary, becomes a wildly curated ‘now’, caught in a vortex of time that is completely out of joint. In the last Europera this disruption is both more historically clear cut through its use of technology and more nuanced, with facets of present and past placed in juxtaposition:

Not only are the two opposing centuries foregrounded, but so are the media from within the twentieth century. The Victrola indicates a technological past, while TV and radio represent the present. And yet, radio has existed in the popular consciousness for almost as long as the phonograph, while TV is already an outdated medium, its traditional content being accessed as often via phones and computers in the twenty-first century, and streamed instead of live or scheduled. Appropriately enough in one of his last works, Cage returns to the concept of silence: ‘a new idea creeps in in 5 which is the opposition of the centuries; and the radio and the television represent the twentieth, obviously, and the television does it silently. Never opens its mouth. Yet it has, so to speak, the last word in the whole piece. So that you’re faced with the silence of the twentieth century’ (Retallack, Reference Retallack1996, p.226). There are a number of possibilities when it comes to Cage’s use of the word ‘silence’ here. Is he referring to the unrecorded media blanks – records and tapes – whose sonic identities form such a significant part of contemporary hauntology? Seeming visually to revert to the era of silent film, Cage has also dragged the television into the orbit of the Victrola, while simultaneously marking the sensory overload that is the twentieth century, where everything becomes curated data in an eternal hauntological present symbolised by the hum of electrical energy, and where so many voices speak concurrently that the sonic landscape becomes an endless wash of white noise.

4.1 Nono and Tape: The Early 1960s

As can be seen in Table 3, unlike Cage, who worked with a multiplicity of analogue sonic hauntological technologies – records, radio, audio and video tape and television – Nono confined himself to tape alone, with both composers appreciating tape’s flexibility as a format. Even in the early 1950s, when Cage was working on Williams Mix (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958),Footnote ⁵⁰ despite the intricate and slow pace of composition, the medium was still better suited to being used as a pre-planned creative tool than the record or radio, where by necessity, chance played a much greater role. For Nono, tape’s portability made it the ideal medium for making field recordings in places of work, and its flexibility was perfect for executing complex editing and mastering processes, allowing for much greater control of the final ‘mix’, while its superior sound quality and capacity were also welcomed. Recording multiple layers of sound was now possible through bouncing tracks between machines, allowing composers (and sound engineers) to overdub one sound onto another without losing individual clarity. Obviously, these techniques made multitrack recording much simpler, more controllable and of considerably better sound quality than the cumbersome arrangements that Hindemith and Toch had worked with in their early experiments with overdubbing onto phonograph discs, although it should be noted that by the late 1940s the US performer/producer Les Paul had made many improvements using a disc-to-disc recording technique.

Nono’s first foray into tape music, his Omaggio a Emilio Vedova (1960), was produced on the RAI Studio di Fonologia’s four-track machine, whose half-inch tape offered good sound quality. Additionally, overdubbing was possible on three-, four- and eight-track models, thereby substantially increasing creative control for the composer. At Nono’s disposal was a comprehensive selection of contemporary studio technologies, including nine oscillators and a variety of tape machines. Intending to extend the experiments in sound spatialisation already made by his mentor Hermann Scherchen, the four-track machine was of particular relevance to Nono as he worked on Omaggio a Emilio Vedova. On first listening, it’s evident that the studio is new territory for Nono. With its deep, booming, metallic reverberations, dense, rhythmic layers and prepared piano-like percussive sonorities, Omaggio could almost be a piece of musique concrète from the previous decade or even earlier; however, the work is entirely composed from sine waves, manipulated by different types of modulation and filtering. Dedicated to his friend, the painter and former freedom fighter Emilio Vedova – who would later work with Nono on Intolleranza 1960 – Omaggio allowed Nono to approach composition from a different perspective, experimenting and ‘painting’ with sound in the fluid way that is now familiar to anyone who composes on a DAW. Despite its technical limitations – by 1960 Stockhausen had already composed a plethora of considerably more complex electronic works – there are clear indications of Nono’s future trajectory in the studio, which will feature booming, metallic sounds, a heavy use of reverb and a ‘radio tuning’ effect consisting of rapid shifts between material.Footnote ⁵¹ For Nono, this approach to composition eliminated one of Western music’s fundamental dialectics, the dialectic between sound and notation. Interpretation was no longer necessary, the ‘final’ cut was on the tape; and yet, different playback machines, spatialisation and acoustic spaces do all effect how that ‘final’ cut sounds in performance, not to mention the decay of the medium itself over time. Nevertheless, as Impett (Reference Impett2019, p.197) comments, this new way of working ‘presented Nono with an alternative map of his own thought, a new model for his own practice, that would persist’.

The improvisatory approach that studio composition encouraged resonated with earlier open-ended rehearsal and production techniques, from the theatre practice of Piscator to that of Nono’s contemporary theatre-maker Joan Littlewood, while its reliance on editing techniques echoed the collision montage techniques of the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. Two decades later, Nono was still experimenting in the studio, saying of his time at the SWR Experimental Studio: ‘I begin with virtually no idea’ (Prati, Masotti & Nono, Reference Prati, Masotti and Nono2018, p.311). Time spent in the studio also formed a decisive step in Nono’s self-imposed gradual removal from the conventional, bourgeois concert scene, a scene that, unsurprisingly for a communist, he was increasingly ill at ease with. Electronics would allow Nono to incorporate acoustic materials taken directly from the environment of the factory floor, in a creative programme dedicated to composing a music of and for working people and raising awareness of social and economic conditions in a similar way to that of Piscator during the 1920s. Even though Omaggio does not employ recording in the field, or use others’ pre-existing recordings in the way that Cage did, it still functions hauntologically through its embrace of temporal and spatial rupture, deeply embedded in its working processes, its dedicatee, its use of technology, sound world and practical political ramifications. As Carla Henius (Reference Henius and Kolleritsch1991, p.76) recalled, ‘his most convincing trait was his incredible seriousness about life, that is, his power to force utopias, the previously impossible, into reality’ (my translation). Nono’s next works would channel the creative affordances offered by tape into composing from and for real-life situations and audiences, while also addressing the justice that is yet to come, sought by all hauntology’s ghosts.

While Nono was composing Omaggio, he was also working on Intolleranza 1960, a technologically rich work for the stage that takes capitalist bourgeois indifference to human suffering as its theme – especially that of the ‘outsider’, whether financial, geographical or political – and opposition to this ‘intolerance’ via the character of an impoverished immigrant’s desire to return home, the challenging situations he encounters during his endeavours and the emerging consciousness that results from these experiences. The work was designated an azione scenica, rather than an opera, by Nono, implying that dramatic situations were substituted for linear narrative, rather in the style of the expressionist Stationendrama in its approach to narrative content and the juxtaposition of themes and situations to deliver a dramatic totality. Nono had already studied the works and practice of German and Russian left-wing creatives and dramaturgs, including Piscator, Toller, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky, and acknowledged the debt to Schoenberg’s multimedia opera Die Glückliche Hand (1910–13) in his programme note for Intolleranza’s premiere (Impett, Reference Impett2019, p.219). We have already seen how closely Piscator’s dramatic practice resonates with hauntological concerns, and these same strategies would reappear in Nono’s Intolleranza. Inspiration also came from the contemporary Czech theatre company Laterna Magika, who shared political ideals with Nono, and whose innovative use of multimedia – initially focused on the interaction between film and live performance – can be observed throughout Intolleranza. For the premiere, Nono collaborated with Emilio Vedova to produce a series of stark images that could be projected during the performance, much in the manner of Piscator’s use of the projector in productions of The Merchant of Berlin and Economic Competition during the 1920s; Nono’s mixing of live and recorded voices – made at the RAI – throughout the performance is also reminiscent of earlier dramatic models. Despite its broadly Marxist themes, Nono’s use of technology, aesthetic-driven musical syntax and fragmentary structure resisted the contemporary formalist and socialist-realist conceptions of drama and music in the Soviet Union, and nearly every aspect of the production is involved in processes of decentring.

Hauntologically, Intolleranza foregrounds three areas: Nono’s use of technology; textual and dramatic fragmentation and self-quotation. By utilising pre-recordings of the chorus and Vedova’s projections, Nono was able to weave a complex fabric of decentred sound and image, enabling a double layer of commentary between the live and recorded action that explicitly overturns the sense of linear time, while increasing dramatic tension on the stage between the live and the ‘once’ live. Space too is decentred, emphasising the ‘tele’ not only through the use of recorded materials and live onstage voices, but also through speaker spatialisation within the auditorium, increasing the sense of fragmentation and disorientation present in text and situation. This technique is particularly noticeable in act 1, scene three, ‘the demonstration’, where, via four groups of speakers, Nono distributed the pre-recorded chorus across the stage, at the sides of the hall and behind the audience, thus fragmenting and decentring the orientation of sound and its sources. The ‘medium of the media’ is doubly foregrounded technologically, first through Nono’s use of tape and Vedova’s projections, and second through the projection of contemporary, and thus changing, media headlines – the more absurd the better – in the ballet section that opens the second act, along with a tape of quotidian absurdities. The disconnect between the action onstage and the deliberately inconsequential – although (presumably) factually accurate – journalistic content echo’s Piscator’s earlier theatrical practice, subtly reinforcing contemporary means of news and information dissemination and control in the West, while emphasising bourgeois indifference to the suffering of the working classes and dispossessed. Did Nono intend to imply that his audience was complicit in the protagonist’s suffering, and that by consuming media banalities and observing situations of intolerance unfold on the safety of the stage that they are in fact as indifferent to ‘intolerance’ as the policemen in scene 4?Footnote ⁵² Nono remained critical of the media’s role in shaping public consciousness and promotion of the arts, commenting in 1983:

Fragmentation extends to Nono’s choice of texts, comprising poetry and part of the original libretto by Angelo Ripellino,Footnote ⁵³ with further content from Brecht, Éluard, Mayakovsky and Julius Fučík and reflections on human rights abuses in the Franco-Algerian conflict by Henri Alleg. The result is a panoply of agonised voices – policemen, political prisoners, demonstrators, miners, the protagonist, his lover and companion, refugees and victims of political torture – signifying the double identity of the group and the individual, all of whom are emblematic of hauntology’s spectres, eternally waiting for the lost future of justice that is yet to come, relayed across fractured time, while haunting past, present and future. The same time constraints that forced him to radically adapt his libretto also had ramifications on his working process, with Nono eventually making quite extensive use of self-quotation, repurposing material from Due espressioni (1953), Incontri (1955) and Il canto sospeso (1955–56). Nono is literally mining his own past and integrating revenants, in the shape of fragmented ghosts of former pieces, into the present, in an echo of the double identity (group/individual) played out by the characters. Illustrative of dialectics on many levels – live voices/recorded voices, live sounds/dead technology, political documentation/poetry, live singers/ghost singers, focused sound/spatialised sound – the looser style of compositional practice evident in Intolleranza, built on the more open-ended compositional process already nascent in Omaggio, and strategies of improvisation and experimentation similar to Piscator’s working methods would become increasingly important in Nono’s future projects.Footnote ⁵⁴

4.2 La fabbrica illuminata: The Factory of Death

Following the premiere of Intolleranza, Nono continued to build on the technologically enabled and socially relevant practice already trialled in that work, and a chance encounter with the poet Giuliano Scabia at the premiere would lead both to the genesis of La fabbrica illuminata and to the intervening project from which it grew, the unrealised Un diario italiano. Working on the premise that to be socially relevant, the arts must intervene rather than merely comment on social and political injustice, Nono and Scabia set about developing a model of flexible artistic plurality, encompassing elements of music, theatre and the visual arts in a mobile hierarchy, further supported by a rational, socially aware use of technology that enabled workers voices to be heard in their own terms, rather than being processed through the aegis of the ‘academy’. Factory workers, union officials and others involved in the class struggle would work alongside the composer and ensemble, with their words and concrete environmental sounds used documentary style in the final artistic creation. Like Joan Littlewood, who stressed the importance of ‘the absorption of the playwright into the collective’ (Leach, Reference Leach2006, p.163), Nono too envisioned a mode of working that was collective and ensemble-driven, distributing creative control more evenly throughout the group and using technology symbolically as well as materially. Un diario italiano combined historical and contemporary text materials ranging from poetry, documentary film and reportage to political documents and first-hand accounts of industrial action, factory conditions and instances of exploitation in Turin, Palermo and Venice. Although Un diario’s potential remained unfulfilled, Nono’s conceptualisation of a multimedia stage work in six scenes with soloists, interspersed with four pre-recorded and spatialised choruses consisting of fragments of political and social textual content, clearly anticipates the hauntological, social and political basis of La fabbrica illuminata.

Dedicated to the workers at the Italsider steel plant in Genoa-Cornigliano, La fabbrica illuminata, for female voice and four-track magnetic tape, perfectly exemplifies not only Derrida’s conception of hauntology but also later developments in the field by Fisher and others. In a similar manner to Un diario, elements of which are repurposed in La fabbrica, the text was composed by Giuliano Scabia, and drawn from several sources, including fragments of speech – slang, shouted orders and conversations – from the Italsider plant, excerpts from union publications, employment contracts and a quatrain from Cesare Pavese’s Due poesie a T. Nono’s use of documentary media materials aligns the work with hauntological concerns, and even though La fabbrica is based on one specific factory, the object of the factory – the industrial production of steel – takes place in such an overwhelmingly hostile, alien and incomprehensible environment, especially to those outside the industry, that the ‘tele’ applies as much to the listening experience of most audiences as to factory automation processes and Nono’s use of recording technology. The title’s ‘illumination’ refers principally to the practice of shiftwork, referenced in section 3: Giro del letto, demanded by the Italsider plant’s constant operation, where its employees worked in artificial ‘daylight’ at all times, but this ‘illumination’ could equally reference the glare of molten steel reported by the workers to Scabia, and incorporated into the tape part – ‘workers’ exposure to accidental falls, to blinding light, to high-voltage current’ (Cossettini, Reference Cossettini2010, p.xxxvi) – or the watchfulness of management, as exemplified by the ‘time and motion study’.

Nono, Scabia and Marino Zuccheri – the sound technician from RAI – visited the factory for three days of discussion with the workers and recording the factory’s acoustic environment. Nono recorded the workers and the plant’s overall sonic landscape, gathering a considerable quantity of auditory documentation, including workers’ voices, the blast furnaces, steel pouring and other manufacturing processes. This process of sonic documentation allows the recording equipment to act as a conduit through which the auditory confrontation between workers and machinery, men and metal, workers and management flows, while also symbolising the overarching dynamic of money and power that drives the capitalist economic model of which the factory is a constituent part. Far from delivering the jet packs, labour-saving devices and endless leisure that the ‘lost future’ of the Italsider plant – and others like it – appeared to promise during the heady optimism of the 1960s, the reality was an environment where surplus labour exploitation and a shocking lack of industrial safety proliferated. Increased automation did not improve working conditions, it only led to higher unemployment and lower wages for those still in work. Nono’s pluralistic use of audio documentation allowed the workers not only to experience their everyday environment from a new perspective, but also to reflect, sonically, on the ‘justice yet to come’ of their employment situation, in effect, a sonic ‘archive’ acting as a pledge to the future. The workers later commented: ‘Listening to this music composed with our sounds-noises and with our words, we become aware of our alienated state in the factory. We work like mechanized robots, almost no longer realizing the violence of the human sound situation. Now we are rediscovering it and recovering awareness of it even through music’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018c, p.281). The concept of workers as ‘mechanized robots’ raises further questions concerning hauntology, through the agency/non-agency of the revenant. Not only does ‘mechanized’ imply repetitive actions, but, as Derrida writes concerning the complexities of speaking with ghosts in Archive Fever, ‘A phantom speaks … this means that without responding it disposes of a response, a bit like the answering machine whose voice outlives its moment of recording: you call, the other person is dead, now, whether you know it or not, and the voice responds to you …’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1996, p.62) – mechanisation also encompasses a dialogue between the living and the dead that overturns the spatial and temporal. As listeners, we ‘activate’ La fabbrica, but the work also elicits a response from us. Through Nono’s agency, the workers have been transformed into sonic ghosts. Fixed for eternity, as revenants that still respond every time La fabbrica is heard even though they do not ‘speak’ as such.

From the beginning of the project, Nono was insistent that La fabbrica should take into account the ‘psycho-physical reactions of the workers rather than merely “photograph” them while they worked in the factory … it is not a work to be analyzed superficially’ (Garavaglia & Nono, Reference Garavaglia and Nono2018, p.256), with the separate elements of the piece fabricated into a fully integrated understanding of the factory workers lived experience ‘not … a mere collage of sounds and noises’ (Garavaglia & Nono, Reference Garavaglia and Nono2018, p.257). As an example of hauntology in action from both political and sonic perspectives, Nono’s rather focused – or limited, depending on the point of view – sonic palette and studio processes work to advantage in the attempt to humanise and archive the factory experience. Nono’s fluid, agile, even intuitive approach in the studio allows for a ‘real-time’ sense of the urgency of the steel plant, its inherent dangers and the inexorable nature of work in such an environment.

La fabbrica illuminata consists of four episodes of material, distributed over three parts and a finale. Its final form and content were realised after processes of improvisation and collaboration between Nono and the creative collective, consisting of Zuccheri, the Italsider workers, Scabia, the RAI choir and the soloist Carla Henius. The four episodes are:

Nono (Reference Nono2018b, p.354) described Henius as ‘using her voice’s wide range of articulations’ in passages of unpredictable improvisation. Split across four tracks, Henius’s improvisation was tracked onto other examples of her voice, coupled with electronic materials, ‘unifying the recorded and the live parts – mingling with fragments of workers’ recorded voices – with fragments of the RAI-Milan chorus’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018b) in a complex process of sonic re-elaboration, rather than simplistic audio documentation. Henius recalled that:

Always, the tensions between the live and recorded – the soloist and choirs and workers, the mechanised and living – are present in Nono’s Piscator-like sonic theatre, and like the protagonist from Intolleranza, the soloist’s isolated voice can be thought of as symbolic of both the individual and the group. As the opening line of text emphasises – ‘factory of death they called it’ – the workers words, their recorded voices and their environment are revenants, and like all Derrida’s ‘ghosts’, they await reparation, each voice yielding to another. Despite the revenant’s hoped-for more equal society, the tape part itself is more ambivalent. Does it, in fact, symbolise the ‘fabbrica dei morti la chiamavano / factory of death they called it’ where the workers are trapped on its magnetic surface in endlessly repeating loops of labour that are gradually erased as the iron oxide decays? The future implied by the tape seems much more uncertain even than Pavese’s final quatrain: ‘the morning will pass / the anguish will fade / it will not be this way forever / you will recover something’ (Cossettini, Reference Cossettini2010, p.xxxvi). Exponentially increased, this uncertainty will be revisited twice more in Die Ermittlung (The Investigation) (1965), incidental music for Peter Weiss’s play of the same name, and Ricorda cosa ti hannno fatto in Auschwitz (1966). In both works, Nono uses two direct quotes from La fabbrica illuminata – ‘fabbrica dei morti / factory of death’ and ‘fabbrica come lager / factory like a concentration camp’ – to draw clear parallels between his experience of industrial conditions in the Italian steel industry during the 1950s and 1960s, and the industrialised efficiency of Nazi genocide. Post-performance, the Italsider workers invited Nono to discuss the work with them in greater deal, and Nono was struck by the technical detail of their questions. Nono recalled,

The workers, operating in a highly mechanised and technical industry themselves, were particularly interested by Nono’s analysis of ‘the relationship between the “natural” material recorded in the factory and the artificial, electrically generated material with all possible transformations implemented at various times’ (Garavaglia & Nono, Reference Garavaglia and Nono2018, p.257).

Nono had always intended different set-ups depending on the occasion: the concert version for solo voice and quadraphonic tape; the radio version for monophonic tape, with the solo voice included; and for other public venues, such as lectures and cultural centres, a version for quadraphonic tape, again with the voice incorporated. The use of tape provides not only spatialisation for the chorus but also a concomitant temporalisation of the recorded materials, allowing the live and ‘present’ vocal soloist to dialogue with the ‘tele’ recorded elements. Time is most definitely out of joint in La fabbrica, and the nature of magnetic tape, subject to processes of audible decay, further emphasises this, as does the evolution of the storage and dissemination formats for performance. From the original quadraphonic tapes to a DVD with wav. files that is included with the current Ricordi edition of the score, the traces of the original tapes remain – the ghosts live on. Another instance of time out of joint can be heard in the juxtaposition of what, for 1964, was still a relatively new medium – tape – placed alongside a much older musical model, the four-section cantata. As Nono ruefully admitted in an interview with Bernd Leukert (1974): ‘There’s another thing I understood too late: the form of La fabbrica is the form of a Bach cantata […] it was constructed that way by me and by the workers, but then I realised ever more clearly that it’s based on a Bach cantata’ (Cossettini, Reference Cossettini2010, p.xxi).

Hauntologically, La fabbrica can be considered in four principal and complementary ways:

1. 1. Electronically recorded archives of factory sounds and music performed by the RAI chorus emphasising the ‘medium of the media’ and ‘tele-techno-iconicity’ in a sound world that is able to refer beyond itself, into wider political and cultural arenas.

2. 2. Electronically generated material, incorporating free improvisation by mezzo-soprano Carla Henius, and other synthesised sounds. These are combined and ‘electronically modified often beyond recognition’ (Cossettini, Reference Cossettini2010, p.xxi).

3. 3. Performance history, particularly pertaining to the changing technological formats necessary for performance and dissemination, and the ever-present danger of obsolescence. For example, the DVD format of the current edition is much less easily accessible than it was only ten years ago.

4. 4. Politics. Nono’s process of sonic re-elaboration takes audio documentation and transforms it into an art object specifically for the workers – as ‘co-researchers’ – at the Italsider plant, in a way that is comprehensible and relevant. However, underlying this utopian aim is Derrida’s ‘techno-tele-discursivity’, implying the collection of accepted or hegemonic norms from a particular period, all at the service of the ‘techno-tele’. In other words, despite Nono’s idealistic intentions, the beast of capital is always present.

La fabbrica functions conceptually somewhat in the way of a grid, in that every instance of documentation, and each fragment of recorded and poetic text, is both linked and yet stands alone. Although there is structure, there is the impression of constant movement – temporal and spatial – while the concept of ‘centre’ is rejected, making La fabbrica a testament to both past and future. Derrida (Reference Derrida1986, pp.70, 73) explains:

The portability of the four-track tape system and the multiple performance arrangements Nono had developed allowed for great flexibility of dissemination. It was as easy to perform La fabbrica for a workers’ collective as it was to broadcast it on the radio, and even live performances were relatively uncomplicated to set up; thus the collective financial power of the music industry, as represented by concert venues and management, has been reduced by the agency of hauntology’s ghostly medium – tape.

4.3 Fragments and Revenants: Die Ermittlung and Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz

As the 1960s progressed, the use of fragmentation, pre-recorded and processed materials and the repurposing of extracts from earlier works in hybrid forms that combined live sounds, taped sounds and electronically generated sounds became increasingly common, paving the way for Nono’s practice during the 1970s. Die Ermittlung – the title of Nono’s music composed to accompany the play of the same name by Peter Weiss (1965) – utilised vocal, instrumental and electronic sound sources, and incorporated fragments of several earlier works; it also finally gave Nono the opportunity to work with Erwin Piscator in person. Having first met Piscator in 1954, Nono later recalled: ‘I suddenly found myself in the presence of one of the figures who had most inspired my imagination’ (Restagno, Reference Restagno2018, p.73). Already an admirer of Weiss’s work, Nono was delighted to accept Piscator’s invitation to contribute to his production of Die Ermittlung, the collaboration bringing together two high-profile practitioners of hauntology on the stage for the first time.

Weiss’s Die Ermittlung is a courtroom-set dramatic situation that probes the shameful contract between German big business – including I. G. Farben, whose iron-oxide-coated tape had revolutionised sound recording – and the Holocaust, via materials gathered from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963–65, at which Weiss was an observer. The play is a searing indictment of rampant profiteering from the Nazi regime’s industrial machinery of mass killing, and an unequivocally anti-fascist work, pointing an accusatory finger at the contemporary West German government’s failings to root out fascism within West German society, in particular from the judiciary and the apparatus of government where many former members of the Nazi party were safely employed, thanks to a series of amnesties brought in after the war. It’s hardly surprising that Weiss’s play was embroiled in an East versus West debate from the outset, one in which Nono was happy to participate. The world premiere(s) took place simultaneously in twelve theatres, across West and East German cities, with a further premiere taking place in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The work is subtitled ‘Oratorio in Eleven Cantos’, and its thirty-three-part structure – eleven cantos divided into three scenes each – follows that of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, with each canto alternating anonymous witness statements against the response of a named defendant. Acting as a central focus for Nono and Piscator, the fifth and sixth cantos concentrate on named individuals: Lili Tofler and SS Corporal Stark. As a whole, the play is open-ended, stopping before the trial verdicts are relayed, effectively offering an endless ‘now’ of testimony. Much of the text material is taken verbatim from the trial, relating the journey of the victims from their first arrival at the concentration camp to their ultimate destination, the gas chamber and crematorium, while relaying an increasingly horrifying and violent catalogue of incidents along the way, as though on a journey into hell.

Piscator took a very studied approach to the direction of his production at the Berlin Freie Volksbühne, rejecting any use of film, projection or other documentary material, thus avoiding any possible accusations of utilising ‘manipulated propaganda’ for contemporary East versus West ideological battles (Nielinger-Vakil, Reference Nielinger-Vakil2015, p.127). Thus, the documentary and hauntological content of Die Ermittlung was supplied by Weiss’s use of verbatim documentation from the Auschwitz trial, described by Nono (Reference Nono2018a, pp.230–31) as embodying ‘the conflict and the superimposition between present and past, between memory, testimony, and current reality’, as well as Nono’s reuse of his own earlier recorded compositional materials. Nono’s task was daunting: to compose music that could ‘represent the six million dead – those who could no longer speak out’ (Nielinger-Vakil, Reference Nielinger-Vakil2015, p.128). Eventually consisting of many small fragments, as with La fabbrica illuminata, Nono initially focused on the sounds of the human voice, as chorus or soloist, restricted to women’s and children’s voices – a conception that Piscator also shared – to best represent the human tragedy unfolding on the stage. To this end, Nono recorded some original material at the Studio Fonologia in Milan, as well as utilising recordings of the children’s choir of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano,Footnote ⁵⁶ the soprano Stephania Woytowitcz (from 1959),Footnote ⁵⁷ and excerpts from Cori di Didone and ‘Ha venido’. Canciones para Silvia, but all ‘deprived of the semantic element of a literary text’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018a, p.234). Nono then added instrumental recordings – for brass and woodwind instruments – including parts of Diario polacco ’58 and Il canto sospeso, together with a panoply of electronic and tape content from the studio. As with so much of Nono’s composition, especially tape-based, the sonic palette reverberates with metallic sounds – both blown and struck – in combination with the human voice. To these principal sonorities are added percussive electronic interjections and concrete sonic materials to indicate the rushing of gas, heard in ‘Canto 10, Zyklon B’, and flames, in ‘Canto 11, The Fire-Ovens’, while reverberation, filtration and transposition are evident throughout. Noise is a prominent feature, increasingly so as the drama progresses, echoing hauntology’s foregrounding of media distortion and disintegration. Perhaps one of the most disturbing vocal sonorities in the play is that of laughter, particularly prominent in the sixth canto, ‘SS Corporal Stark’, and the eighth, ‘Phenol’. Every time there is laughter onstage, Nono responds with silence; it is hard to imagine any other response that would be appropriate after, for example, the detailed description of the murder of children in Canto 8.Footnote ⁵⁸

Nono in his conception rejected any hint of a programmatic approach to Weiss’s play, stating that ‘I was not interested in a solution involving incidental music’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018a, p.229). Nono was also aware of the heavy responsibility of his task, observing: ‘Piscator saw the music-theater relationship correctly: that what neither the word nor the stage was able to express and represent, the music had to do. The millions of dead in the concentration camps’ (Nono, 2018, p.232). Of great interest to Nono was the Berlin Volksbühne’s sophisticated speaker array, comprising tape recorders connected to ‘numerous loudspeakers placed all around (right, left, onstage, on the ceiling) and … a loudspeaker also in a space under the floor of the hall right under the audience’. Utilising this equipment, it was possible to make the floor and audience tremble, enabling ‘an acoustic-musical opportunity for emotional involvement greater than anyone could imagine’ (Restagno, Reference Restagno2018, p.74). The physicality of Nono and Piscator’s sound spatialisation, especially at such low levels (sub-woofer style), elicits an empathetic response from the audience that would be difficult to provoke using other means. Sound thrusts the audience full centre, reinforcing the sense of kinship with the survivors that Piscator was intending. As Derrida comments in Specters of Marx (Reference Derrida2006, p.202), ‘to haunt does not mean to be present’; Die Ermittlung underlines the lack of ‘presence’ through the distance of time (the twenty years between the end of the war and the Auschwitz trials), through media (Nono’s use of tape, in part as materialised memory; Weiss’ use of verbatim trial reports) and through the simulacra of events presented in the theatre itself. The victims may now be ‘virtual’, or ghostly, ‘with the spectre understood … as that which acts without (physically) existing’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.18); but although they can only seek justice as ghostly revenants, the survivors can demand reparation in the present, using memory and testimony to haunt the guilty and wider society. As Fisher observes: ‘Hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names and sudden abductions … the fragments of a time permanently out of joint’ (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014, p.130).

Nono’s engagement with the subject matter of Die Ermittlung – the legacy of Auschwitz and the violence of fascist oppression – would continue, its subsequent manifestation being an autonomous work, repurposing the sound materials already used for Die Ermittlung, called Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (Remember what they did to you in Auschwitz). As a philosophy of revenants and ghosts, hauntology is closely aligned with the word ‘remember’, implying the ‘tele’ of the past, collective inheritance, the anticipation of its inevitable reappearance and the desire for justice: ‘The revenant is going to come … everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition …’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida2006, p.2). The title was probably inspired by Alberto Nirenstajn’s 1958 account of the Warsaw ghetto and the Polish resistance, Ricorda cosa ti ha fatto Amalek, a copy of which was in Nono’s possession. Although there is no new material, the structure is quite different from the earlier work, replacing extreme fragmentation with a more through-composed approach, while condensing or eliminating other materials. Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz consists of three unequal sections: (1) Canto del lager (Canto of the camp); (2) Canto della fine di Lilli Tofler (Canto of the death of Lili Tofler) and (3) Canto della possibilità di sopravvivere (Canto of the possibility of survival). Although the links to Weiss’s play are clear, the music here takes on a much more direct mode of expression, wherein, as Nanni (Reference Nanni2006, p.51) notes, ‘the music itself is an outcry both of desperation and at the same time of accusation’. Memory, inheritance, legacy; in Ricorda’s sound world, these hauntological concepts speak to the possibility of survival and even of justice, for, as Hägglund suggests, without memory, there can be no justice. Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.67) notes that, ‘like all inheritors, we are in mourning’, and while most mourn for the victims of oppression, for their suffering, the loss of life and the slow pace of justice, there is a sinister flipside, for there are those who will always mourn for the loss of the Reich and its ideals.

4.4 A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida and Contrappunto dialettico alla mente

The 1960s proved to be a period of frenetic activity for Nono, both politically and compositionally, with works for solo tape, tape and ensemble and tape and the stage being produced in rapid succession, and compositional practice dominated by field recording and hauntological concepts very much to the fore. Moving from the memorial specificity of Die Ermittlung and Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz, evidence of Nono’s increasingly international political engagement can be seen in both A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida and Contrappunto dialettico alla mente, with both works tackling global themes – the war in Vietnam,Footnote ⁶⁰ the fight for independence from colonial control across Africa, and racial discrimination in the United States – while also addressing more generalised concerns of the class struggle, labour relations and the fight against imperialist and right-wing oppression. Made in collaboration with the writer Giovanni Pirelli, A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (The forest is young and full of life) was a continuation of earlier developments made by Nono in his expanding conception of music theatre. As with fabbrica, the composition makes extensive use of documentary materials, and utilises processes where spatial and temporal decentring are consistently foregrounded. Much of the performance content – both live and taped – was arrived at after periods of workshopping and improvisation with the interpreters and in the studio, both of these facets resonating with the work processes of Piscator. It’s also worthy of note that, except for the percussion parts, Nono did not produce a score for A floresta, instead relying on the commitment and integrity of his original performers and the recording made by the same ensemble, placing the final ‘scripted’ tape in hauntological dialogue with the ‘unscripted’ live interpreters.

On multiple levels, the ghostly dominates A floresta and many subsequent works. This ghostliness operates on three main levels: (1) the ‘no longer’, embodied by the voices of the dead, trapped as sonic reverberations by Nono, endlessly repeating; (2) the ‘not yet’, evidenced by the voices of the living and the dead and their search for justice, equality and change – it’s the principal reason why ghosts ‘haunt’ after all – and the texts, where Nono collates a hauntological archaeology, from political speeches and pamphlets that ultimately did not achieve their aims (the ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’), to contemporary protest slogans and song lyrics that reinforce the temporal and spatial decentring of the first text group and (3) collaboration with living poets and dramatists, where new work is generated, but in the service of ghosts.

A large portion of the tape part had originally been conceived as a different work – EscalationFootnote ⁶¹ – written for, and with, the artists of the Living Theatre, an experimental US theatre group, co-led by a former Piscator disciple, Judith Malina. Nono utilised filtering and ring modulation to create a storm of voices, with the rest of the tape consisting of more material from the Living Theatre – the opening of Frankenstein (after Shelley) and improvised ‘jungle’ evocations – combined with Nono’s field recordings of peace demonstrations in the United States during 1965. Nono’s choice of documentary materials is wide-ranging, resulting in something of a global political manifesto. Text sources – all of them documentary – fall into three main categories: (1) African decolonisation – Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba and the Angolan freedom fighter Gabriel, whose words form the title; (2) Caribbean and Central America – Fidel Castro, Pedro Duno and (3) Vietnam – Nguyen Van Troi. Further political content is derived from American and Italian protest movements, while, to underline Nono’s political stance, especially in American eyes, the work was dedicated to the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. The eventual forces for the premiere consisted of soprano (Liliana Poli), three actors (Kadigia Bove, Elena Vicini and Berto Troni), clarinet (William O. Smith), percussion ensemble – playing five dramatically lit bronze plates – and two four-channel tapes.

A floresta engages with hauntological strategies in four principal areas: (1) its use of recorded media (four-track tapes) as emblematic of tele-techno-iconicity and tele-techno-discursivity; (2) its role in decentring the voice, through fragmentation and phonemes, and politically, through the voicing of global anti-Western capitalist ideologies; (3) its engagement with the media as both purveyor of orthodoxy and suppression of non-orthodox narratives, and as a means of disseminating dissenting voices, through documentation of first-person narratives, political manifestos, and group protest and (4) its engagement with revenants in all the above, and particularly through the voices of the murdered and suppressed. Woven through A floresta are the twin threads of the revenant’s desire for a justice yet to come, coupled with – in this case – the implied imperial fear should any such eventuality be reached. Temporally, Africa and Vietnam are still waiting for justice, still deeply embroiled in the struggle for freedom, while Cuba has achieved a measure of success in the present, looking to the future for stability and autonomy without outside interference. It is the human voice – amplified and spatialised – that dominates A floresta, its emotional immediacy used to relay words from diverse linguistic traditions that are both spatially and temporally ‘out of joint’, as live and recorded sound merge into a total sound field.

Continuing A floresta’s, themes of global class struggle and US policies of imperial oppression, and using almost the same forces, although restricted to tape without live performance interventions, Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1968) places racial discrimination at its heart, using as a framing device Sonia Sanchez’s words on the assassination of Malcolm X and an anti-Vietnam War manifesto (‘Black Women Enraged’) by a Harlem-based African American women’s group (Rizzardi, Reference Rizzardi2006, p.55). Described as ‘an inextricable interpenetration of old and new components’ (Restagno, Reference Restagno2018, p.83), Contrappunto is one of Nono’s relatively few settings of avant-garde poetry, with Nanni Balestrini’s words being placed in the context of a structural, musical parody inspired by Adriano Banchieri’s (1608) comic and highly inventive Festino nella sera del giovedi grasso avanti cena, in a similar juxtaposition of disparate centuries to those of Al gran sole carico d’amore in the following decade. Dedicated to Denis Bravo, leader of the Venezuelan Armed Front for National Liberation, political dissent and decentring are clearly articulated, but Nono’s conception of Contrappunto as a radiophonic workFootnote ⁶² is also indicative of a collective and democratic approach to dissemination and reception, where the imagined hauntological signature of the medium – static – reinforces Nono’s compositional ‘tuning’ between his diverse selection of documented materials, live performance and generative studio practice.

From the beginning, Nono is playing with time that is out of joint: contemporary poetry and politics are placed within a setting inspired by the seventeenth-century Venetian comic madrigal tradition, while also combining field recordings with studio-generated materials. The titular dialectic thus not only juxtaposes opposing temporalities but also contrasts serious political content with semi-absurdist wordplay, the lyrical with the mundane and, as with so many of Nono’s works, the individual and the group. Nono made extensive use of linguistic parody over the work’s six sections, while his field recordings continue the theme of temporal – and spatial – juxtaposition, consisting of sounds from Venice’s Rialto market, the Venetian lagoon and the lowest bell in the tower of St Mark’s; and in the Studio di Fonologia, Nono recorded actors Kadigia Bove and Elena Vicini, the classically trained singer Liliana Poli and the RAI-Rome chorus in a process of ‘adding-subtracting, composing-discomposing’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018b, p.355), delivering highly fragmented portions of word polyphony – including ‘White House’, ‘Johnson’ and ‘Pentagon’ – and other vocal effectsFootnote ⁶³ that result in periods of what Impett (Reference Impett2019, p.284) calls ‘sonic pandemonium’. Metal sheets and pipes were manipulated in numerous ways to create a panoply of effects, ‘filtered, superimposed, and “composed” with different time relationships among themselves’ (Nono, Reference Nono2018b, p.355). The recorded sounds fall into various categories: metal resonances; electronic modalities, and related tape manipulation procedures; spatially situated materials that evoke Venice’s history as a great medieval and Renaissance trading centre and wielder of imperial power, and its role in historical economic and racial oppression. Placed in conjunction with contemporary, albeit fragmented, text materials, the entire work constantly plays back and forth through time, the legacy and revenants of Venice’s past ricocheting off current arenas of injustice and conflict. As with La fabbrica illuminata (and its dedication to the workers of the Italsider steelworks), Contrappunto’s dialectic was considered sufficiently controversial politically – to US and Italian diplomatic sensibilities – to cause the work to be withdrawn from the 1968 Prix Italia.

4.5 The Late 1960s and the Move Towards Electronics

The close of the decade was a period of summation and transition, with the vast majority of tape works aligning with hauntological themes. Nono’s style and working practices were well established, and clear trajectories concerning politics, the composer-performer interface, studio language, the use of documentary materials, and studio techniques are evident in Musica-Manifesto no. 1: Un volto, del mare – Non consumiamo Marx (1969), Musiche per Manzù (1969), Como una ola de fuerza y luz (1972) and Für Paul Dessau (1974). The 1970s was also a decade of change, with techniques already prefiguring the move to electronics in the 1980s and a more personal approach to content, as demonstrated in Como una ola de fuerza y luz and … . . Sofferte onde serene … (1976), where friendship and loss both come under scrutiny. Nono’s working practices, based on close interaction with his interpreters, through improvisation and detailed co-research in the studio, continued during the 1970s. Non consumiamo, for soprano, actress and tape, saw Nono work with favoured collaborators Poli and Bove again, as well as the actress Edmonda Aldini. His close scrutiny of the human voice, achieved through periods of experimentation and improvisation – covering vocal articulation, timbre, range, and microphone placements – with his performers, anticipates the analytical approach to the piano that Nono would adopt in Como una ola de fuerza y luz, also featuring the soprano Slavka Taskova, and … . . Sofferte onde serene … with Maurizio Pollini as soloist. Although not a performer as such – except for some piano experiments in the studio for Sofferte – Nono’s relationship with studio technician Marino Zuccheri remained a vital one, and Nono’s reliance on experimentation and performer co-research as fundamental composing strategies ally his processes with those of Piscator, underlining the interconnected history of Marxist artistic creation.

Sonorities during this period continue Nono’s focus on resonance, particularly relating to metal (brass, percussion and piano) and air (voices, brass and, to a lesser extent, woodwinds) coupled with studio processes that evoke a sense of spatial and temporal vastness. Thus, Non consumiamo Marx sees the reuse of the bells of St Mark’s and recordings of metal tubes and sheets made with Stefania Woytowitcz the previous decade, and Como una ola features the mid and lower registers of the piano (metal) and the soprano voice (breath), both live and on the central tape part. Musiche per Manzù – composed to accompany Mario Bernardo’s Pace e Guerra, a film study of the reconstruction of Rotterdam’s Sint Laurenskerk, with particular focus on sculptor Giacomo Manzù’s bronze doors – is dominated by the sounds of metal and air; again, one of the bells of St Mark’s is reused, as is material from Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz, and choral voices (breath). The overall effect is of a giant resonating metal shell, articulated by air currents, processed at an ultra-slow tempo, which in many ways both shares and anticipates the endless ‘now’ of the Caretaker’s Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia (2006), a totemic work for twenty-first-century hauntology. Für Paul Dessau revisits fragments of earlier works – Il canto sospeso, Non consumiamo Marx and Como una ola – within a skilful amalgam of words, noise and music. Brass, bells and piano (metal) sonorities are evident throughout, while breath is present in both speech and choral singing. The overall effect is like a circle of radios, tuning in and out of range and amplitude – although static is not a prominent feature – rather in the manner of Stockhausen’s Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–67).

Where political content is overt, imported documentation is a central focus, delivered through spoken texts – read by their original orators or by actors in the studio – and field recordings of protest events and political gatherings, presented in a sonic blend where past and present continually interpenetrate. Nono’s predilection for self-quotation can also be viewed in this light; to quote the self is a political act in itself, in an intermingling of past events and future aspirations. It also underlines the deeply hauntological nature of Nono’s work practice per se, where each piece emerges from another, fragments are recast and the incomplete or abandoned are given a new voice in different contexts. Nono mines his own past constantly, and the desire to ‘rebuild’ using old materials is of course as political as its obverse, the desire to destroy, a dialectic that is very evident in Musiche per Manzù. Tape and text emphasise how Derridean techo-tele-discursivity and iconicity are implicit strategies for Nono (the ‘techno’ of tele-techno), haunting these works temporally and spatially. Nono’s texts, whether poetry, political speech, shouted slogan or manifesto, all interact with each other; thus in Non consumiamo Marx, in part 1 (‘Un volto, e dal mare’), poetry by Pavese operates in dialectic with part 2’s (‘Non consumiamo Marx’) field recordings of protests at the Venice Biennale and spoken political slogans from the Parisian demonstrations of 1968. The tele is further underlined by Nono’s skilful deployment of spatialisation (fore/mid/background) and amplitude in the recordings. Emblematic of the ongoing class struggle, Impett (Reference Impett2019, p.296) considers this work to be Nono’s ‘most explicit engagement with contemporary events’. The title’s reference to Marx connects the listener to past, present and future – also resonating with Derrida’s still-to-be-written text – while dialectics (past/present, individual/group, poetry/politics, live/recorded and generated/retrieved) provide further modes of connection between parts 1 and 2. The dialectic is even extended to the original playing formats – 10″ vinyl EP and the 12″ LP reissue – with part 1 on side A and part 2 on side B.

A similarly overt approach to political content occurs in Für Paul Dessau. Contemporary expressions regarding global justice and freedom are combined with earlier manifestos; hence, Castro, Lenin, Guevara and Lumumba rub shoulders in a meta-manifesto of the living and the dead, and as a further manifestation of the revenant’s desire for justice that is still to come. And yet there is a sense of timelessness, of time that is standing still, as the fragmented babble of voices blends into an eternal ‘now’, a spectral ‘moment’. That fragmented babble is also redolent of the digital looping and sampling that will become prominent in music during the next decade. Conversation with the past and its politics can equally operate in the form of memory and lament, as demonstrated in Como una ola, where reflection on the life of Luciano Cruz, Chilean revolutionary and personal friend of Nono, is presented across a five-movement history of loss, memory, political action and eventual hope, conveyed by piano, soprano voice, orchestra and tape.

4.6 Spectral Moments: Tape in the 1980s

By the late 1970s Nono was increasingly looking to expand the sense of suspended time that is already apparent in Musiche per Manzù, Für Paul Dessau and … . . Sofferte onde serene … . Derrida (Reference Derrida2006, p.xix) refers to such instances of suspended time as ‘a spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now”, future present)’. These instances of suspended time appear to no longer function as part of a traditional temporal narrative, but instead to reverberate as echoes, as ‘a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida2006, p.xx). Ghostly or not, although the moment is spectral, it is not any less real for that. It is still a moment of connection between performers, listeners and composer, while for Derrida, as hauntology is irreducible, such ghosts of futures past do not emanate from one point, place or time, but from the collective that is time out of joint. Nono’s final work with tape, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura is suffused with this sense of suspended, disjointed time, composed of lost futures and decaying memory, but also holding within itself distant utopias of a future yet to come. With the Milan studio in decline by the early 1980s, Nono would soon move his researches to the Experimental Studio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation in Freiburg, where he was particularly inspired by the new Halaphon, a device for spatialising sound that would prove instrumental during the composition of La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura.

The phrase ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar’ (Wanderer, there are no paths, yet you must walk), which Nono observed on a monastery wall in Toledo during a visit in 1985, inspired no fewer than four late works, including his final completed composition and his last and most ambitious work with magnetic tape, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Madrigale per piu ‘Caminantes’ con Gidon Kremer (The nostalgic utopian future distance: madrigal for several ‘travellers’ with Gidon Kremer), for violin, eight tapes and eight to ten music stands, to which the quote is fundamental.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nono had already established the notion of the ‘traveller’ through his increasingly complex designs for sound spatialisation in previous pieces, and this feature would become central to La lontananza’s realisation, with the soloist physically moving throughout the performance – hence, the number of music stands specified, two of which, significantly, remain empty – and the sound technician electronically moving sound around the eight speakers of the performance space. The tape was recorded at the Experimental Studio in Freiburg during two days of intensive co-research with Kremer in February 1988. In the same way as he had done with Henius over two decades earlier, and following his by now well-established working process, Nono recorded a comprehensive range of Kremer’s playing, revealing the full gamut of possible sonorities, attacks and gestures, before final processing and manipulation in the studio. The final tape part was spread across eight channels, focusing on four principal sonic domains: dense materials, electronically and spatially transformed; pure violin sonorities; studio and other ambient sounds and very high violin sounds. The importance of the composer–performer relationship is acknowledged in the title of course; not only are there ‘travellers’ to accompany Kremer – including the sound technician, who in no way should be considered merely as providing an accompaniment – but there is also a composite portrait of Kremer the musical traveller himself, in search of the sound world that comprises La lontananza. Nono too has been a part of this journey of sonic exploration, as with every such experience of co-research with a performer, while temporal (and spatial) travel is implied by the ‘madrigal’ of the title, evoking the Venetian tradition previously alluded to in Contrappunto dialettico. In a sense, the composer, performer and technician are all pilgrims, seeking a spatiotemporal, mobile sound world through joint endeavour, reflecting backwards and forwards through time.

In a series of events worthy of any of Piscator’s last-minute production experiences in the 1920s, Nono did not complete the violin part until the day of the world premiere, leaving Kremer only hours to learn the complex part. Although the live part is relatively sparse, it is a technically demanding score, with an equally challenging interface between the violin and tape parts, where each must react to the other while also operating with considerable autonomy, rather in the manner of operation of A floresta. The tape neither accompanies nor directs the violin’s actions: both are independent, but linked, contributors to the creation of the work. As with Krapp’s Last Tape, through its staging and performance, the creation of the work happened anew in each live iteration, with Beckett making many adjustments to the work for several years after its world premiere.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although Nono had originally wanted to withdraw the tape part – instead presenting a solo violin world premiere – eventually, the performance went ahead with tape included. Unsatisfied with the result, Nono withdrew the violin part and substantially revised it. Of course, the memory of the original is still present in the new part, and also in the memory of the world premiere itself. La lontananza is redolent of Derrida’s ‘fabric’, it passes ‘through’, sharing textual inspiration with other compositions, generating new materials from old processes, and reflecting on the past and the future. In what is practically a hauntological manifesto, its dedicatee, Salvatore Sciarrino, perhaps sums this up best, describing La lontananza as ‘the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica); the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance (lontananza)’ (quoted in Van Eck, Reference Van Eck2013, p.3). By combining sound spatialisation and the utilisation of recorded memory, Nono is creating a fundamentally hauntological landscape that shimmers with the traces of traces of traces, simultaneously collapsing and expanding narrative notions of space and time. La lontananza embodies Derrida’s conceptions of techno-tele-iconicity, techno-tele-discursivity and the spectral moment perhaps better than any of Nono’s other compositions, and that in a creative life that was replete with such ‘moments’.

Listening to this complete body of work, one is reminded of contemporary hauntologists and their aesthetic practice; their desire to create a certain ‘atmosphere’ that is redolent of decay and loss, such as the Caretaker’s reuse of vintage records of 1930s dance music in Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1999) and Everywhere at the End of Time (2016–19), where hiss, crackle and pops form the foundations of the sound world. The very nature of Nono’s tape-based studio practice, by now more than fifty years old for much of this repertoire, imbues his sound world with exactly the same qualities that contemporary hauntology adores. Even after restoration and reissue, due to the nature of the recording medium itself and degradation of the original tapes, today the sound world of these works has changed, giving them a hauntological sonic signature that would not have been apparent when they were new; and this ‘signature’ is even more obvious in compositions where Nono incorporated found objects, such as the records of political speeches in the first part of Musica-Manifesto no. 1: Un volto, del mare – Non consumiamo Marx, where pops and crackles are clearly audible on the recordings.