for two violins is Luigi Nono’s last finished composition. It is also the last part of the trilogy Caminantes... Ayacucho – No hay caminos, hay que caminar... Andrej Tarkowskij – “Hay que caminar” sonando, inspired by an inscription on the walls of the Toledo cathedral: “Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar” (Wanderers, there is no pathway, there is only travelling itself). The Italian word sognando (dreaming, in dream) added to a quote from that inscription is sometimes interpreted as the postulate of necessary utopia. Certainly, Sognando may also be related to the character of the music itself, whose characteristics are akin to dreaming: the unpredictable succession of snippets, fragments, and enigmatic sound images. The work is based on the solo part from the composition La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988–89) for violin and eight-channel tape, divided into fragments spanning from one to nine bars, which recombined, make up the new work. In most cases, Nono retains the pitches and rhythmic values but changes the phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and timbre. In Hay que caminar..., the violinists “seek their way,” playing from scores spread over eight music stands, moving between them after performing each section marked Leggio. The subtlest differentiation of dynamics and articulation, surprising contrasts, the “mobile” character of sound (as opposed to immutable, static duration), Verdi’s “enigmatic scale” as the latent base of the musical material, the “qualitative” (relative to meaning and emotion instead of pure duration) differentiation of silences and fermatas—all this results in music that is truly esoteric, requiring extreme concentration from the listener and a fairly new type of virtuosity from performers, going beyond mere velocity.

Krzysztof Kwiatkowski