ABSTRACT
The amateur music-lovers' world are from which Aldo Clementi sprung had depended upon a chain of appropriations. Any maker of enigmatic musical objects such as Clementi was well advised to pay his discursive dues if he wished to be left in peace. The 'death of music' proclaimed by Clementi is the death of that openness to the risk of intimacy; its nemesis, the distracted familiarity proclaimed by Walter Benjamin, is the necessary point of departure for any contemporary composer true to his time. But Clementi reaches out for the means to restore to the ruins of his beloved classical repertoire some portion of the distancing enigma of which mass reproduction had stripped them. Clementi marks out the distance between himself and the two twentieth-century composers figuring within his compositional backdrop who had most consistently committed themselves to canonic thought: Webern and Dallapiccola.
