ABSTRACT
Luigi Nono would often speak of musical thought as a distinct mode of human activity, one that he was happy to describe but never define. Nono later described his study of music as having begun with his purchase of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Treatise on Harmony during his time as a law student at the University of Padova. Emerging from Zanibon’s music shop in its prominent location on the Piazza dei Signori , he would have been immediately confronted with the lion of St Mark and the Palazzo del Capitano, the symbols of that Venetian cultural and political authority that would ground and condition his own musical evolution. That Nono worked through his copy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Treatise on Harmony conscientiously and in detail is clear from the annotations with which it is covered. From his childhood musical experiences and sporadic piano lessons, it seems unlikely that he was unacquainted with the difference between major and minor triads, for instance.
