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The 'spatial" temporalisation of Prometeo considered in the previous chapter cannot be separated from its spatial environment. Where both 'spheres of music" are concerned, this environment is today preeminently urban. During the 1970s, Massimo Cacciari engaged with some of the classical theoretical reflections on the metropolis within the German sociology of the first third of the twentieth century. In this research, Cacciari conceived of an "architecture of nihilism" as constituting the "tragic" acknowledgement of and resistance to the capitalist "project".¹ Although Nono's music may be said to elude his philosophical grasp, much of Cacciari's thought about architecture proves to be useful in understanding that music, as will be shown. Furthermore, Cacciari's Nietzschean research into German sociology allows for a fruitful dialogue with Adorno and with Heidegger — even though Cacciari himself only discusses the latter writer explicitly. Specifically, the category of the tragic is at stake in the temporal-musical mimesis discussed above, just as it will be at stake in the spatial-architectural mimesis outlined below. Cacciari was well aware of the musical character of the architectural — increasingly, perhaps, through his conversations and collaborations with Nono.² Yet Cacciari did not explicitly call upon his earlier research when writing about and for Nono in the 1980s.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137487254_5

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