This chapter follows up on Chapter 3 by presenting nine portraits of works for multiple orchestras or for an orchestra divided into spatialized groups composed, premiered or reprised between 1958 and 1978 by Henry Brant, Henri Dutilleux, Gunther Schuller, Luigi Nono, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Gilles Tremblay, Harry Somers, Charles Ives and Anthony Braxton. These works were premiered in New York, Boston, Paris, Darmstadt, Toronto and Tokyo. The common features of these works invite their being studied as a group, focusing on the ways composers and critics characterized these works premiered in the heyday of both post-war avant-gardism and the public dissemination of stereo hi-fis, thereby creating points of contact with the works discussed in the previous chapter.

Luigi Nono was one the first and foremost Italian composers to develop multiple serialism. Stimulated by the teachings and friendship of Bruno Maderna, in the years 1950–1 he started composing with an extended twelve-tone technique that involved complex rhythmic permutations. While developing a special interest in translating verbal formations (especially poetry) into musical structures, around 1954 Nono started a fruitful exchange with Karlheinz Stockhausen on the problems of integral serialism, which culminated in 1958–9 in controversy over the serial workings of Nono’s Il canto sospeso, also related to the function of the textual underlay. In 1957, Nono had taken up a public discussion of serial technique from the perspective of its historical foundation. Increasingly concerned with an organic approach to vocal-instrumental sound and with the significance of text in relation to it, Nono defined a personal multi-parametric technique which enabled him to find a consistent way of composing both complex sound fields and monodic processes, which ultimately led him to vocal-electroacoustic composition in the 1960s.