Nono Nono Bo Bono began with the idea of writing a piece for which the title would delineate the form. That is, each letter would symbolize a different theme or motive. An inherent problem in coming up with an appropriate title was that the word or phrase must use not more than three or four different letters, but that it must also have letters which recur (so that a theme could return more than once). It was not long before I hit upon “The Name Game,” a silly song from 1965 by Shirley Ellis, as a possible solution to the problem of finding a title which would serve my purposes. “The Name Game” is a song which uses a name as a means of creating an entire set of lyrics; the singer uses her own name as an example in the song: “Shirley Birley Bo Birley Banana Fanna Fo Firley. . . .” Because the “Bo” is a fixed part of the song, I decided to come up with a name that had only O’s in it so as to minimize the number of letters used. “Nono” was a perfect choice. Not only did it use only O’s, but it used only two letters, and was the name of a composer: the Italian serialist Luigi Nono. Furthermore, the first phrase of the Name Game song, when Nono’s name was applied, produced “Nono Nono Bo Bono,” and “Bono” is the name of several pop music icons: Sonny Bono, of Sonny and Cher fame, and Bono of the Irish band U2. The three letters used in the title would each represent a theme, and I decided to borrow from the indicated sources: “N” would be a Nono-esque theme, “O” would be the Name Game theme, and “B” would be a theme from Sonny and Cher. (Sonny and Cher had more identifiable tunes than U2, in my opinion; I settled on the theme from “The Beat Goes On,” which seemed appropriate for a percussion piece.) The Luigi Nono theme I used is a 12-tone row that Nono used in several works, most notably his Il Canto Sospeso. He also used rows of dynamics and note values in his work; these I employed in the first iteration of the “N” theme. With each occurrence of “N,” I adjusted some aspect of the music, so that it almost grows into the Bono theme. The opening Nono section returns once at the end of the piece, followed by a coda using the Name Game theme. Nono Nono Bo Bono was written for Paul Fadoul, who premiered the work in January 2001 in New York City.
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