bradley leonard
Intolerance 1963 (2025)
From Hosted by NEBYULA as part of Various Others at Bayerischer Hof in Munich
Hosted by Lenbachhaus in Munich
Intolerance 1963 is a sound composition that reinterprets recorded excerpts from Luigi Nono’s radical atonal opera Intolleranza 1960, a seminal work that confronted the political realities of fascism, militarism, and societal oppression. In the same way Nono built his opera upon Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen”, this work engages with Nono’s legacy from a different generation and national context.
The archival fragments are slowed down, stretched beyond their dramatic pacing into a suspended, atmospheric field. Conceptually and musically, the work extends Nono’s atonality by challenging the Western tuning standard of 440Hz. It employs detuning, utilizing resonators and granular synthesis to turn these microtonal deviations into a generative basis. This manipulation is not only a technical gesture but a political one: by elongating the source material and creating an auditory dislocation, the work exposes submerged textures and questions how historic challenges endure across time.
The installation was originally designed as an interaction with its physical context, the Bayerischer Hof hotel, the site of the Munich Security Conference. This location, emblematic of global political power and statecraft, served as a direct counterpoint to the ethos of the work. Rather than aiming to replicate the urgency of the original opera, the work reflected on its persistent themes through a slower, more meditative lens.
Later reworked for the spatial conditions of the Kunstbau at the Lenbachhaus, the piece was expanded into a ten-channel format employing distinct time-stretching algorithms across the array. The processing chain was also deepened: the gradual detuning of the mid-range spectrum mapped to resonators, directly triggering the synthesis of additional sub-frequencies. This creates a dense, recursive texture where the disintegration of pitch generates the work’s sonic foundation.
Documentation: Lukas Schramm (first, fourth), Diogo Frazão (second, third)