Como una ola de 'fuerza y luz / ...sofferte onde serene... / etc

where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen-then Maderna's conducting teacher-who gave Nono further tuition and was an early mentor and advocate of his music.

It was Scherchen who presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the Variazione canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg in 1950, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt-a centre for the rediscovery of modern music after the devastation of dictatorship and war. The Variazioni canoniche, based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Schoenberg's Op 41, marked Nono as a committed composer of anti-fascist political orientation (Annibaldi 1980). Nono had been a member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War (Nono 1993[citation needed]). In fact Nono's striking political commitment, while allying him with some of his contemporaries at Darmstadt such as Henri Pousseur and in the earlier days Hans Werner Henze, distinguished him from others, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Nevertheless, it was with Boulez and Stockhausen that Nono became one of the leaders of the New Music during the 1950s.