"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in the last part of these manifold Variazioni. In Incontri (1955) the composer deals with a personal relationship by way of analogy: "Like two beings, different from each other and each independent in itself, meet and their meeting may turn, not into a 'oneness' but into a matching each other, a being together, a symbiosis." After the Darmstadt premiere of Incontri, Nuria Schönberg and Luigi Nono got married. While Varianti (1957), dedicated to Rudolf Kolisch, is related to serial techniques, No hay caminos, written three decades later, is limited to the dynamic and tonal regions that were so important to Nono in his later years: "The maximum of divested inwardness."