Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio (
October 24,
1925 –
May 27,
2003) was an
Italian composer. He is noted for his
experimental work (in particular his
1968 composition Sinfonia for voices and
orchestra) and also for his pioneering work in
electronic music.
= Biography =Berio was born in
Oneglia (now Borgo d'Oneglia, a small village 3 km N of
Imperia). He was taught the
piano by his father and grandfather who were both
organists. During
World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day he injured his hand while learning how a
gun worked. He spent time in a military hospital, before fleeing to fight in anti-
Nazi groups.
Following the war, Berio studied at the
Milan Conservatory under
Giulio Cesare Paribeni and
Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He was unable to continue studying the piano because of his injured hand, so instead concentrated on composition. In 1947 came the first public performance of one of his works, a
suite for
piano.
Berio made a living at this time accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met American
mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). Berio would write many pieces exploiting her versatile and unique voice.
In 1951, Berio went to the
United States to study with
Luigi Dallapiccola at
Tanglewood, from whom he gained an interest in
serialism. He later attended the
Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at
Darmstadt, meeting
Pierre Boulez,
Karlheinz Stockhausen,
György Ligeti and
Mauricio Kagel there. He became interested in
electronic music, co-founding the
Studio di Fonologia, an electronic music studio in Milan, with
Bruno Maderna in 1955. He invited a number of significant composers to work there, among them
Henri Pousseur and
John Cage. He also produced an electronic music periodical,
Incontri Musicali.
In 1960, Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as Composer in Residence, and in 1962, on an invitation from
Darius Milhaud, took a teaching post at
Mills College in
Oakland, California. In 1965 he began to teach at the
Juilliard School, and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performances of
contemporary music. Also in 1965, he again married, this time to the noted philosopher of science Susan Oyama (they divorced in 1971). His students include
Louis Andriessen,
Steve Reich,
Luca Francesconi and, perhaps most surprisingly,
Phil Lesh of the
Grateful Dead.
All this time Berio had been steadily composing and building a reputation, winning the Italian Prize in 1966 for
Laborintus II. His reputation was cemented when his
Sinfonia was premiered in 1968.
In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980 he acted as director of the electro-acoustic division of
IRCAM in
Paris, and in 1977 he married for the third time with musicologist Talia Pecker. In 1987 he opened
Tempo Reale in
Florence, a centre similar in intent to
IRCAM.
In 1994 he became Distinguished Composer in Residence at
Harvard University, remaining there until 2000. He was also active as a conductor and continued to compose to the end of his life. In 2000, he became Presidente and Sovrintendente at the
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Luciano Berio died in 2003 in a hospital in
Rome.
= Berio's music =
See also:
List of compositions by Luciano BerioBerio's electronic work dates for the most part from his time at Milan's Studio di Fonologia. One of the most influential works he produced there was
Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), based on
Cathy Berberian reading from
James Joyce's
Ulysses. A later work,
Visage (1961) sees Berio creating a wordless emotional language by cutting up and rearranging a recording of
Cathy Berberian's voice.
In 1968, Berio completed
O King a work which exists in two versions: one for voice,
flute,
clarinet,
violin,
cello and
piano, the other for eight voices and
orchestra. The piece is in memory of
Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated shortly before its composition. In it, the voice(s) intones first the vowels, and then the consonants which make up his name, only stringing them together to give his name in full in the final bars.
The orchestral version of
O King was, shortly after its completion, integrated into what is perhaps Berio's most famous work,
Sinfonia (1968-69), for orchestra and eight amplified voices. The voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by
Claude Lévi-Strauss (whose
Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text),
Samuel Beckett (from his novel
The Unnamable), instructions from the scores of
Gustav Mahler and other writings.
In the third movement of the piece Berio takes the third movement from Mahler's
Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up and re-shuffled version of it. At the same time, the voices recite texts from various sources, and the orchestra plays snatches of
Claude Debussy's
La Mer,
Maurice Ravel's
La valse,
Igor Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from
Arnold Schoenberg,
Anton Webern and many others, creating a dense
collage, occasionally to humorous effect; when one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with a fragment from
Don (French for "gift"), the first movement from
Pli selon pli by
Pierre Boulez.
The result is a narrative with the usual tension and release of classical music, but using a completely different language. The actual
chords and
melodies at any one time do not seem as important as the fact that we are hearing such and such a part of Mahler, a particular bit of
Alban Berg and certain words by Beckett. Because of this, the movement is seen as one of the first examples of
Postmodern music. It has also been described as a
deconstruction of Mahler's Second Symphony, just as
Visage was a deconstruction of Berberian's voice.
A-Ronne (1974) is similarly collaged, but with the focus more squarely on the voice. It was originally written as a radio program for five actors, and reworked in 1975 for eight vocalists and an optional keyboard part. The work is one of a number of collaborations with the poet
Edoardo Sanguineti, who for this piece provided a text full of quotations from sources including the
Bible,
T. S. Eliot and
Karl Marx.
Another example of the influence of Sanguineti is the large work
Coro, scored for orchestra, solo voices, and a large choir, whose members are paired with instruments of the orchestra. The work extends over roughly an hour, and explores a number of themes within a framework of folk music from a variety of regions; Chile, North America, Africa. Recurrent themes are the expression of love and passion; the pain of being parted from loved ones; death of a wife or husband. A line repeated often is "come and see the blood on the streets", a reference to a poem by
Pablo Neruda, written in the context of savage events in Latin America under various military regimes.
Berio also produced work which does not quote the work of others at all. Perhaps best known among these is his series of works for solo instruments under the name
Sequenza. The first,
Sequenza I came in 1958 and is for
flute; the last,
Sequenza XIV (2002) is for
cello. These works explore the possibilities of each instrument to the full, often calling for extended techniques.
The various Sequenza are as follows;
*Sequenza I for flute (1958);
*Sequenza II for harp (1963);
*Sequenza III for woman's voice (1965);
*Sequenza IV for piano (1966);
*Sequenza V for trombone (1965);
*Sequenza VI for viola (1967);
*Sequenza VII for oboe (1969);
*Sequenza VIII for violin (1976);
*Sequenza IX for clarinet (1980);
*Sequenza X for trumpet in C and piano resonance (1984);
*
Sequenza XI for guitar (1987-88);
*Sequenza XII for bassoon (1995);
*Sequenza XIII for accordion "Chanson" (1995);
*Sequenza XIV for violoncello (2002).
Berio is known for adapting and transforming the music of others, but he also adapted his own compositions: the series of
Sequenze gave rise to a series of works called
Chemins each based on one of the
Sequenze.
Chemins II (1967), for instance, takes the original
Sequenza II (1963) for
harp and adapts it for solo
viola and nine other instruments.
Chemins II was itself transformed into
Chemins III (1968) by the addition of an orchestra, and there also exists
Chemins IIb, a version of
Chemins II without the solo viola but with a larger ensemble, and
Chemins IIc, which is
Chemins IIb with an added solo
bass clarinet. The
Sequenze were also shaped into new works under titles other than
Chemins;
Corale (1981), for example, is based on
Sequenza VIII.
As well as original works, Berio made a number of
arrangements of works by other composers, among them
Claudio Monteverdi,
Henry Purcell,
Johannes Brahms,
Gustav Mahler and
Kurt Weill. For Berberian he wrote
Folk Songs (1964; a set of arrangements of
folk songs). He also wrote an ending for
Giacomo Puccini's
opera Turandot (premiered in Los Angeles on May 27 2002 and in the same year in Amsterdam and Salzburg) and in
Rendering (1989) took the few sketches
Franz Schubert made for his
Symphony No. 10, and completed them by adding music derived from other Schubert works.
In fact, transcription is a vital part of even Berio's "creative" works. In "Two Interviews," Berio muses about what a college course in transcription would look like, looking not only at Liszt, Busoni, Stravinsky, Bach, himself, and others, but to what extent composition is always self-transcription. In this respect, Berio rejects and distances himself from notions of "collage," preferring instead the position of "transcriber," arguing that "collage" implies a certain arbitrary abandon that runs counter to the careful control of his highly intellectual play, especially within
Sinfonia but throughout his "deconstructive" works. Rather, each quotation carefully evokes the context of its original work, creating an open web, but an open web with highly specific referents and a vigorously defined, if self-proliferating, signifier-signified relationship. "I'm not interested in Italic textcollagesItalic text, and they amuse me only when I'm doing them with my children: then they become an exercise in relativizing and 'decontextualizing' images, an elementary exercise whose healthy cynicism won't do anyone any harm," Berio tells interviewer Rossana Dalmonte, in what reads like Berio attempting to distance himself from the haphazard image many more careless second-hand analysts have of him.
Perhaps Berio's most notable contribution to the world of post-WWII non-serial experimental music, running throughout most of his works, is his engagement with the broader world of critical theory (epitomized by his life-long friendship with linguist and critical theorist Umberto Eco) through his compositions. Berio's works are often analytic acts: deliberately analyzing myths, stories, the components of words themselves, his own compositions, or preexisting musical works. other works In other words, it is not only the composition of the "collage" that conveys meaning; it is the particular composition of the component "sound-image" that conveys meaning, even extra-musical meaning. The technique of the "collage," that he is associated with, is, then, less a neutral process than a conscious, Joycean process of analysis-by-composition, a form of analytic transcription of which Sinfonia and The Chemins are the most prurient examples. Berio often offers his compositions as forms of academic or cultural discourse themselves rather than as "mere" fodder for them.Among Berio's other compositions are
Circles (1960),
Sequenza III (1966), and
Recital I (for Cathy) (1972), all written for Berberian, and a number of stage works, with
Un re in ascolto, a collaboration with
Italo Calvino, the best known.
Berio's "central instrumental focus", if such a thing exists, is probably with the voice, the piano, the flute, and the strings. He wrote many remarkable pieces for piano which vary from solo pieces to essentially concerto pieces (points on the curve to find, concerto for two pianos, and Coro, which has a strong backbone of harmonic and melodic material entirely based on the piano part).
Lesser known works make use of a very distinguishable polyphony unique to Berio that develops in a variety of ways. This occurs is several works, but most recognisably in compositions for small instrumental combinations. Examples are Differences, for flute, harp, clarinet, cello, violin and electronic sounds, Agnus, for three clarinets and voices, Tempi concertanti for flute and four instrumental groups, Linea, for marimba, Vibraphone, and two pianos, and Chemins IV, for eleven strings and oboe.
=Bibliography=
=External links=
*
Obituary from the Daily Telegraph*
Obituary from the New York Times*
Centro Tempo Reale*
CompositionToday Berio Article*
Berio/Dubuffet - a conversation (compiled by John Fowler)
