Luciano Berio

By Rory Braddell

On 27^th of May this year, the Italian composer Luciano Berio died in Rome at the age of 77 years. Contemporary music fans in Dublin will remember the prominence given to Berio at the first RTE Living Music Festival, which was held in Dublin last autumn. During the festival, many significant performances of Berio’s works were undertaken. Due to illness, Berio could not attend the event in person. And in sending his apologies he said: “I feel as if I were a citizen of Dublin, even though I have never had the privilege of visiting it”. In order to compensate for this absence, a public interview with Berio arranged and facilitated by a barely intelligible telephone link. Despite the fact that some of the small audience were disappointed by not seeing the great man in person, they were greatly moved by the vivid experience of hearing his voice.

Luciano Berio was born on the 24^th of October 1925 in Oneglia, a town in the coastal province of Liguri. His father and grandfather were both organists and composers, and provided Berio with his early musical education. When he was nine he took part in his father’s musical evenings, and in his early teens he composed his first musical compositions. This quiet existence must have been drastically changed by the effects of World War II, towards the end of which, Berio was conscripted into Mussolini’s fascist army. He was quickly discharged after an accident with a loaded gun, which was responsible for injuring his hand and ending his ambition to become a concert pianist. As a result of this experience Berio followed his original inclinations and fought for the partisans. In 1946-51, after the cessation of war, Berio continued with his musical education at the Conservatorio Giuseppi Verdi in Milan. Due to his already advanced knowledge of music, which was absorbed from childhood, he was able to pass the fourth year exams, entering the fifth year of the ten-year long conservatory training.

In 1951 Berio received a scholarship from the Koussevitzky foundation that enabled him to travel to the United States to receive lessons in serialism from Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Under this formative influence, Berio experimented with serialism in his early works of the 1950’s, but maintained his own personal style. It was during the American trip, on the 28^th of October 1952, that Berio was witness to the first concert of electronic music in the United States, given by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. His exposure to the new musical medium interested him a great deal, and the following year he met a fellow Italian composer Bruno Maderna with whom he shared the same interest. Together they founded Italy’s first electronic music studio Studio di Fonologia Musicale, at Milan Radio, which opened in 1955, and which was co-directed by Berio until 1960. During the 1950’s the summer school, held at the German town of Darmstadt established itself as an important talking-shop for avant-garde composers, attracting major figures of the contemporary music scene, such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Henri Pousseur. In addition to experiments in the field of electronic music, the Darmstadt composers followed in the wake of Schoenberg and Webern, developing techniques of total serialism that included all parameters of music. It was in this melting pot of ideas and debate that Berio’s first major orchestral piece “Nones” was successfully received in 1956. Berio was also active in promoting new music in his native country, and it was in the same year he inaugurated a contemporary music series, “Incontri Musicali,” producing a journal of the same name.

In the late 1950’s the scholar and friend Umberto Eco introduced Berio to the onomatopoeia and word play in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The composer was fascinated by Joyce’s flexible and multi-layered use of language, which was a discovery that was to influence his experimentation with electronic tape music. He was engrossed in the flexibility of this medium and its capability to combine various sources of material, bringing them into the microcosm of the studio, and cutting and pasting elements into new forms. It was against this background that Berio expanded possibilities created in spoken language and the relationship of words to their sonic components. Joyce had created an interface between words and music, deciphering the world through sounds. Joyce’s assemblages of words provided a borderline between musical coherence and semantic meaning that fascinated Berio. Together with Umberto Eco, Berio produced a radio project on onomatopoeia that ended with the first version of Thema, known as Omaggio a Joyce. It was Joyce’s prelude to the “sirens” chapter of Ulysses that provided Berio with vocal material for this classic piece of electro-acoustic music, which was composed at the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in 1958. In the liner notes, Berio describes how he wanted to “establish a new relationship between speech and music, in which a continuous metamorphosis of one into the other can be developed.” The work starts with the singer Cathy Berberian reading the opening text, which then becomes the point of departure for a more complex technological polyphonic processing of vocal sounds, which in many respects is inspired by the inherent musical polyphony of the original text itself. Berio blurs the distinction between language and sound to a point where it is no longer possible to differentiate between word and sound. Fragmented poetic elements appear removed from their original context, as they are drawn into new musical configurations. The process of dissembling texts, dissecting them, within a structured matrix of gestural, phonetic, sounds was considerably influenced by the semiotic linguistics of Umberto Eco. This is what the leading Berio scholar, Osmond-Smith states: “the germ cell of everything that follows in Berio’s music, and the most important concept that underpins all of his music.”

Another major part of Berio’s life was his activity as a composition teacher. He taught at the Darlington summer school in England, 1961-62. The 1960’s marked a period when Berio shifted his operations across the Atlantic. This involved extensive involvement with American institutions, starting in 1960 with an invitation to be composer-in-residence at Tanglewood. In 1962-64, he filled in for Darius Milhaud, teaching composition at Mills College. The longest American appointment he held was at the Julliard School of Music from 1965 to 1971, after which he turned his back on teaching and returned to Europe. Around the same time, Berio purchased a farm close to the foot of the hilltop village of Radicondoli, near the town of Siena, which was to become his long-term home for the rest of his life.

During the years that followed Berio was appointed director to several important orchestral posts: Artistic director of Israel Chamber Orchestra (1975), the Accademia Filharmonica Romana (1975-76), the Orchestra Regionale Toscana (1982), and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (1984). In 1993-94 Berio was appointed the Charles Elliot Norton Professor of poetics at Harvard University. In 2000 he started work as president and artistic director of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. These appointments not only attest to Berio’s powers as a composer, but also to his immense organisational and administrative skills. In the field of electronic music, Berio continued his involvement with collaborations at the new IRCAM studios in Paris, which was founded by Pierre Boulez. He was the director of the electro-acoustic department from1974 to 1980, during which time he collaborated on the development of a digital system that was designed to process and transform sounds in real-time. In more recent times he supervised the setting up of an electro-acoustic research centre, Tempo Reale, at the Villa Strozzi in Florence in 1987. He was involved in work on the Tempo Reale Audio Interaction Location System (TRAILS), which facilitated live processed sound to be moved around speakers, creating a space not confined to normal aural characteristics.

The most popular of Berio compositions is the Folk Songs (1964), for mezzo-soprano and instrumental ensemble. These pieces, which are settings of material from various countries, are not forms of stylised folk music. Berio does not follow a strict process of authentic transcription, but synthesises elements, creating his own individual interpretation, and even composing one of the pieces himself. He has said that the “transcriptions are analyses of folk songs,” which implies a highly personal realisation of the core material. Quite a large ensemble of wind, string and percussion instruments is used in different combinations, creating a rich backdrop for the human voice. The author of a book on Berio, Thomas Gartmann, writes: “Berio weaves an iridescent net of instrumental sounds around the traditional raw material and offers it afresh for our own age. At the same time he adopts many procedures familiar from other cultures, or even from the European Middle Ages.” This is, in Berio’s words, an attempt to create “a real perceptible, understandable continuity between ancient, popular music-making which is so close to everyday work, and our music.”

One of Berio’s best-known works is Sinfonia (1968-69), scored for eight amplified voices combined with orchestral. This work is a postmodern pastiche of spoken and sung texts, which are sometimes in different languages. The textural elements are incorporated from a plethora of different sources

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The first section quotes extracts of text on Brazilian water myths by the French anthropologist Claude Leví-Strauss. The second section incorporates a tribute to Martin Luther King, “O King”. The third movement is perhaps the most obvious example, because it borrows the Scherzo from Mahler’s Resurrection symphony as the basis for its musical form. A monologue from Beckett’s Unnameable supplies the textural element and in addition many other fragments are interjected, such as verbalisations, crowd sounds, slogans, songs, clichés, shouts, grunts, and also sardonic comments directed at the audience. In the last section Berio returns to text drawn from the first movement and quotations from the third. This process of re-writing, re-examination and re-composition applies the same cannibalising procedure to his own music, as he already used for existing sources.

Berio’s use of text is verbal fragmentation that dramatises the poetical word with gestural bodily energy. In Sinfonia, the influence of Joyce and Beckett is apparent, as Berio juxtaposes fragments, often purely for vocal timbre, rather than intelligibility. He writes in the liner notes: “Thus, the various degrees of intelligibility of the text, along with the hearer’s experience of almost failing to understand, must be seen as essential to the very nature of the musical process.” Berio integrates music and textural entities, inviting the listener to take part in the interpretive process. The listener is drawn into the music and in a sense involved in what he/she is hearing, but compelled to find his/her own subjective meaning from the sequence of texts and musical expressions. A similar work belonging in the same category is Laborinthus II (1965) for three female voices, a speaker, eight actors and instrumental ensemble. In addition to text supplied by Edoardo Sanguineti, Berio used material by Dante from Vita Nuovo, Inferno and Convivio, and also Ezra Pound’s Canto XLV: With Usura. A narrative is read by a male speaking voice, exploring social themes like love, the depiction of hell, a condemnation of capitalism and usury, while an entire array of voices at the back of the stage declaims various verbalisations, in various different languages, including lists of cultural junk. The link to Joyce is compelling, as one can find many parallels between Berio’s unconventional use of text and Finnegans Wake, which perhaps explores the musical potential of language itself.

A similar concept of re-composition from existing pieces,which is so apparent in the folksongs and also Sinfonia, is applied to the re-working of Beriothe ’s solo Sequenza into Cheminsfor series. In the fourteen Sequenza, each composed a different solo instrument, Berio explores extended techniques and individual virtuosity, taking into account the construction, development and history of each individual instrument. In each of the seven Chemins, scored for solo instrument with chamber ensemble, a solo Sequenza is embedded into the expanded texture. These are in effect commentaries that develop the latent harmony of the earlier works. However, they are not typical concertante pieces, but rather a re-examination of an already existing structure. For example in Berio’s Chemins II (1967), which is based on material from Sequenza VI, the soloist is not really heard above the orchestra. In this anti-concerto, the soloist is struggling against an orchestra, which is pulling and pushing his material, drowning him out in the process. The soloist is finally audible in the closing bars, as aggressive confrontation is dissolved into melody. One can only appreciate the difficulty of the solo part when one hears Sequenza VI, as it has reveals harmonic potential evolving fixed fields of pitches. This is the basis of what becomes completely overwhelming in the hands of the ensemble in Chemins II. There is a striking parallel to the treatment of Joyce’s text in Thema and the derivation and stratification of new musical layers in Chemins. The material of the Sequenza is the central core of the music, from which extra layers are derived and superimposed. Berio has illustrated this process with the statement that the Chemins are in fact “the best analysis of the Sequenza.” There is an important concurrence here with his comments relating to the Folk Songs.

Berio also experimented in the field of opera, and in 1970 Berio composed his anti-opera, simply titled “Opera,” for the Santa Fe Opera. This work was a complex deconstruction of the medium. Two later operas followed in a similar vein, La Vera Storia (1977-81) and Un Re In Ascolto (1979-1984), and were created in conjunction with the writer Italo Calvino. Similarly to the earlier musical-theatrical works, Berio synthesised texts from different sources. The opera Un Re In Ascolto is a combination of trext by Calvino, W. H. Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” and a libretto based on the Shakespere’s Tempest. The main narrative is the story of an old man trying to realise his vision of ‘another theatre’ before he dies. Berio shifted the importance of the lyrical solo voice towards an intrinsically more dramatic concept of opera that emphasises the theatrical aspects. Berio’s more recent opera Outis, first performed at Milan La Scala 1996, deals a later-day Ulysses integrated into modern narrative. This work is also highly theatrical, frequently mixing verbal and visual images. An example is the third cycle of the work, which contrasts the contemporary themes of a supermarket and a
concentration camp.

Berio was the outstanding composer of his generation. The Italian minister emphasised this point when he said: “We have lost one of the most representative protagonists of avant-garde music on an international level.” Berio’s status as a composer of international standing was celebrated in the last decade by many music festivals. These included London and Genoa (1994), Milan (1996), Paris (1997), Schleswig-Holstein (1998), Geneva, Lisbon, Gütersloh and Salzburg (1999), Trondheim and Dublin (2002). He has received several honorary degrees from universities in London (1980), Siena (1995), Edinburgh and Turin (1999) and more recently Bologna University. He has also won a number of important international prizes including the Ernst von Siemens-Musikpreis (Munich, 1989), the prize of the Wolf Foundation (Jerusalem, 1991), the Leone d’oro from the Venice Biennale (1995), the Praemium Imperiale (Japan, 1996) and the Premio Internazionale Luigi Vanvitelli (Caserta, 2001). Conductors of Berio’s music include high profile names like Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chilly, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss Jansons and Loren Maazel to mention only a few. In recent times Berio has been grouped with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti and Pierre Boulez, as one of the principle founders of European musical modernism of the post-war period, and similarly one of the most important pioneers of the new electronic music that emerged in the 1950’s. With the death of Berio, music has lost not only a wonderful composer, but also one of its main representatives of the Twentieth Century.