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The distinction between individual and mass music is also made clear in the use of two different kinds of text. On the one hand, Berio turned to folk poetry in various languages for the solo episodes. These folk utterances are often translated from a wide range of languages and dealt with very different topics, from love and death to the oneness between man and nature. All of these songs are authorless. For example, the initial episode in which a soprano is gradually joined by four other sopranos and five contraltos is based on an American Indian text, "Today is mine".
On the other hand, Berio used a different textual source for mass episodes, which is taken from a work by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Here, the process is reversed: whereas in the previous episodes the poetry from different peoples are assigned to individual singers, in the case of Neruda, his poetry is here sung by all forty singers in the massive tuttis which are the pillars of this piece. Only a few fragments are taken from the poet's three-volume Residencia en la tierra (1933–1947). The most recurring cry in the piece, "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" ("Come and see the blood in the streets"), is taken from the final verses of one of the poems included in this collection, entitled Explico algunas cosas ("A few things explained"). This cry appears many times throughout the piece as a refrain without any context whatsoever. [3]
Residence on Earth is book of poetry by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Residence on Earth came out in three volumes, in 1933, 1935, and 1947. Neruda wrote the book over a span of two decades, from 1925 until 1945.
Since Coro tends to be something different especially for singers because they are soloists most of the time (given the fact that the large number of voices often calls for a choir and not solo performers), it is generally psychologically new and often challenging. Probably to make things simpler, Berio decided to use a wide range of texts in very different —and, often, little-known— languages; however, most of the texts in African, Iranian, and American languages are generally translated into German. Berio only used five different languages: French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. [1]
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.
Spanish, known in the Middle Ages as Castilian, is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers in the Americas and Spain. It is a global language and the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese.
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca. It is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, as England. Both names derive from Anglia, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea. The language is closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, and its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Norse, and to a greater extent by Latin and French.
Scoring and on-stage distribution
Coro is scored for forty voices and forty instruments, namely, a chorus of 10 sopranos, 10 altos, 10 tenors and 10 basses, four flutes (flutes three and four doubling piccolos), an oboe, an English horn, a piccolo clarinet in E-flat, two clarinets in B-flat, a bass clarinet in B-flat, an alto saxophone, a tenor saxophone, two bassoons, a contrabassoon, three trumpets in F, four French horns in C, three trombones, a bass tuba, a tenor tuba, an electric organ, a piano, a large percussion section played by two percussionists consisting in five cowbells, six tom-toms, ten tam-tams, a snare drum, a set of chimes, a pair of castanets, two guiro, two set of sleigh bells, maracas, two pairs of zills, a ratchet, three woodblocks, two bongos, a bass drum, a tambourine and a glockenspiel and, finally, three violins, four violas, four violoncelli, and three double basses.
Although the work is largely based on folk material, Berio used no direct quotations or transformations of actual folk songs, aside from movement 6, where he used a Croatian melody, and movement 16, where he quoted a melody from his own Cries of London . [4] Berio used, in addition to this folk element, a wide range of musical avant-garde techniques. He divided the piece into 31 "self-contained and often contrasting episodes" and made clear that the same piece of text is used in several different parts of the piece with different music, whereas the same musical model can also occur several times with different texts. To the end of enhancing acoustical and visual interactions among voices and instruments, he envisaged a very specific placing of the singers and instruments on the stage, with a singer each sitting next to an instrumentalist of roughly comparable timbre and range, forming a semicircle. [1] According to Berio, the harmonic level is perhaps the most important one, since it is the work's base but is at the same time its environment and its slowly changing landscape. [5]
This was not the first time Berio decided to place instrumentalists together with singers: he also did this in his Sinfonia and Labyrinth , to name a few works, as one of his major preoccupations in musical composition was creating an acoustic unity among all instruments and voices. Berio himself cited "different levels of understanding" as one of the most important traits of his work, as he stated that the range of complexity varied widely along the whole composition, going from African musical techniques to complex, avant-garde techniques. On the way listeners should understand this piece, he commented:
There is every way of listening: you may listen to a Mozart symphony only in terms of melody. That's poor, but it's there, you can do it. Of course the deeper you go, the more you are rewarded. So here there is a simpler level of perception, then it is more complex. It's one of the great privileges of music that there is a certain complexity of perception: the Grosse Fuge is complex. But then you can generate simpler levels.
