Coro | |
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by Luciano Berio | |
![]() Luciano Berio, at the time of the composition. | |
Composed | 1974—1976 |
Published | Ricordi |
Duration | Approximately one hour |
Movements | 31 |
Scoring | 40 voices and 40 instruments |
Premiere | |
Date | 24 October 1976 |
Location | Donaueschingen |
Conductor | Luciano Berio |
Performers | WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln WDR Rundfunkchor Köln |
Coro (Italian : Chorus) is a large scale composition for forty voices and forty instruments by Italian composer Luciano Berio.
Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, and together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to it of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria. It formerly had official status in Albania, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro (Kotor) and Greece, and is generally understood in Corsica and Savoie. It also used to be an official language in the former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa, where it still plays a significant role in various sectors. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a regional or a traditional language in these countries, where Italians do not represent a historical minority. In the case of Romania, Italian is listed by the Government along 10 other languages which supposedly receive a "general protection", but not between those which should be granted an "advanced or enhanced" one. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian and other regional languages.
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.
Coro was written at a time when, according to Berio, "the blood in the streets of Italy came out", partly due to the Years of Lead. Berio, a composer committed to social issues, often expressed his views and described the composition's central theme to be "the acute awareness of things at a tragic moment. On this line, he referred to Coro as being a tribute to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In his opinion, Neruda was "practically murdered (not physically, but spiritually); they broke his heart. [...] It is an invitation to be aware of the violence of the times, Fascist violence". [1]
The Years of Lead is a term used for a period of social and political turmoil in Italy that lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, marked by a wave of both left-wing and right-wing incidents of political terrorism.
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a South American country occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far south. Chilean territory includes the Pacific islands of Juan Fernández, Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas, and Easter Island in Oceania. Chile also claims about 1,250,000 square kilometres (480,000 sq mi) of Antarctica, although all claims are suspended under the Antarctic Treaty.
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Berio composed Coro between 1974 and 1976 under a commission by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln. It was dedicated to his wife, Talia Berio. Its premiere took place in Donaueschingen on 24 October 1976 by the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln. However, Berio only premiered an initial version of Coro, which contained 29 movements. The final 31-movement piece was premiere later in Graz, on 16 November 1977, by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton of Leif Segerstam. [2]
Donaueschingen is a German town in the Black Forest in the southwest of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg in the Schwarzwald-Baar Kreis. It stands near the confluence of the two sources of the river Danube.
The WDR Rundfunkchor Köln is the choir of the German broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), based in Cologne. It was founded in 1947. The choir premiered works by contemporary composers including Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron in 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Momente, Luigi Nono's Il canto sospeso, Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Requiem für einen jungen Dichter and Penderecki's St Luke Passion.
The WDR Funkhausorchester Köln is a broadcast orchestra of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. It was also known as Kölner Rundfunkorchester. In its present form the orchestra was founded in 1947, but groups from which it was formed date back to 1927. It is an important part of the WDR and consists currently of 56 principal members.
As customary in Berio's musical output, Coro has its place in a sequence of works whose titles refer to archetypal modes of musical expression. He started this sequence with his Sinfonia (1968–1969), followed by his outlook on the whole genre of music theatre in Opera (1960–1970), on the life and work of a solo singer in Recital I (for Cathy) (1972) and on the relationship between soloists and ensembles in his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1972–1973). [3] With Coro, Berio also further explored the kind of folk music he had already used in his Folk Songs (1964) and Questo vuol dire che (1969). [4]
Sinfonia (Symphony) is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight 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, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Recital I is a stage work by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. It was written for Cathy Berberian, with whom Berio was married from 1950 to 1964, and is scored for mezzo-soprano and 17 instruments. It was first performed on 27 April 1972 in Lisbon in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grand Auditórium by Cathy Berberian with Orquesta Gulbenkian, conducted by the composer.
Folk Songs is a song cycle by the Italian composer Luciano Berio composed in 1964. It consists of arrangements of folk music from various countries and other songs, forming "a tribute to the extraordinary artistry" of the American singer Cathy Berberian, a specialist in Berio's music. It is scored for voice, flute, clarinet, harp, viola, cello, and percussion. The composer arranged it for a large orchestra in 1973.
Coro is divided into 31 untitled movements of varying duration and takes around an hour to perform. Following is a full breakdown of the movements, with their duration as specified by Berio in the original score.
Movement | Incipit | Duration | Tempo |
---|---|---|---|
1 | "Today is mine. I claimed to a man" | — | ♩ = 60 (ma sempre molto flessible) |
2 | "Venid a ver" | 1:25 | ♩ = 64 |
3 | "Your eyes are red" | 0:30 | ♩ = 114 |
4 | "Venid a ver" | 0:06 | ♩ = 104 |
5 | "Your eyes are red" | 1:30 | ♩ = 84 |
6 | "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" | 0:20 | ♩ = 104 |
7 | "Wake up, woman, rise up, woman" | 1:40 | ♩ = 104 |
8 | "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" | — | ♩ = 72 |
9 | "I have made a song" | — | ♩ = 72 |
10 | "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" | — | ♩ = 68 |
11 | "I have made a song" | 2:05 | ♩ = 84 |
12 | "Venid a ver la sangre" | 0:30 | ♩ = 84 |
13 | "Wake up, woman, rise up, woman" | — | ♩ = 96 |
14 | "Venid a ver la sangre" | 0:35 ca. | ♩ = 60 |
15 | "Komm in meine Nähe" | 0:30 | ♩ = 60 |
16 | "Today is mine. I claimed to a man" | 2:10 | ♩ = 84 |
17 | "Pousse l'herbe et fleurit la fleur" | 1:15 | ♩. = 84 |
18 | "Go, my strong charm" | — | ♩ = 116 |
19 | "It is so nice, a nice one gave a sound" | 1:35 | ♪ = 160 |
20 | "Your eyes are red" | — | ♩ = 94 |
21 | "Mirad mi casa muerta" | — | ♩ = 74 |
22 | "Je m'en vais où ma pensée s'en va" | — | ♩ = 72 |
23 | "Pousse l'herbe et fleurit la fleur" | 1:20 | 𝅗𝅥 = 68 |
24 | "Oh, issa, oh, issalo in alto" | 1:35 | ♩ = 84 |
25 | "Oh, isselo in alto" | — | ♩ = 94 |
26 | "Come ascend the ladder" | — | ♩ = 72 |
27 | "When we came to this world" | — | ♩ = 60 |
28 | "El día oscila rodeado" | — | ♩ = 72 — ♩ = 60 |
29 | "Hinach yafà raayatí" | — | ♩ = 84 |
30 | "El día pálido se asoma" | — | ♩ = 74 |
31 | "Spin, colours, spin" | — | ♩ = 60 |
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.
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.
— Luciano Berio [1]
Both Berio and renowned conductor Lorin Maazel have stated that one of the main challenges in Coro is the balance in sounds and, more specifically, in voices, arguing that "it sounds better in a hall". Because of this, both conductors were very critical of recordings, claiming that the rewarding experience of listening to the freshness of sounds is often destroyed, and no sense of distribution can be made when listening to a recorded version of the piece. [1]
The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian, historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In 4-part voice leading alto is the second highest part, sung in choruses by either low women's or high men's voices. In vocal classification these are usually called contralto and male alto or countertenor.
IRCAM is a French institute for science about music and sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organisationally linked with, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Much of the institute is located underground, beneath the fountain to the east of the buildings.
Pascal Dusapin is a contemporary French composer born in Nancy, France. His music is marked by its microtonality, tension, and energy.
Contrabass refers to several musical instruments of very low pitch—generally one octave below bass register instruments. While the term most commonly refers to the double bass, many other instruments in the contrabass register exist.
A multiphonic is an extended technique on a monophonic musical instrument in which several notes are produced at once. This includes wind, reed, and brass instruments, as well as the human voice. Multiphonic-like sounds on string instruments, both bowed and hammered, have also been called multiphonics, for lack of better terminology and scarcity of research.
Différences is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio for flute, clarinet, viola, cello, harp and magnetic tape, dating 1958–59. It was written for the Domaine musical concerts in Paris and first performed in March 1959, conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Henri Pousseur was a Belgian composer, teacher, and music theorist.
Peter Lieberson was an American classical composer.
Circles is a composition for female voice, harp and two percussionists by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Written in 1960 Circles is a setting of three poems by E. E. Cummings, including the poems "Stinging", "Riverly Is a Flower", and "N(o)w".
Betty Olivero is an Israeli music educator and composer.
Stojan Stojkov, born 1941 Podaresh, Radovish, is a Macedonian composer and pedagogue. He completed his education on music at Belgrade Music Academy, where he graduated on the Department of Composition. Stojkov is author of numerous works of almost all genres and forms of music. His creative opus includes symphonies, vocal-instrumental, vocal, and staged works, chamber compositions, works for children and other kinds of music creative works.
Thema is an electroacoustic composition by Luciano Berio, for voice and tape. Composed between 1958 and 1959, it is based on the interpretative reading of the poem "Sirens" from chapter 11 of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce by Cathy Berberian and on the elaboration of her recorded voice by technological means.
Laborintus II is a 2012 album by Belgian orchestra Ictus Ensemble, vocal group Nederlands Kamerkoor and American vocalist Mike Patton. It is a recording of the 1965 work of the same name by Italian composer Luciano Berio, which featured lyrics taken from fellow Italian Edoardo Sanguineti's 1956 poem Laborintus. The performance was recorded live at the 2010 Holland Festival.
Quattro versioni originali della "Ritirata notturna di Madrid" is an arrangement of a movement from Luigi Boccherini's Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid by Italian composer Luciano Berio. The full title of the composition is Quattro versioni originali della "Ritirata notturna di Madrid" di Luigi Boccherini, sovrapposte e transcritte per orchestra. This arrangement was composed in 1975.
Sequenza VII is a composition for solo oboe by Luciano Berio, the seventh of his fourteen Sequenze. The sequenza calls for extended technique. In 1975, Berio used Sequenza VII as part of Chemins IV, which included an orchestra of eleven string instruments. In 1993, Claude Delangle adapted the work for soprano saxophone, naming the revised work Sequenza VIIb.