Luciano BerioOMRI (24 October 1925 – 27 May 2003) was an Italian composer noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia and his series of virtuosic solo pieces titled Sequenza), and for his pioneering work in electronic music. His early work was influenced by Igor Stravinsky and experiments with serial and electronic techniques, while his later works explore indeterminacy and the use of spoken texts as the basic material for composition.[1]
Berio was born in Oneglia (now part of Imperia), on the Ligurian coast of Italy. He was taught 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 and spent time in a military hospital.
Berio's first wife was the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian.
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, he had the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano. Berio made a living at this time by accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met the American mezzo-sopranoCathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). They had one daughter, Cristina Berio (born in 1953). Berio wrote a number of pieces that exploited her distinctive voice.
All this time, Berio had been steadily composing and building a reputation, winning the Prix Italia in 1966 for Laborintus II, a work for voices, instruments and tape with text by Edoardo Sanguineti that was commissioned by the French Television to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s birth.[3] His reputation was strengthened when his Sinfonia was premiered in 1968. In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980, he was the director of the electro-acoustic division of IRCAM in Paris. He married the musicologist Talia Pecker in 1977.
Berio was active as a conductor and continued to compose to the end of his life. He died in 2003 in a hospital in Rome. He was an atheist.[6]
He was noted for his sense of humour. He gave a two-hour seminar at a summer school in the United States analyzing Beethoven's 7th Symphony, demonstrating that it was a work of radical genius. The next day he gave another two-hour seminar, with a completely straight face, showing why it was hopelessly flawed and a creative dead-end.[7]
Berio'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, which can be considered as the first electroacoustic composition in the history of western music made with voice and elaboration of it by technological means.[8] A later work, Visage (1961) sees Berio creating a wordless emotional language by cutting up and rearranging a recording of Cathy Berberian's voice; therefore the composition is based on the symbolic and representative charge of gestures and voice inflections, "from inarticulate sounds to syllables, from laughter to tears and singing, from aphasia to inflection patterns from specific languages: English and Italian, Hebrew and the Neapolitan dialect".[9][10]
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 Jr., 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.
Berio with violinist Francesco D'Orazio
The orchestral version of O King was, shortly after its completion, integrated into what is perhaps Berio's most famous work, Sinfonia (1967–69), 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. The third movement is a collage of literary and musical quotations. 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 (premiered 1977), 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; the 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 the outbreak of the civil war in Spain.
In the last period of his production Berio was also interested in the use of live electronics, applied in some compositions as Ofanìm (1988–1997) and Altra voce (1999): the electronic music and technical part of such pieces was always performed by the musicians of Tempo Reale.
Along with eleven other composers, (Conrad Beck, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Fortner, Alberto Ginastera, Cristóbal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Klaus Huber and Witold Lutosławski), Berio was asked by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to celebrate the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher's 70th birthday by composing a solo cello piece using the letters of Sacher's name (eS, A, C, H, E, Re). This was published under the name 12 Hommages à Paul Sacher.[11] Berio's piece is called Les mots sont allés (The Words Are Gone). Some of the resulting compositions were performed in Zurich on 2 May 1976 and the whole "Sacher" project was first performed completely by Czech cellist František Brikcius in Prague in 2011. Music Les mots sont allés has been performed since by cellists Siegfried Palm, Jean-Michelle Fonteneau, and Alexander Ezerman among others.
Berio composed a series of virtuoso 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 full possibilities of each instrument, often calling for extended techniques.
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 VI (1967) for viola 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.
Transcription is a vital part of even Berio's original works. In "Two Interviews", Berio mused about what a college course in transcription would look like, looking not only at Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, himself, and others, but to what extent composition is always self-transcription.[13] In this respect, Berio rejected and distanced 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 collages, 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 told interviewer Rossana Dalmonte.
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 lifelong friendship with linguist and critical theorist Umberto Eco) through his compositions. Berio's works are often analytic acts: deliberately analysing myths, stories, the components of words themselves, his own compositions, or preexisting musical 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 prominent 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.[citation needed] 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 in several works, but most recognisably in compositions for small instrumental combinations. Examples are Différences, 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, as well as Canticum novissimi testamenti for 8 voices, 4 clarinets and saxophone quartet.
Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. Puccini left the opera unfinished at the time of his death in 1924; it premiered in 1926 after the music was posthumously completed by Franco Alfano.
Sylvano Bussotti was an Italian composer of contemporary classical music, also a painter, set and costume designer, opera director and manager, writer and academic teacher. His compositions employ graphic notation, which has often created special problems of interpretation. He was known as a composer for the stage. His first opera was La Passion selon Sade, premiered in Palermo in 1965. Later operas and ballets were premiered at the Teatro Comunale di Firenze, Teatro Lirico di Milano, Teatro Regio di Torino and Piccola Scala di Milano, among others. He was artistic director of La Fenice in Venice, the Puccini Festival and the music section of the Venice Biennale. He taught internationally, for a decade at the Fiesole School of Music. He is regarded as a leading composer of Italy's avantgarde, and a Renaissance man with many talents who combined the arts expressively.
Franco Alfano was an Italian composer and pianist, best known today for his operas Cyrano de Bergerac (1936), Risurrezione (1904) and for having completed Puccini's opera Turandot in 1926. He had considerable success with several of his own works during his lifetime.
Catherine Anahid Berberian was an American mezzo-soprano and composer based in Italy. She worked closely with many contemporary avant-garde music composers, including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Sylvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and Igor Stravinsky. She also interpreted works by Claudio Monteverdi, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Kurt Weill, Philipp zu Eulenburg and others. As a recital curator, she presented several vocal genres in a classical context, including arrangements of songs by The Beatles by Louis Andriessen as well as folk songs from several countries and cultures. As a composer, she wrote Stripsody (1966), in which she exploits her vocal technique using comic book sounds (onomatopoeia), and Morsicat(h)y (1969), a composition for the keyboard based on Morse code.
Heinz Robert Holliger is a Swiss composer, virtuoso oboist, and conductor. Celebrated for his versatility and technique, Holliger is among the most prominent oboists of his generation. His repertoire includes Baroque and Classical pieces, but he has regularly engaged in lesser known pieces of Romantic music, as well as his own compositions. He often performed contemporary works with his wife, the harpist Ursula Holliger. Many composers have written works for him, including Messiaen, Berio, Carter, Henze, Krenek, Lutosławski, Martin, Penderecki, Stockhausen and Yun. A noted composer himself, Hollinger has written works such as the opera Schneewittchen (1998).
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.
Sequenza is the name borne by fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice by Luciano Berio. The pieces, some of which call for extended techniques, are:
Sequenza XII is a composition for solo bassoon, written by Luciano Berio in 1995, and part of a series of fourteen Sequenze composed between 1958 and 2002. The work was written for, and dedicated to, the French bassoonist Pascal Gallois, who gave the world première on 15 June 1995.
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.
Vinko Globokar is a French-Slovenian avant-garde composer and trombonist.
Lorenzo Ferrero is an Italian composer, librettist, author, and book editor. He started composing at an early age and has written over a hundred compositions thus far, including twelve operas, three ballets, and numerous orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. His musical idiom is characterized by eclecticism, stylistic versatility, and a neo-tonal language.
Sequenza II is a composition for unaccompanied harp by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Written for and premiered by the French harpist Francis Pierre in 1963, it has since been performed and recorded by Emily Laurance, Frédérique Cambreling, Susan Jolles, and Claudia Antonelli, among others. The piece is about seven to eight minutes.
Sequenza IV for solo piano is the fourth in a series of solo Sequenze by Luciano Berio that started with the publication of Sequenza I for solo flute.
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 incorporates musical quotations to represent an abstract and distorted history of culture. The eight voices are not incorporated classically but rather speak, whisper and shout excerpts from texts including Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Laborintus II is an album by the Belgian orchestra Ictus Ensemble, the vocal group Nederlands Kamerkoor, and the American vocalist Mike Patton, which was recorded live at the 2010 Holland Festival. It was released on July 10, 2012, by Ipecac Recordings, and debuted at number 23 on the American Billboard Classical Albums Chart. It was not well received by critics.
Sequenza VI is a composition for solo viola by Luciano Berio, part of his series of fourteen Sequenze.
Quattro versioni originali della "Ritirata notturna di Madrid" is an arrangement by Luciano Berio of a movement from Luigi Boccherini's Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid. 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.
Coro is a large scale composition for forty voices and forty instruments by Italian composer Luciano Berio.
↑ Stowell, Robin, "Other solo repertory" in R. Stowell (ed.), (1999) The Cambridge Companion to the Cello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 144
Peter Altmann, Sinfonia von Luciano Berio. Eine analytische Studie, Vienna: Universal Edition, 1977.
Gianmario Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960. Entwurf einer Theorie der informellen Musik, Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1993.
Francesco Giomi, Damiano Meacci, Kilian Schwoon, "Live Electronics in Luciano Berio's Music", Computer Music Journal 27 (2), The MIT Press, 2003.
Ute Brüdermann, Das Musiktheater von Luciano Berio, Bern/Frankfurt/New York, Peter Lang 2007.
Claudia Sabine Di Luzio, Vielstimmigkeit und Bedeutungsvielfalt im Musiktheater von Luciano Berio, Mainz, Schott 2010.
Norbert Dressen, Sprache und Musik bei Luciano Berio. Untersuchungen zu seinem Vokalschaffen, Regensburg, Bosse 1982.
Giordano Ferrari, Les débuts du théâtre musical d'avantgarde en Italie, Paris, L'Harmattan 2000.
Thomas Gartmann, »...dass nichts an sich jemals vollendet ist.«Untersuchungen zum Instrumentalschaffen von Luciano Berio, Bern/Stuttgart/Wien 1995.
René Karlen and Sabine Stampfli (eds.), Luciano Berio. Musikmanuskripte, (= »Inventare der Paul Sacher Stiftung«, vol. 2), Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1988.
Jean-François Lyotard, "'A Few Words to Sing': Sequenza III", in: Jean-François Lyotard, Miscellaneous Texts II: Contemporary Artists. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. ISBN978-90-586-7886-7
Jürgen Maehder, Zitat, Collage, Palimpsest ─ Zur Textbasis des Musiktheaters bei Luciano Berio und Sylvano Bussotti, in Hermann Danuser/Matthias Kassel (eds.), Musiktheater heute. Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel 2001, Mainz, Schott 2003, p.97–133.
Jürgen Maehder, Giacomo Puccinis "Turandot" und ihre Wandlungen ─ Die Ergänzungsversuche des III. "Turandot"-Aktes, in: Thomas Bremer and Titus Heydenreich (eds.), Zibaldone. Zeitschrift für italienische Kultur der Gegenwart, vol. 35, Tübingen: Stauffenburg 2003, pp.50–77.
Florivaldo Menezes, Un essai sur la composition verbale électronique »Visage«de Luciano Berio, ("Quaderni di Musica/Realtà", vol. 30), Modena 1993.
Florivaldo Menezes, Luciano Berio et la phonologie. Une approche jakobsonienne de son œuvre, Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Peter Lang 1993.
Fiamma Nicolodi, Pensiero e giuoco nel teatro di Luciano Berio, in: Fiamma Nicolodi, Orizzonti musicali italo-europei 1860–1980. Rome: Bulzoni. 1990, pp.299–316.
David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words. A Guide to Berio's »Sinfonia«, London (Royal Musical Association) 1985.
David Osmond-Smith (ed.), Luciano Berio. Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga. New York/London: [S.n.], 1985.
David Osmond-Smith, Berio, (= Oxford Studies of Composers, vol. 24), Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
David Osmond-Smith, Nella festa tutto? Structure and Dramaturgy in Luciano Berio's »La vera storia«, in: Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (1997), pp.281–294.
David Osmond-Smith, Here Comes Nobody: A Dramaturgical Exploration of Luciano Berio's "Outis", in: Cambridge Opera Journal 12/2000, pp.163–178.
Michel Philippot, Entretien Luciano Berio, in: La Revue Musicale, numéro spécial Varèse ─ Xenakis ─ Berio ─ Pierre Henry, Paris 1968, pp.85–93.
Edoardo Sanguineti, Per Musica, edited by Luigi Pestalozza, Modena, Milan: Mucchi and Ricordi, 1993.
Charlotte Seither, Dissoziation als Prozeß. "Sincronie for string quartet" von Luciano Berio, Kassel: Bärenreiter 2000.
Peter Stacey, Contemporary Tendencies in the Relationship of Music and Text with Special Reference to "Pli selon pli" (Boulez) and "Laborinthus II" (Berio), New York, London: Garland, 1989.
Ivanka Stoïanova, Verbe et son "centre et absence". Sur "Cummings ist der Dichter" de Boulez, "O King" de Berio et "Für Stimmen... Missa est" de Schnebel, in: Musique en jeu, 1 (1974), pp.79–102.
Ivanka Stoïanova, Prinzipien des Musiktheaters bei Luciano Berio – "Passaggio", "Laborintus II", "Opera", in: Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), Oper heute. Formen der Wirklichkeit im zeitgenössischen Musiktheater, Studien zur Wertungsforschung 16, Graz, Wien: Universal Edition 1985, pp.217–227.
Ivanka Stoïanova, "Luciano Berio. Chemins en musique". La Revue Musicale Nos. 375–377 (1985).
Ivanka Stoïanova, Procédés narratifs dans le théâtre musical récent: L. Berio, S. Bussotti et K. Stockhausen, in: Ivanka Stoïanova, Entre Détermination et aventure. Essais sur la musique de la deuxième moitié du XXème siècle, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004, pp.243–276.
Marco Uvietta, "È l'ora della prova": un finale Puccini-Berio per »Turandot«, in: Studi musicali 31/2002, pp.395–479; English translation: "È l'ora della prova": Berio's finale for Puccini's "Turandot", in: Cambridge Opera Journal 16 (2004), pp.187–238.
Matthias Theodor Vogt, Listening as a Letter of Uriah: A note on Berio's "Un re in ascolto" (1984) on the occasion of the opera's first performance in London (9 February 1989), in: Cambridge Opera Journal 2/1990, pp.173–185.
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