Luciano Berio | |
|---|---|
 Berio in the 1970s | |
| Born | (1925-10-24)24 October 1925 Oneglia, Italy |
| Died | 27 May 2003(2003-05-27) (aged 77) Rome, Italy |
| Works | List of compositions |
Luciano BerioOMRI (24 October 1925 – 27 May 2003) was an Italian composer noted for hisexperimental work (in particular his 1968 compositionSinfonia and his series of virtuosic solo pieces titledSequenza), and for his pioneering work inelectronic music. His early work was influenced byIgor 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 inOneglia (now part ofImperia), on theLigurian coast of Italy. He was taught piano by his father and grandfather, who were bothorganists. DuringWorld 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.
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Following the war, Berio studied at theMilan Conservatory under Giulio Cesare Paribeni andGiorgio 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, asuite for piano. Berio made a living at this time by accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met the Americanmezzo-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.
In 1952, Berio went to the United States to study withLuigi Dallapiccola atTanglewood, from whom he gained an interest inserialism. He later attended theInternationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik atDarmstadt, where he metPierre Boulez,Karlheinz Stockhausen,György Ligeti andMauricio Kagel. He became interested inelectronic music, co-founding theStudio di fonologia musicale, an electronic music studio in Milan, withBruno Maderna in 1955. He invited a number of significant composers to work there, among themHenri Pousseur andJohn 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 fromDarius Milhaud, took a teaching post atMills College inOakland, California. From 1960 to 1962, Berio also taught at theDartington International Summer School. In 1965, he began to teach at theJuilliard School, and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performances ofcontemporary music. In 1966, he married again, this time to the noted philosopher of scienceSusan Oyama. They divorced in 1972. His students includedLouis Andriessen,Noah Creshevsky,Steven Gellman,Dina Koston,Steve Reich,Luca Francesconi,Giulio Castagnoli,Flavio Emilio Scogna,William Schimmel andPhil Lesh of theGrateful Dead.[2]
All this time, Berio had been steadily composing and building a reputation, winning thePrix Italia in 1966 forLaborintus II, a work for voices, instruments and tape with text byEdoardo Sanguineti that was commissioned by the French Television to celebrate the 700th anniversary ofDante Alighieri’s birth.[3] His reputation was strengthened when hisSinfonia was premiered in 1968. In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980, he was the director of the electro-acoustic division ofIRCAM in Paris. He married the musicologist Talia Pecker in 1977.
In 1987, he openedTempo Reale, a centre for musical research and production based inFlorence. In 1988, he was made an Honorary Member of theRoyal Academy of Music, London.[4] The following year, he received theErnst von Siemens Music Prize. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.[5] The same year, he became Distinguished Composer in Residence atHarvard University, remaining there until 2000. In 1993–94, he gave theCharles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, later published asRemembering the Future. In 2000, he became Presidente and Sovrintendente at theAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.
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 analyzingBeethoven'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 wasThema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), based on Cathy Berberian reading fromJames Joyce'sUlysses, which can be considered as the firstelectroacoustic 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 completedO King a work which exists in two versions: one for voice,flute,clarinet,violin,cello andpiano, the other for eight voices andorchestra. The piece is in memory ofMartin Luther King Jr., who hadbeen 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 ofO 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 andmusical 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 poetEdoardo Sanguineti, who for this piece provided a text full of quotations from sources including theBible,T. S. Eliot andKarl Marx.
Another example of the influence of Sanguineti is the large workCoro (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 byPablo 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 asOfanìm (1988–1997) andAltra voce (1999): the electronic music and technical part of such pieces was always performed by the musicians ofTempo Reale.
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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 andWitold Lutosławski), Berio was asked by the cellistMstislav Rostropovich to celebrate the Swiss conductorPaul 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 name12 Hommages à Paul Sacher.[11] Berio's piece is calledLes 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 cellistFrantišek Brikcius in Prague in 2011. MusicLes 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 nameSequenza. The first,Sequenza I came in 1958 and is forflute; the last,Sequenza XIV (2002) is forcello. These works explore the full possibilities of each instrument, often calling forextended techniques.
The variousSequenze are as follows:
Berio is known for adapting and transforming the music of others, but he also adapted his own compositions: the series ofSequenze gave rise to a series of works calledChemins each based on one of theSequenze.Chemins II (1967), for instance, takes the originalSequenza VI (1967) for viola and adapts it for solo viola and nine other instruments.Chemins II was itself transformed intoChemins III (1968) by the addition of an orchestra, and there also existsChemins IIb, a version ofChemins II without the solo viola but with a larger ensemble, andChemins IIc, which isChemins IIb with an added solobass clarinet. TheSequenze were also shaped into new works under titles other thanChemins;Corale (1981), for example, is based onSequenza VIII.
As well as original works, Berio made a number ofarrangements of works by other composers, among themClaudio Monteverdi,Henry Purcell,Johannes Brahms,Gustav Mahler andKurt Weill. For Berberian he wroteFolk Songs (1964; a set of arrangements offolk songs). He also wrote an ending forGiacomo Puccini'soperaTurandot (premiered in Las Palmas on 24 January 2002[12] and in the same year in Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Salzburg) and inRendering (1989) took the few sketchesFranz Schubert made for hisSymphony No. 10 and completed them by adding music derived from other Schubert works.
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 atFranz 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 ofcollage, 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 withinSinfonia but throughout his "deconstructive" works. Rather, eachquotation 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 incollages, 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 theoristUmberto 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 whichSinfonia and theChemins 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 areCircles (1960),Sequenza III (1966), andRecital I (for Cathy) (1972), all written for Berberian, and a number of stage works, withUn re in ascolto, a collaboration withItalo 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, andCoro, which has a strong backbone of harmonic and melodic material entirely based on the piano part).
Lesser known works make use of a very distinguishablepolyphony 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 areDifférences, 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, andChemins IV, for eleven strings and oboe, as well asCanticum novissimi testamenti for 8 voices, 4 clarinets and saxophone quartet.
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