Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio (24 October 1925 in Imperia - 27 May 2003 in Rome) was an Italian modernist composer and one of the main representatives of the European musical avant-garde. He is recognized for his work in experimental music, particularly his Sinphony for orchestra, and was also a pioneer in electronic music.

Biography

Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia (today called Borgo d'Oneglia, a small town 3 km north of the city of Imperia). He received his first piano lessons from his father and his grandfather who were organists. During World War II he was drafted into the army, but on his first day of service he was wounded in the hand while learning to use a pistol. After some time in a military hospital, he escaped and joined fighting anti-Nazi groups.

After the war, Berio studied at the Milan Conservatory with Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He abandoned his piano studies due to the injury to his hand and concentrated on composition. In 1947, one of his first works, a suite for piano, was given its public premiere.

Berio made a living during that time by accompanying singing classes. He thus met his first wife, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he would marry in 1950, shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). Berio wrote numerous pieces in which the unique and versatile voice of his wife exploited.

In 1951 he traveled to the United States to study with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, who sparked his interest in serialism. Later he attended the «Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik» («International Summer Courses of Contemporary Music») in Darmstadt, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. He became interested in electronic music, founding with Bruno Maderna, in 1955, the Studio di Fonologia , an electronic music studio in Milan. He invited several significant composers to work there, such as Henri Pousseur and John Cage. He also created a publication on electronic music, Incontri Musicali .

In 1960, Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as composer-in-residence, and in 1962, invited by Darius Milhaud, he became a professor at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1965 he began teaching at the Juilliard School and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performing contemporary music. That same year, Berio married a second time, this time to the notorious philosopher Susan Oyama (whom he divorced in 1971). Among his students were Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, Luca Francesconi and Phil Lesh (of the Grateful Dead band).

During all this time, Berio was constantly composing and building his reputation, winning the Premio Italia in 1966 for Laborintus II. His work as a composer was consolidated when his Sinfonía was premiered in 1968.

In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980 he was director of the electroacoustic section of IRCAM in Paris, and in 1977 he married for the third time, this time with the musicologist Talia Pecker. In 1987 he created Tempo Reale in Florence, a center with similar intentions to IRCAM. He gave classes in this city to the composer Karen Tanaka

In 1989 he was awarded the Ernst Siemens Prize, in 1991 the Wolf Foundation Award for the Arts, and in 1994 he became Distinguished Composer-in-Residence at Harvard University, holding this position until 2000. In 1996 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale and, in the year 2000, he was appointed President and Superintendent of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He continued to compose until the end of his life. Luciano Berio died in 2003 in a hospital in Rome.

Berio's music

Original works

Berio's electronic works date mostly from his stay at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. One of the most influential works he produced there was Thema (Omaggio to Joyce) (1958), based on a reading by his first wife Cathy Berberian of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. . In a later work, Visage (1961) Berio created emotional language based on cuts and modifications of a recording of Cathy Berberian's voice.

In 1968, Berio completes O King, a work of which there are two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, and another for eight voices and orchestra. This piece is created in memory of Martin Luther King, who was assassinated shortly before it was composed. In it, the voices sing the vowels first and then the consonants, and then all join together their name in the last bars.

The orchestral version of O King was integrated, shortly after its completion, into what is perhaps Berio's most famous composition, the Sinfonia (1968-69), for orchestra and eight amplified voices (a double microphoned vocal quartet). In this work the voices are not used in the traditional way; not only do the typical intoned chant, but the voices recite, whisper, and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss (whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text), Samuel Beckett (from his novel The Unnamable), Gustav Mahler's score instructions and other texts. The work is one of the paradigms of the collage technique and one of Berio's most popular.

A-Ronne (1974) is a similar collage but more directly focused on the voice. It was originally written as a radio show for five actors and in 1975 it was reworked for eight vocalists and an optional keyboard part. This work is one of numerous collaborations with the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, who gave this piece a text full of quotes whose sources include the Bible, T. S. Eliot or Karl Marx.

Chorus

Another example of Sanguineti's influence is the extensive work Chorus, for orchestra, solo voices and a large choir, whose members are paired with instruments from the orchestra. The play lasts a little over an hour, and explores a number of themes linked to folk music from a variety of regions: Chile, North America, Africa. Recurring themes are the expression of love and passion; the pain of being separated from those we love; the death of a wife or husband. A repeated line is "come and see the blood in the streets," a reference to the Pablo Neruda poem "I explain some things," written in the context of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Other compositions by Berio include Circles (1960) and Recital I (for Cathy) (1972), all written for Berberian, and several stage works, such as the opera Un re in ascolto, with the singular collaboration of his compatriot Italo Calvino.

Sequences

Berio also produced works in which other works are not cited. Perhaps the best known is the series of works for solo instruments under the name Sequenza; the first, Sequenza I, was performed in 1958 for flute. The last one, Sequenza XIV (2002) was composed for solo cello. Berio states that these works are written for "the only type of virtuoso that is acceptable today, sensitive and intelligent" and he adds that he must possess "the highest levels of technical and intellectual virtuosity." The works fully explore the possibilities of each instrument. The different Sequenza are:

• Sequenza I for flute (1958)
• Dr. II for harp (1963)
• Dr. III for female voice (1965) written for Cathy Berberian
• Dr. IV for piano (1966)
• Sequenza V for trombone (1965)
• Sequence VI for rape (1967)
• Sequence VII for oboe (1969) written for Heinz Holliger. It was reworked as Sequenza VIIb for soprano saxophone
• Dr. VIII for violin (1976)
• Dr. IX for clarinet (1980), reworked in 1981 as Sequenza IXb for high saxophone, and in 1980 as Sequenza IXc for low Clarinete.
• Dry X for trumpet in Do and piano resonance (1984)
• Sequence XI for guitar (1987-88)
• Dr. XII for fagot (1995)
• Sequence XIII for accordion "Chanson" (1995)
• and Sequence XIV for cello (2002)

Scenic works

• Opera (1970, revised 1977)
• The vera storia (1982)
• A rendezvous (1984)
• Vor, während, nach Zaide (1995; Prelude, interlude and end for a Mozart opera fragment)
• Outis (1996)
• Clown of the Luogo (1999)
• Turandot (2001; end for Puccini opera)

Adaptations and Transcriptions

Berio has adapted his own compositions: the series Sequenze (Sequences) gave rise to a series of works called Chemins (Paths), each of them based on one of Sequence. For example, Chemins II (1967) takes the Sequenza VI of the same year for viola and adapts it for solo viola and nine other instruments. Chemins II is itself transformed into Chemins III (1968) by adding an orchestra, and there is also Chemins IIb, a version of Chemins II without viola solo but with a larger ensemble, and Chemins IIc, which adds a bass clarinet solo to Chemins IIb. The Sequenze have also given birth to other new works with other titles: Corale (1981), for example, is based on the Sequenza VIII.

In addition to his own works and adaptations, Berio is known for arranging numerous works by other composers, such as Claudio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, and Kurt Weill. For his first wife he wrote Folk Songs (1964) a collection of arrangements of popular and folk songs. He also wrote an ending for Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot (premiered in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands)-Spain on January 26, 2002 and that same year in Amsterdam and Salzburg); and in Rendering (1989) he took the few sketches that Franz Schubert made for his Symphony No. 10 , and finished them off by adding music derived from other Schubert works.

In fact, (music) is a vital part of the "creative" from Berio. In "Two Interviews", Berio expresses that what a Transcription School course should look for, is not only looking at Franz Liszt, Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, himself and others, but extending to composition what is self transcription. At this point, Berio rejects and abandons the notion of "collage", preferring to take the position of "transcriber", arguing that "collage" it implies a certain arbitrary abandonment to the careful control of his highly intellectual execution, which is given especially in his Symphony, preferring more his other & # 34;deconstructive & # 34; works. So, each quote carefully evokes the context of the original work, creating an open network, but open to highly specific referents and a vigorously defined, if re-generative, signifier-signified relationship. "I am not interested in collages, and only used them when I do it with my children: then they are an exercise in relativizing and "decontextualizing" images, an elementary exercise whose healthy cynicism should not hurt anyone" Berio tells the interviewer Rossana Dalmonte, in which one can read how he tries to distance himself from the chaotic image that many careless second-hand analysts have of him.

Perhaps Berio's greatest contribution to World War II was experimental non-serial music, which ran around his music, and with a commitment to the broader world of critical theory (personified by his friendship from lifetime with linguist and critical theorist Umberto Eco) through his compositions. Berio's works are often acts of analysis: deliberate analysis of myths, stories, components of the words themselves, his compositions, or pre-existing musical works. In other words, it is not just a 'collage' composition. #3. 4; that conveys meaning; is the particular composition of the "image-sound" the one that transmits meaning, even with an extra-musical content. The "collage" technique, associated with a less neutral and more conscious process, Joycean processes analysis with composition as a form of analytic transcription of which Sinfonía and Los Chemins are the most prominent examples.. Berio often offers his composers an academic form or a cultural discourse in itself and not as a mere thought for them.

Notable among Berio's other compositions are Circles (1960), Sequenza III (1966), and Considering I (by Cathy) (1972), all written for Berberian, and a series of plays such as A King Listens, a collaboration with Italo Calvino, among the best known.

"The Core Fundamental Approach" by Berio, is with the voice, the piano, the flute and the strings. He wrote many notable works for piano, ranging from solo concert pieces (Points on the Finding Curve, Concerto for Two Pianos, and Chorus, which has a strong backbone of harmonic and melodic material entirely based on the piano part)..

Among his lesser-known works, Berio makes use of a highly distinguishable but unique to Berio polyphony that develops a variety of forms. This occurs in various works, but the most recognizable is found in compositions for small combinations. For example: for flute, harp, clarinet, cello, violin and electronic sounds; Agnus, for three clarinets and voices; Tempi concertanti for flute and four instrumental groups, Línea, for marimba, vibraphone and two pianos; and Chemins IV, for eleventh strings and oboe, as well as " Canticum novissimi Testamenti " for 8 voices, 4 clarinets and saxophone quartet.

The meaning of Berio

Probably the most outstanding contribution to the world of post-war non-serial experimental music, reflected in many of his compositions, is his association with the wider world of critical theory (epitomized by his long friendship with the linguist and critic theorist Umberto Eco) in his music. Berio's works are then analytic acts: deliberately analyzed myths, stories, the components of the words themselves, or pre-existing musical works. In other words, it is not only in the composition of the "collage" in which the meanings converge, is the particular composition of the component "sound-image" that converges in a meaning, even extra-musical meaning. The "collage" that is associated with it, then, rather than a neutral process, it is a conscious, Joycean process of analysis-by-composition, a form of analytical transcription of which the Symphony and the Chemins are the most pruritic examples. So, Berio offers his compositions as forms of academic or cultural discourse rather than a & # 34;mere & # 34; fodder for them.

Catalog of works