20th Centry Music: Luciano Berio - Essay Example

Luciano Berio Luciano Berio, Italy's leading mid-century composer is a close t of Stockhausen and Boulez; his music and career show many parallels with theirs. Having become friends at Darmstadt in the early 1950s, all three wrote compositions of the same general type at about the same time. They are internationalists who spend time in the United States as they do in Europe. All have taught at American Universities, have expressed their views on the state of music and the state of the world in books and articles, and have conducted orchestras and music festivals in various parts of the world. Together, they form the image of the young, mid-century composer, who is far cry from being introverted, "ivory-towered artist" stereotype. Berio was born in Oneglia, a small town in Northern Italy, where both his father and grandfather were church organists and composers. After preliminary study with them he entered Milan Conservatory specializing in piano, conducting and composition. In 1951scholarship took him to Berkshire Center at Tanglewood Massachusetts where he studiedwith Luigi Dallapicolla, who taught there that summer. In 1953, he attended the Darmstadt Summer School and met Stockhausen and Boulez, and learned about their musical interests. His totally-controlled Nines (1955) already described, reflects this trend. In 1960s Berio wroteseries of solopieces for flute, harp, solo voice, piano and trombone called Sequenza. In each discovers and exploits new sounds from the instruments. The Sequenza for trombone is particularly interesting in its absolutely new sounds; somecombination of the trombonist's singing or humming while he plays, as a result of blowing through the instrument without embouchure, others by tapping the side of the instrument. The Sequenza for voice also calls for sounds emanating from the throat. These pieces show Berio's interest in enriching timbral resources. They call for a new kind of virtuosity that goes far beyond conventional standards. The most ambitious and successful of Berio's works to date is Sinfonia (1968), written for eight voices (The Single Sisters) and orchestra, combined in that close connection -voices sounding like instruments and instruments sounding like voices- already found in Circles. In no sense a conventional symphony, the word Sinfonia is used in its original; meaning of "sounding together". Sinfonia is in four movements. The first is dominated by voices, speaking and humming, occasionally punctuated by crashing orchestral sonorities. The texts, spoken in stuttering manner, are from Le Cru et le Cuit, a study of Brazilian folklore by Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist. It is slow moving and carefully articulated between the vocal and instrumental sections. It is obviously planned and purposeful and is therefore unlike Stockhausen's Hymnen where there is little if any causal relationship between parts. The second movement is a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King; the vocal parts consist of nothing more than the chanting of his name. The movement is elegiac and bell-like timbre and melodic outline. Instruments and voices are so interwoven in long, sustained unisons that it is difficult to distinguish between them. The third movement is the longest and most original. It is based on the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony which is played as a more or less constant "background" but there are also references to Bach, Schoenberg, and Debussy, Strauss, Ravel, Brahms, Boulez, Stockhausen and others. In the foreground one hears snatches of a Beckett play and student slogans from recent confrontations. It is an amazing dreamlike jumbling together of sound images from the past and the present, reminding free associations of James Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, where different languages and dictions are brought together in a time-destroying present. Berio speaks of the movement as a documentary of an objet trouve (the Mahler movement), recorded in the mind of the listener. As a structural point of reference, Mahler is the totality of the music of this section what Beckett is to the text. The fourth movement can only be described as a "work in progress" because it has been performed in several versions. Sinfonia is one of the most significant works of the late 1960s. It is tremendous omnibus, carrying past and present, voices and instruments, and popular and sophisticated styles. Above all, it is relevant. Music, for Berio, is a social art, a medium of communication between composer and audience. He is a man of deep convictions about human condition and his all-embracing musical style is his statement. One of the unexpected events of the postwar musical world was the emergence of a vigorous and adventurous group of Polish composers, because music in the Iron Curtain countries was traditionally ultraconservative. After the Stalinist regime was overthrown in 1956, however, succeeding Polish government encouraged free expression in the arts and once the lid was off, there was a great deal of healthy experimental activity in the Polish theater, films, painting, music. The Warsaw Fall Festivals of Contemporary Music, founded in 1956, became important international cultural events. During the first years, music from all of Europe was played but soon it became the showplace for the exciting music being written by young and hitherto unknown Polish composers. One of the major composers to emerge was Wit old Lutoslawski (1913). His earliest works, Symphonic Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1938) for two pianos, and a Symphony, show the influence of Stravinsky. His Concerto for Orchestra (1954) is closer to Bartok, an influence he acknowledged in Trauermusik (1958), written in memory of the Hungarian composer. In this piece he used a modified twelve-tone technique, showing his awareness of Schoenberg, but this was not to be a permanent influence. "My music", he said "has no direct relationship to the traditions of the Viennese school. I am much strongly tied to Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok and Varese." In his later compositions, Venetian Games (1961), Three Poems by Henry Micahux (1963) and a Second Symphony (1969), he uses controlled aleatoric effects leaving the individual orchestral members free to choose their own notes and rhythms in some passages. In the Poems, written for a choir of twenty individual parts and twenty-three instruments, he asks singers to speak, whisper, moan and shout, as well as sing, thus exploring some of the new vocal sounds that Stockhausen, Berio and others were using at that time. Lutoslawski's use of such devices is always for expressive purposes. Kurt Stone, writing in the Musical Quarterly, has said, "No matter how experimental his latest works may be, his musical vitality, combined with discipline of traditional craftsmanship, lends even to these probing, advanced works a commanding dignity, seriousness, and unerring power of communication found only rarely among today's composers". The String Quartet has all the boldness and strength of the works immediately preceding, but at the same time the contrapuntal and formal aspects are developed in an entirely new manner. The form, then, extends to the work as a whole, beyond individual movements, in the manner of Beethoven's later sonatas. The first movement glorifies Bartok's favorite interval, the minor second. It is used both melodically and harmonically, most of the melodies having a narrow compass resulting from a series of chromatic seconds, and most of the chords consisting of clusters of the same interval. Until one is accustomed to the effect, it is rather startling to hear such angry violence coming from the string quartet ensemble, for which so much literature has been written in more polite language. After a bold introduction of a few measures, the principal motive of the movement is heard from the cello. A few measures later, the theme is presented in inversion against itself, ending in a characteristic cluster consisting of the notes played szforzando and fortissimo. The second movement is a miracle of string writing, possibly influenced by somewhat similar movement in Berg's Lyric Suite. The tempo is breathlessly fast and the instruments are muted. The effect is unearthly for one cannot hear individual tones but only "flashes of sound". The third movement is the keystone of this arch-form work. It is static and atmospheric in Debussyan manner. An unusual effect is introduced at the beginning where the cluster chord played by the three upper strings is played nonvibrato with vibrato. Against this chord, the cello plays a chromatic soliloquy, centered on a few notes, the phrases starting with the typical Hungarian rhythm. Later, the first violin takes over with birdlike, twittering sounds, an example of "night music" mood so characteristic of the composer. The first melody turns to the cello but this time the first violin answers in free canon. The fourth movement corresponds to the second in its dependence on special string effects. Here the device is the pizzicato, the entire movement being played without bows. Again a special effect if indicated a pizzicato so intense that a snap is heard as the string hits the finger board. The movement has strong folkdance flavor, derived from the syncopated triple meter and modal scales. Berio, Luciano; Dalmonte, Rosanna & Varga, Blint Andrs (1985), Two Interviews, London: Boyars Osmond-Smith, David (1985), Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, London: Ashgate Schwartz, Elliott & Godfrey, Daniel (1993), Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, and Literature, New York City: Schirmer Books Read More