Background
Luciano Berio was born on October 24, 1925 in Onegia (now Imperia), northern Italy. His father and grandfather were church organists and composers.
( In Remembering the Future Luciano Berio shares with us ...)
In Remembering the Future Luciano Berio shares with us some musical experiences that "invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory." His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer's profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art. There is much in this short book that provides insight on Berio's own compositions. Indeed, he comments that writing it "led me to formulate thoughts that might otherwise have remained concealed in the folds of my work." He explores themes such as transcription and translation, poetics and analysis, "open work," and music theater. The reader will also find here numerous insights on the work of other composers, past and present, and much more. A figure of formidable intellect, Berio ranges easily among topics such as Schenkerian analysis, the criticism of Carl Dahlhaus and Theodor Adorno, the works of his friends and sometime collaborators Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. But Berio carries his learning lightly--his tone is conversational, often playful, punctuated by arresting aphorisms: "The best possible commentary on a symphony is another symphony."
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Luciano Berio was born on October 24, 1925 in Onegia (now Imperia), northern Italy. His father and grandfather were church organists and composers.
After preliminary study with his father, Berio entered the Milan Conservatory, specializing in piano, conducting, and composition and after graduation worked as an operatic coach and conductor. In 1951 he received a scholarship to the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola, the Italian twelve-tone composer. In 1953 Berio attended the Darmstadt Summer School for New Music, where he met Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and other advanced young composers and became acquainted with their revolutionary musical ideas.
Dallapiccola's influence is evident in the compositions Berio wrote after his return to Italy. Nones (1955), written to W. H. Auden's poem "Ninth Hour, " is "totally controlled"; that is, not only the tones but also the durations, dynamics, and articulations follow a preconceived serial order.
Berio established the first electronic music studio in Italy and started to compose in this medium. One of his first pieces was Homage to Joyce, in which the sound material is not electronically produced tones but is a reading of the opening section of the "Sirens" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. The sound of the words is distorted through tape manipulation so that meaning is lost and only expressive vocal sounds remain. Berio was fascinated with such sounds, and in many of his pieces he explored unusual manners of speaking and singing.
Circles (1961), for voice, harp, and percussion instruments, is another early piece that exploits the expressive quality of words. The words, an E. E. Cummings poem, are "fractured, " that is, separated into their component parts: single vowels and consonants. In Visage (1960) the singer emits cries, laughs, sobs, and moans, creating a whole drama on a preverbal level. Berio was a characteristic 20th-century composer in that he did not repeat himself; each piece called for new sounds and embodied his developing aesthetic. Sinfonia (1968), an extraordinary composition written for eight singers (the Swingle Singers) and orchestra, is a vast collage of words and sounds, reflecting the complexity and disorder of modern life. Parts of it sound as though several radio programs were being played simultaneously. Underlying everything, a distorted but recognizable performance of the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony can be heard. In addition, there are words from a Samuel Beckett play, student slogans from contemporary confrontations, and fleeting references to a score of other composers ranging from J. S. Bach to Stockhausen. The piece is a Joycean bringing-together of everything in a time-destroying present. In spite of its unconventionality and complexity, the first performances were highly successful. In the early 1976, Berio began experimentation in opera, alongside his continuing orchestral, choral, and chamber pieces, notably the ongoing Sequenza series. However, despite the titular suggestion of Opera (1970), Berios's forays into the genre expectedly strayed from its traditional narrative structure while retaining its emotive peaks. Again working in collaboration with key figures of postmodern literature like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, Berio found an audience with subsequent "operas" such as La Vera Storia (1977), Un Re in Ascolto (1979), and Outis (1996), all of which deepened the composer's techniques of undermining normative conceptions of space and time. Outis, for example, was loosely based upon the classic myth of Odysseus, but lapsed in and out of a web of time frames, with Odysseus dying repeatedly in each scene. In the operas of Berio, characters were used less as coherent dramatic fictions and more as concepts on stage. Nonetheless, the works retained the color and excitement of opera, simultaneously celebrating the relationship with the legacy of musical history and interrogating that very relationship. Berio became increasingly appreciated by a mass audience, and was hailed as a much-wanted link between popular audiences and the deconstructionist avant-garde. Accordingly, Berio was invited to give a series of oral dissertations for the 1993 Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard University, a prestigious chair devoted to poetic expression in all the arts. Unfortunately, the lectures were ill received, the general consensus being that Berio's ideas were best expressed through his music.
( In Remembering the Future Luciano Berio shares with us ...)
(Two seminal interviews with the celebrated Italian compos...)
(Advanced level)
Royal Academy of Music
His wife was Cathy Berberian, the versatile American singer.