Berio first came into contact with the music of the twentieth century at the end of World War II, when he enrolled at the conservatory in Milan. An undiscovered world of modern music opened its doors to him: Milhaud, Bartók, Stravinsky, but also Ravel and Prokofiev. During his years as a student in Milan, composition courses with Ghedini (starting in 1948) would be a strong influence. Ghedini, himself an expert on Stravinsky, passed on his skills in instrumentation and realization. He also helped Berio to break free of the rut of Italian music, paralyzed by opera. He led his student to establish links between baroque vocal and instrumental traditions, particularly the works of Monteverdi, and contemporary music. These new connections contributed in large part to Berio’s subsequent reflections on the history of music and its role in his creative thought. His encounter with Dallapiccola at Tanglewood in 1952 was equally crucial. Throughout these years, young Italian composers sought to forge an identity. Dallapiccola seemed to an entire generation to be the composer with the most clearly established ties to contemporary music in Europe, and thus the most open to new perspectives. Berio adopted his style of rigorous, melodic twelve-tone writing, but also become interested in a close bond between literary musical experience. His meeting with Dallapiccola marked the beginning of a more personal journey. He “reacted” to his Italian master with works such as Chamber Music in 1953 and Variations for chamber orchestra in 1955.

The same American voyage also introduced Berio to electronic music, at a concert in New York City. He was struck by the novel sonorities and by the possibilities offered by magnetic tape. After returning to Italy, he immediately began to experiment with tape recorders borrowed from the RAI, culminating with Mimusique No. 1 in 1953. Berio became close friends with Maderna, who would come to play an important role in the structure and development of his musical language, notably by leading him to consider “the possibility of quantifying musical perception through ad hoc invented proportions, allowing one to rediscover and reorganize familiar material.” The same year, he attended Darmstadt for the first time, where he came into contact with Boulez, Stockhausen, and Pousseur. He shared with them a need for change in music and a desire to see an enrichment and development beyond serial technique. Berio however held on to a critical perspective. He appropriated the possibilities of expanded musical means offered by serialism while avoiding the pitfalls of abstraction, rejecting strictly normative and combinatory practices. Nones, for orchestra (1954), inspired by the Auden poem of the same title, was the fist personal response to this era of musical speculation. In this work, made up of five episodes whose proportions are calculated from the number nine, Berio demonstrates an approach founded not on mechanical practices, but on processes which highlight these five stages of transformation. His Serenata for flute and fourteen instruments (1957) considerably broadens its serial approach with a continual variation of its basic elements.

Berio’s interest in working with magnetic tape quickly intensified, stimulated in part by Maderna’s own enthusiasm. In 1955 he founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan, which became a center of intense creative collaboration, with the participation of Pousseur in 1957 and Cage in 1958. Following Perspecives for two-channel magnetic tape (1957), Berio composed Thema (Ommagio a Joyce) (1958), mixing Cathy Berberian’s voice with electronic sounds. The piece makes use of a recording (in English, Italian, and French) of the opening of the ninth chapter (“The Sirens”) of Joyce’s Ulysses, an outgrowth of his interest in linguistics and his work with Umberto Eco on onomatopoeia in poetry. Joyce’s text, deconstructed, broken down, loses its narrative power. The voice, exclusively spoken, transmits mainly phonemes at a pre-semantic level but nevertheless charged with emotion. Freed from the logic of language, verbal and musical gestures are mixed to create a polyphony of sense and sound where neither system of expression is favored.

The voice remained an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Berio. With Circles, for female voice, harp, and two percussionists (1960), he continued to explore new rapports between music and poetry. Three poems by E. E. Cummings are subjected to a process of de-composition then reconstitution of language. The poetic material is thus progressively transformed until the instruments take hold, through “sonic mimesis,” of its phonetic material. In Visage, another electronic work, a singer’s voice provides a wordless “phonic” material, made up exclusively of expressive vocal emissions evoking a range of effects. The distinction between vocal material and electronic material is erased, allowing all raw sound, natural and artificial, equal weight in the same discourse. Sequenza III for voice (1966), “written for Cathy and about Cathy,” uses an “open” text by Markus Kutter, cut into pieces and recomposed so that the fragments can be subjected to a vast exploration of vocal means of expression, from a scream to stylized singing, including banal gestures such as coughing and crying. The work outlines a “new vocality” that makes use of the widest possible XXX as a means of escape from the excessive connotations that, according to Berio, are inherent in vocal writing. Berberian’s voice was also the inspiration for Epifanie for voice and orchestra (1961), in which five vocal pieces in original languages from Proust, Machado, Joyce, Sanguieneti, Simon, and Brecht alternate with three Quaderni, virtuosic orchestral pieces which can be performed separately. The linguistic material and the timbral richness of phonemes are further explored in several vocal works, in different genres: the madrigalesque A-Ronne (1974-5), a theatrical setting of daily scenes on a text by Sanguinetti, or the second movement of Sinfonia — a reworking of O King (1967), written in memory of Martin Luther King — where the vocal material is based on the phonemes derived the vowels and the consonant ‘k’ of the reverend’s name.

The Sequenza for voice also testifies to the composers inclination for virtuosity, seen in the series of thirteen Sequenze begun in 1958 with the Sequenza for flute and completed in 1995 with the accordion Sequenza. In this series, Berio researches and expands certain playing techniques particular to each instrument, but attempts to never write material contrary to the nature of a given instrument. Each sequenza is dedicated to a particular soloist chosen by Berio for both his extreme technical virtuosity as well as his intellectual capabilities. He expects “a musician capable of placing himself in an extended historical perspective and of resolving the tensions between yesterday’s definition of creativity and today’s.” These pieces are almost all based on a series of a harmonic fields which underpin other musical functions, from the mundane to the extreme. Most of them develop a harmonic discourse by delineating melodies to suggest “a polyphony, founded in part on quick transitions between different characters and on their simultaneous interaction.” Berio further develops the potential of certain Sequenze in a series of Chemins in which the composer transforms, amplifies, and transcribes these solo pieces for ensemble. For example, Sequenza VI for viola (1967) led to Chemins II for viola and nine instruments (1967), then to Chemins III for viola, nine instruments, and orchestra (1968); Sequenza IX for clarinet blossomed into Chemins V (1980), for solo instrument and electronics, realized during Berio’s tenure as head of electroacoustic music at IRCAM.

This concerto-like dimension, another means of exploiting instrumental virtuosity, is explored throughout the 1970s with the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra (1973), Points on the curve to find for piano and 23 instruments, and Il Ritorno degli Snovidenia for cello and chamber orchestra (1977). For orchestra alone, he penned three major works in this vein: Eindrücke (1973), Formazioni (1985-87), and Ekphrasis (Continuo II) (1996).

Berio’s fondness for elaborate forms never interfered with his love for folklore and popular music. If the well-known Folk Songs for voice and seven instruments (1964, orchestrated in 1973) emphasizes the timbral potentials of diverse types of popular song transplanted to a concert music context, Coro (1974-76) demonstrates a higher degree of development. The piece calls for forty singers, each of whom is paired with an instrument. Its goal is to anthologize various disparate manners of “setting to music,” combining modes and diverse popular techniques while also making reference to lied, chanson, African heterophony and polyphony, constantly reworked and modified. In 1984, Berio composed Voci for viola and two instrumental groups, in which authentic Sicilian folk songs are transcribed in three different manners: the first in constant parallel to the original, the second in free experimentation liberally with the folk melody, and the third surpassing its source.

Berio’s music embraces divergent forms of expression, heterogenous material, high-brow or “vulgar” from distant historic or geographic sources, including very diverse musical or extra-musical references, weaving a higher unity from his disparate sources. This goal is most remarkably realized in Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra (1968), whose musical development stems from a search for identity and continuity on all levels: between voices and instruments, text and music, spoken and sung, and between harmonic stages. The piece borrows numerous musical and literary quotes to animate a an exploration of all potential forms of interaction between music and language. The first movement, made up largely of short excerpts from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Le cru et le cuit, adopts an anthropological perspective, investigating parallels between music and myth. The fifth movement comes across as a synthesis of the preceding four, an example of the principle of auto-citation. But Sinfonia unquestionably owes most of its fame to the third movement, an homage to Mahler constructed on top of the entirety of second movement of his second symphony (“Resurrection”). With this scherzo underneath, Berio creates a musical web based on quotes fom Beckett, Joyce, slogans from Parisian students in May 1968, and a host of musical quotes from Bach to Globokar. Fragments from masters of orchestration, the Germanic tradition, the Second Viennese school, and from Berio’s colleagues and friends form an extraordinary musical kaleidoscope, as if Berio sought to “shoulder the weight of the history music.”

Berio’s desire for the largest possible musical “plurality” is equally evident in his stage works. His collaboration with Edoardo Sanguineti led him to explore experimental theatrical forms marked by the poet’s post-Brechtian ideology, as in Passaggio for soprano, two choirs, and ensemble (1962) or Laborintus II for voices, instruments, and tape (1965), in which he displaces the traditional boundaries between music and literature to create a truly “labyrinthic” work. Commissioned for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth, the text combines analogous themes in Vita Nova, Convivo, and La Divina Commedia with biblical texts written by Ezra Poud and Sanguineti. Isidore de Seville’s Etymologies recall the medieval principle of cataloguing which, for the composer, is not limited to a single text but can serve as the basis for an entire musical structure.

Berio tackled the genre of opera several times. With Opera (1970), written in collaboration with Eco and Colombo, three levels carrying the themes of loss, death, and finality and entangled and recombined throughout. Three “myths” coexist: one from the ancient world, the Orpheus legend, and two modern counterparts, the Titanic and Terminal (borrowed from an Open theater play on the end of life in a hospital). La Vera Storia (1977-78) on a libretto by Italo Calvino takes Verdi’s Il Trovatore as a model of complex dramaturgy which inspires a rich canvas of complex action and music in its first act, inspired by Brecht’s epic theater. The second act, where the operatic tradition is eradicated, is presented as a sort of amplification of the text and music of the first act. Un Re in ascolto (1984), inspired by Calvino, which takes a theoretical essay by Roland Barthes about listening as its point of departure, is an “action musicale” in two parts. It makes reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a solitary king, alone in his office, listens repeatedly on stage. For Berio, “…the hidden character in all three of these works (…) is the theater itself, the opera. Form is always a kind of meta-theater. But in Un Re in ascolto there is no narrative, only situations and processes, and at the moment that it threatens to turn back into an opera, it stops.” Berio’s further attempts include Outis (1996), also based on numerous literary references (Homer, Joyce, Beckett, Celan) with no real narrative connection, and Cronaca del luogo (1999).

A portrait of Berio could not end without making mention of his fondness for transcription in multiple forms. Whether in his Chemins, a means to better analyze his Sequenze, in Rendering (1989), his reconstruction of Schubert’s tenth symphony, or in Orfeo II based on Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Berio often made use of multiple musical quotes and refernces to analyze, comment on, call into question, recompose, and create an incessant and fertile dialogue with history, his history which has now become our own.

Translation: Christopher Trapani.