Student Paper: John Barrow AKA "AEG" SP'99
Luciano Berio - His Life So Far, and "Thema: Omaggia a Joyce".
History
Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia (now Imperia), on the Italian Riviera in 1925.
He started his musical studies with his father and grandfather, both organists and composers with whom he studied harmony, counterpoint and piano.
In 1945 he entered the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with G.C. Paribeni and G.F. Ghedini, graduating in 1951. It was not until then that he had the opportunity to see and hear works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Webern, Hindemith, Bartók and Milhaud due to the Fascist regime in which he had grown up.
In 1954 he founded with Bruno Maderna the 'Studio di Fonolodia Musicaleí at the 'Radio Televisione Italiana di Milanoí which he led till 1961.
In 1956 he founded the periodical "Incontri musicali". He pursued an intense pedagogical activity from 1965 to 1972 mainly in the USA (Mills College in Oakland CA, Harvard University in Cambridge MA and the Juilliard School of Music in New York).
From 1974 to 1980 he took over the department of electroacoustics at Pierre Boulezí ëInstitut de Recherché et de Coordination Acoustique/Musiqueí (IRCAM) in Paris and in 1987 he founded the ëCentro Tempo Reale di Firenzeí.
In 1980, the City University of London, and in 1995 the University of Siena awarded him the Doctor honoris causa.
In 1991, he received the Siemens Music Prize in Munich and the Wolf Foundation Prize of Jerusalem.
In 1995 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his lifework and in 1996 Japanís top music award, the "Praemium Imperiale" by the Japan Art Association.
A distinguished conductor as well as composer, Mr. Berio has led many of the worldís leading orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, London Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic and La Scala Orchestra, among others.
He is currently serving as Distinguished Composer-in-Residence at Harvard University, a five-year appointment that began with the 1994-95 academic year. During the 1993-94 academic year, Mr. Berio held the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard. In his series of six lectures, entitled "Remembering the Future", which Harvard University Press will publish in book form, Mr. Berio addressed the question of the relationships between theoretical and practical implications for the future. Each lecture was accompanied by performances of two of Mr. Berioís Sequenzas, a continuing series of virtuoso pieces for solo instruments, now numbering thirteen, that the composer began in 1958.
He was married for a number of years to Cathy Berberian, a singer well known for her performances of contemporary music.
His Music.
Luciano Berioís early music falls in the post-Webern camp, but during the last three decades, he has written many diverse works including compositions for tape, voice, and orchestra.
"The apparatus of sound production in his works consists of every imaginable combination and every feasible application of vocal and instrumental techniques; formal structures extend from deceptively simple Baroque arrangements to theatrical conglomerates of speech, song, spoken melody, rhythmically inflected recitation, mimodrama, choreodrama, abstract opera, concrete noises, electronic effects, aleatory passages."
He is one of the most widely performed and most productive of postwar composers.
His discovery of controls in electronic music led him to explore its possible roots in serialism and gave him a new outlook on traditional use of instruments and voice and has therefore been a major force in the development of new music since 1950. He has produced a body of works that embrace a wide range of interest, genres and techniques and reflect his continuing exploration of human voice, the virtuoso capabilities of solo instruments, the orchestral idiom, music theater (not Opera which he says is dead), and the digital processing of sound. In addition, Mr. Berioís interest in re-examining the music of the past has resulted in his transcriptions of works by many composers ranging from Monteverdi to Mahler, as well as in several pieces based on sketches or unfinished works by such composers as Mozart and Schubert. Luciano Berioís compositions are performed regularly throughout the world at leading music centers, opera houses and festivals, and have been recorded by RCA, Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, CBS, Mode Records, Harmonia Mundi, and Nonesuch. He also greatly admires the Beatles for bringing back excitement to music.
The most significant tape and electronic pieces of the 1950's and early 196'ís used the human voice - on tape or live with tape - as an essential part of the conception: Stockhausen's "Gesang der Jünglinge", Babbit's "Vision and Prayer" and "Philomel" and Berio's "Omaggio a Joyce".
Berio uses the human voice in a number of his pieces, and has also conducted a number of vocal pieces including Mahler. He writes very challenging pieces for voice because they utilise every aspect of the voice, not just singing or text, but Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang a la Schoenberg and Berg in their own compositions.
He also takes this further in that he tries to get every possible sound that can be made with the human voice, and also sounds that can be created by electronically manipulating the sound of the human voice.
Thema: Omaggio a Joyce. 1958.
(Theme: An Homage to James Joyce.)
The text used in the piece is from the beginning of Eleventh Chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, and is read by Catherine Berberian. The passage concerns Mr. Bloom's afternoon in the Ormond Bar, Dublin.
"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumbling rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer.
Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche!
Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas!
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
Martha! Come!
Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod he never heard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlight nightcall: far: far.
I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming.
Listen!
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each and for other plash and silent roar.
Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss."
The first part of 'Themaí'is a recitation by the soloist of the original Joyce text. This is tells you what the piece is based on, and enables to connect with what Berio is trying to accomplish in the second section. The second section starts after a short pause, and is a prepared tape recording, built entirely out of sounds recorded during an earlier reading of the text by the soloist.
Berio uses a lot of voice panning, to give the effect of more than one voice. The voice sometimes sounds distant and close again in a very short space of time, and also is made to sound more ethereal by the use of reverb and other effects.
Twice, a language other than English is used. French, from the translation by Joyce and V. Larbaud, for the phrase "Petites ripes, il picore les petites ripes d'un pouce reche, petites ripes" ("Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips."), which serves as a modulating pattern for the transformation of continuous sounds derived from the English text, and Italian, from the translation by E. Montale et al, which allows development of periodic patterns from the rolled "r" of the words "morbida parola" ("soft word").
A series of main themes are picked out and isolated to form a sequence of Leit motives which are unconnected. These are phrases that are understandable musically because they are references to the most common forms of musical decoration.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn trill
Chips, picking chips staccato
Warbling. Ah, lure! appoggiatura
Deaf bold Pat brought pad knife took up martellato
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves glissando, portamento
Once these are accepted, the text is gradually detached from itís original form, and evaluated in terms of "electro-acoustical transformational possibilities"
The text is then broken down into groups with the same sound. For example the ëblí in "Blew. Blue Bloom..." and ësí from "Pearls: when she. Lisztís rhapsodies. Hissss."
These groups are then moved around so that they are not in the same place in relation to one another.
The piece is based on three articulatory categories of the original material:
Discontinuous -> Periodic -> Continuous
(as in "Goodgod, he never heard inall")
Continuos -> Periodic -> Discontinuous
(as in sibilants)
Periodic -> Continuous -> Discontinuous
(as in "thnthnthn")
ëDiscontinuousí are sounds or words which end quickly. ëContinuousí are words which donít, and ëPeriodicí are continuous words with a definite rhythmic value.
All the transformation of the text is done by tape editing, through superimposition of identical elements with varying time relations (phase shifting, especially when concerned with musical onomatopoeia), through wide frequency and time alterations, and through 1/3 octave filtering.
At certain points it would have been easier to use electronic instruments to create the desired sound, however, this was not done because the original intention was to develop a reading of the text within certain restrictions dictated by the text itself.
The intention behind ëThemaí is to create a link between speech and music by morphing one into the other so that you cannot tell where one ends and other begins. It becomes impossible to distinguish between word and sound, between sound and noise, and between poetry and music.
In the first section, lots of expression is used by Cathy Berberian when reading the text. Her voice goes from soft to forceful and loud a number of times, and listening to it is like sailing and then suddenly hitting a storm. The words are comprehendable as words, since no effects are used whatsoever, but the meaning is difficult to understand. I did not know what the text was about until I read about it.
The second (tape) section has a similar form. It still sounds like a sudden storm and calm, but more so, because greater expression and tension is developed. However, the result is less understandable because the words are even less comprehendable and at times are not words at all.
It has a different texture whilst trying to maintain and expand on the same texture. It sounds almost alien because you can almost understand it, like aliens trying to communicating and theyíre not quite getting it right. The ethereal and other altered voice sounds also make it sounds quite un-natural by normal everyday speach standards.
Itís quite interesting how you can take words which you hear everyday which only range between 2-4kHz which normally you think nothing of, and then alter them to a much bigger frequency range and make quite un-natural sounds.
References.
Books:
Internet Web-sites:
Audio Sources.