Musical and Literary Quotations in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio's
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Musical and Literary Quotations in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia Richard Lee-Thai 30024611 MUSI 333: Late Romantic and Modern Music Dr. Freidemann Sallis Due Date: Friday, April 6th 1 | P a g e Luciano Berio (1925-2003) is an Italian composer whose works have explored serialism, extended vocal and instrumental techniques, electronic compositions, and quotation music. It is this latter aspect of quotation music that forms the focus of this essay. To illustrate how Berio approaches using musical and literary quotations, the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia will be the central piece analyzed in this essay. However, it is first necessary to discuss notable developments in Berio’s compositional style that led up to the premiere of Sinfonia in 1968. Berio’s earliest explorations into musical quotation come from his studies at the Milan Conservatory which began in 1945. In particular, he composed a Petite Suite for piano in 1947, which demonstrates an active imitation of a range of styles, including Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev and the neoclassical language of an older generation of Italian composers.1 Berio also came to grips with the serial techniques of the Second Viennese School through studying with Luigi Dallapiccola at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1952 and analyzing his music.2 The result was an ambivalence towards the restrictive rules of serial orthodoxy. Berio’s approach was to establish a reservoir of pre-compositional resources through pitch-series and then letting his imagination guide his compositional process, whether that means transgressing or observing his pre-compositional resources. This illustrates the importance that Berio’s places on personal creativity and self-expression guiding the creation of music. He makes his position clear when he says that “it is poetics which guide discovery and not procedural attitudes.”3 Furthermore, he explains that while each individual carries with them “a mass of experiences,” it is important to be able to filter that mass to best their own needs and to more accurately represent themselves.4 1 David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4. 2 Osmond-Smith, Berio, 6. 3 Luciano Berio, “Composer on His Work: Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse,” in Classic Essays on Twentieth- Century Music: A Continuing Symposium (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 171. 4 Luciano Berio, Two Interviews (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1985), 66. 2 | P a g e The next significant development for Berio was an introduction to electronic music through composers such as Edgard Varèse, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as collaborating with Bruno Maderna to found an electronic studio in Milan in 1955. One of the most significant works to emerge from that studio is Berio’s Thema: Omaggio a Joyce in 1958.5 This work used a limited sound source, in this case, a magnetic tape recording of Cathy Berberian reading from the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The intention of the “Sirens” chapter is for Joyce to associate it with music. He achieves this by weaving song quotations and juxtaposing isolated images so that the reader can build their own new meanings in the ensuing narrative.6 Berio subjected Berberian’s words to a range of tape manipulations, including montage, intercutting, looping and tape delay, to break down the text to its component phonetic materials.7 The result was extending the musical quality of Joyce’s language to its logical conclusion by exploring the boundary of where sound loses its linguistic meaning and dissolves into purely musical meaning. It is notable that comprehensibility was treated as a compositional parameter because comprehensible speech does occasionally emerge, only to be quickly engulfed again. The process of tape manipulation in Thema: Omaggio a Joyce is an extension of Berio’s early interest in manipulating pre-existing material and reflects an interest in providing musical commentary on literary sources. Furthermore, comprehensibility of the literary and musical quotations will come to play an important factor in Sinfonia. The last significant development in Berio’s compositional style that should be discussed is the influence of the Darmstadt School. Maderna was involved in the development of the Darmstardt School since 1949 and this allowed Berio to be exposed to the radical new ways of 5 Elliot Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey, Music since 1945: issues, material, and literature (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 115. 6 Osmond-Smith, Berio, 62. 7 Elliot Schwartz and Daniel Godfrey, Music since 1945, 116. 3 | P a g e composition that were emerging from there. In particular, it was the notion that not just pitch could be serialized, but so could aspects of dynamics, articulations, timbre and rhythm. This was a phenomenon that Berio approached with “a characteristic mixture of curiosity and caution.”8 This type of ambivalence parallels his attitude towards the twelve-tone system he discovered through Dallapiccola. However, he was still inspired by the Darmstadt School of serial thought and along with his experimentations of electronic music, Berio explored these serial techniques in pieces such as Allelujah composed in 1956. In this piece, his goal was to create a polyphony by superimposing layers of orchestral sound. Additionally, he was interested in the “the aural experience of complexity” and “the new aesthetic regions to which such overloading of sensory input led.”9 However, his original aim of having polyphonic layers interact with each other was not met. Consequently, he ended up composing an Allelujah II in 1958, which radically reworked previous material and was successful in differentiating each sonic layer.10 The superimposition of multiple musical layers, fascination with complexity, and the process of reworking material are all important factors in Sinfonia. The process of reworking old material relates to Berio’s central philosophy of “work in progress” where there is a continuous process of commentary and elaboration that proliferates from one piece to the next.11 For example, he has frequently adapted his own works, such as his Chemins which are instrumental elaborations of his Sequenze, a series of solo works.12 This philosophy also comes from Berio’s engagement with the writing of Joyce, as previously seen with Berio’s setting of Ulysses. Joyce wrote installments of a “work in progress” over a period of 8 Osmond-Smith, Berio, 16. 9 Osmond-Smith, Berio, 19. 10 Osmond-Smith, Berio, 20. 11 Angela Ida De Benedictis, “Biography,” trans. Mark Weir, Centro Studi Luciano Berio, http://www.lucianoberio.org/en/node/1154 (accessed January 20, 2018). 12 David Osmond-Smith, Playing on words: a guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (Cambridge: Royal Musical Association, 1985), 5. 4 | P a g e seventeen years that would eventually come to be published as Finnegans Wake. The text was often revised in the direction of greater complexity, such as adding layers upon layers of multilingual puns and associations.13 The result is a labyrinthine, stream-of-consciousness journey. Besides Joyce, Berio has a strong preoccupation with literature and linguistics in general, which informs his philosophy and compositions. The philosophy of a work in progress explains Berio’s interest in reworking music and literature, whether from his own output and or the output of another artist. All of this previous discussion has now established the appropriate context for analyzing Sinfonia. Originally composed as a four-movement work for orchestra and eight amplified voices, Sinfonia was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1968 for its 125th anniversary. In Berio’s program notes for this piece, he explains that the title “bears no relationship to the classical form, but rather it must be understood in its etymological sense of ‘sounding together’ of different things, situations and meanings.”14 It incorporates a wealth of quotations from musical and literary sources, including Claude Levi-Strauss’ Le cru et le cuit, Berio’s O King (1967), and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. Further demonstrating his desire of combining disparate elements into a unified form, Berio added a fifth movement months after the premiere which synthesizes elements from the previous four movements. Although the musical borrowing and influence found in each movement are all worthy of analysis, this essay will specifically focus on the third movement. The central purpose of this essay is to answer why Berio chose to use these specific musical and literary quotations in this movement. The approach will not be to provide an exhaustive analysis for every single quotation that is used, but rather to explain how 13 David Osmond-Smith, Playing on words, 4. 14 Luciano Berio, “Sinfonia (author’s note),” Centro Studi Luciano Berio, http://www.lucianoberio.org/node/1494?1683069894=1 (accessed January 22, 2018). 5 | P a g e the quotations are logically interconnected and carefully selected to create a larger narrative. This will be divided into an analysis of the relationships between musical quotations, between the text and music, and the work and the audience. It is appropriate to first discuss the scherzo from Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony. The scherzo forms the skeleton of the movement upon which layers of quotations are superimposed as commentary. In his program notes, Berio explains that: “The Mahler movement is treated like a generator - and also as a container - within whose framework a large number of musical characters and references is proliferated.”15 Although Berio had also considered using the last three movements of Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, and the second movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, he settled on the scherzo.16 Berio explains that he wanted to analyze the piece through commentary and extension. Furthermore, he chose the Mahler because “his music proliferates spontaneously.”17 These aspects can be related to Berio’s concept of a work in progress.