Berio’s Duetti per due violini: An introduction

This article is the summary of a workshop on the violin duets of Béla Bartók and Luciano Berio, and the pedagogical implications of the works. Bartók’s Forty-Four Duos are based on folk melodies, and in this workshop, we explored how the text of certain melodies are recreated using tone-painting in the music. Luciano Berio’s 34 Duetti were inspired by the Duos of Bartók, and each duet focuses on a specific technique or concept in twentieth-century music. Like Bartók did with his Duos, Berio also intended his pieces to be performed by children as well as professionals. In addition, Berio’s duets are each inspired by a person, story, or event. All duets refer to a person with their surname, including Béla [Bartók] (no. 1), Pierre [Boulez] (no. 14), Edoardo [Sanguinetti] (no. 20), Vinko [Globokar] (no. 22), Igor [Stravinky] (no. 28) or Lorin [Maazel] (no. 33). In this workshop we explored how Berio recreates these inspirations in his music.

Visualizing Berio’s Sinfonia: Choreographing Animation for Indeterminate Narratives

In 1968, a year of massive political and cultural upheaval, Luciano Berio composed a score that would shape his legacy. Entitled Sinfonia, which literally means sounding together, the symphony was sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King. Heralded as “the ultimate pre-postmodernist musical palimpsest” (Service, 2012). Sinfonia reverberates with the political assassinations and massive protests punctuated by police repression that marked 1968. In late 2019, I was offered an animated projection commission with a primary voice in choosing a piece for live symphonic performance/projection. After some researching, I found Berio’s Sinfonia. It had what I was looking for - a “contemporary” piece, it resisted illustration, linear narrative and 19th century romanticism while eschewing the rigid formality of serialism. Instead, it embraced two core Modernist principles – fragmentation and use of the archive. Berio quoted/sampled disparate chunks of literature, music, and events of 1968 in the service of the political and the poetic to discover unity in the heterogeneous. His score seemed ripe for visual interpretation - and exposition - with animation as the prime driver. Following Berio’s lead, I chose visual sampling as my entre and turned to Google. By animating in and out of iconic (and lesser known) images in the orb of 1968, I created a commensurate puzzle piece that mirrored the suggested avant-garde intent I found in Sinfonia – “Where now? Who now? When now?” (Beckett, 1965, p. 291).

Interações entre escrita e instrumentalidade em Ladainha e Eclusas, para violão solo

Este artigo tem como tema as estratégias de construção de performance de duas peças para violão solo, Eclusas e Ladainha, traçando um amplo diálogo com os violonistas e pesquisadores Daniel Murray e Stanley Levi, que não apenas estrearam cada qual uma das duas obras, como também deixaram registrados em trabalhos acadêmicos seu modo de construção de performances. Propomos assim uma leitura dessas duas composições a partir dos paradigmas sonoros que permeiam essas obras, do conhecimento do universo de referências do compositor (Silvio Ferraz) e do universo de performance do violão da segunda metade do séc. XX herdado pela violonista (Ledice Fernandes Weiss). Observamos a importância da composição e reconstrução do gesto nas duas pontas do processo de colaboração compositor-interprete. Nossos principais referenciais são as noções de técnica estendida e aquela do aspecto tripartite da música no gesto, textura e figura, tal qual proposto por diversos compositores, como B. Ferneyhough, H. Lachenmann, Luciano Berio e resgatada pelo compositor.

The Dream (Film)

This chapter begins with a scene from the 2001 film Hannibal, where the recitation of Dante’s first poem from the Vita nuova plays a crucial part in elaborating the main character’s cannibalism, and a passage from Luciano Berio and Edoardo Sanguineri’s polyphonic setting of Dante’s dream in their musical work Laborintus II. Arguing that these popular adaptations bring into focus Dante’s distinctive mixing of horror and humor, this chapter uses the cannibalist theme to understand Dante’s relationship with his first friend Guido Cavalcanti. Drawing on the idea of cultural cannibalism developed in the Brazilian Antropófago movement, which was itself deeply informed by Dante, the chapter explores the significance of Dante’s relationship with Cavalcanti by exploring the different ways scribes and editors have presented their poems on the page. This inquiry also addresses larger transformations of Dante’s book such as the tendency to reduce it to its poetic components alone following the model of Petrarch.

Object-oriented methods of analyzing the parameters of interaction of speech and music language

The article considers the methodological principles of analyzing the parameters of interaction of speech and music language in the context of object-oriented methods of Astafiev’s intonation theory, Yavorsky’s concept of music speech, the views on and ideas about the intonation basis of speech of Bonfeld, Medushevsky, Aranovsky and Nazaikinsky, and the new system of interaction of speech and music in the works of Helmut Lachenmann and  Luciano Berio. Music language and speech are the phenomena allowing for various intersections, complementarities and mutual interferences. These factors manifest themselves in various aspects spotlighting particular sides of these parameters characterizing speech and music language. Since there’s no unified methodology for analyzing these parameters at the moment, it is reasonable to study a music composition as a text (in a broad sense) using various methods of analysis. The author suggests considering the parameters of interaction of speech and music language in terms of object-oriented methods. In the works of composers, music and speech have different forms of interaction and, consequently, need to be studied via different analytical approaches. Comprehensive consideration of a piece of music as a text (by means of various approaches) allows considering it as an intercultural universum representing the code of the epoch. Based on the peculiarities of interpretation of voice as an instrument, and speech as music, and the opportunities it gives, the author formulates the classification of creative methods and principles and the system of analysis which can be used in musicology.   

“Visage” by Luciano Berio in the Light of His Musical Phonology

Статья посвящена особенностям уникальной художественной системы итальянского композитора Лучано Берио (1925-2003) под названием музыкальная фонология, представленной на примере сочинения «Visage» (1961). В 1950-х годах Берио и его коллеги по электроакустической студии Studio di Fonologia Musicale были увлечены фонологией как разделом лингвистики, опираясь на фундаментальный труд Н. С. Трубецкого «Основы фонологии». Основные аспекты данной книги Берио творчески интегрировал в сочинения для голоса и постепенно выработал новый подход к единству слова и музыкального звука. The article is devoted to the features of the unique artistic system of the Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) called musical phonology, presented on the example of the composition “Visage” (1961). In the 1950s, Berio and his colleagues at the electroacoustic studio Studio di Fonologia Musicale were interested about phonology as a branch of linguistics, based on the fundamental work of N. S. Trubetskoy “Fundamentals of phonology.” The main aspects of this book Berio creatively embodied in compositions for voice and gradually developed in his work a new approach to the unity of words and musical sound.

(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.