Composer and teacher of music, born in Oneglia, NW Italy. He studied at the Music Academy in Milan, and founded an electronic studio. He moved to the USA in 1962, taught composition at the Juilliard School, New York City, and returned to Italy in 1972. In 1950 he married the US soprano Cathy Berberian (192583), for whom he wrote several works; the marriage was dissolved in 1966. His particular interest was in the combining of live and pre-recorded sound, and the use of tapes and electronic music, as in his compositions Mutazioni (1955, Mutations) and Omaggio a James Joyce (1958, Homage to James Joyce). His Sequenza series for solo instruments (1958 onwards) are striking virtuoso pieces. Other works included Passaggio (1963), Laborintus II (1965), Opera (196970), and Continuo (1991).
Luciano Berio (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia for voices and orchestra) and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.
Biography
Berio was born in Oneglia (now Borgo d'Oneglia, a small village 3 km N of Imperia). During World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked.
Following the war, Berio studied at the Milan Conservatory under Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Giorgio Federico Ghedini. In 1947 came the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano.
Berio made a living at this time accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). Berio would write many pieces exploiting her versatile and unique voice.
In 1951, Berio went to the United States to study with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, from whom he gained an interest in serialism. He invited a number of significant composers to work there, among them Henri Pousseur and John Cage.
In 1960, Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as Composer in Residence, and in 1962, on an invitation from Darius Milhaud, took a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California.
All this time Berio had been steadily composing and building a reputation, winning the Italian Prize in 1966 for Laborintus II.
In 1972, Berio returned to Italy.
In 1994 he became Distinguished Composer in Residence at Harvard University, remaining there until 2000. Luciano Berio died in 2003 in a hospital in Rome.
Berio's music
See also: List of compositions by Luciano BerioBerio's electronic work dates for the most part from his time at Milan's Studio di Fonologia. One of the most influential works he produced there was Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), based on Cathy Berberian reading from James Joyce's Ulysses. A later work, Visage (1961) sees Berio creating a wordless emotional language by cutting up and rearranging a recording of Cathy Berberian's voice.
In 1968, Berio completed O King a work which exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra.
The orchestral version of O King was, shortly after its completion, integrated into what is perhaps Berio's most famous work, Sinfonia (1968-69), for orchestra and eight amplified voices.
In the third movement of the piece Berio takes the third movement from Mahler's Symphony No.
The result is a narrative with the usual tension and release of classical music, but using a completely different language.
A-Ronne (1974) is similarly collaged, but with the focus more squarely on the voice. The work is one of a number of collaborations with the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, who for this piece provided a text full of quotations from sources including the Bible, T.
Another example of the influence of Sanguineti is the large work Coro, scored for orchestra, solo voices, and a large choir, whose members are paired with instruments of the orchestra. The work extends over roughly an hour, and explores a number of themes within a framework of folk music from a variety of regions;
Sequenza
Berio also produced work which does not quote the work of others at all. Perhaps best known among these is his series of works for solo instruments under the name Sequenza.
The various Sequenza are as follows;
Transcriptions and arrangements
Berio is known for adapting and transforming the music of others, but he also adapted his own compositions: the series of Sequenze gave rise to a series of works called Chemins each based on one of the Sequenze. Chemins II was itself transformed into Chemins III (1968) by the addition of an orchestra, and there also exists Chemins IIb, a version of Chemins II without the solo viola but with a larger ensemble, and Chemins IIc, which is Chemins IIb with an added solo bass clarinet.
As well as original works, Berio made a number of arrangements of works by other composers, among them Claudio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Kurt Weill. 10, and completed them by adding music derived from other Schubert works.
In fact, transcription is a vital part of even Berio's "creative" works. In "Two Interviews," Berio muses about what a college course in transcription would look like, looking not only at Liszt, Busoni, Stravinsky, Bach, himself, and others, but to what extent composition is always self-transcription. In this respect, Berio rejects and distances himself from notions of "collage," preferring instead the position of "transcriber," arguing that "collage" implies a certain arbitrary abandon that runs counter to the careful control of his highly intellectual play, especially within Sinfonia but throughout his "deconstructive" works. Rather, each quotation carefully evokes the context of its original work, creating an open web, but an open web with highly specific referents and a vigorously defined, if self-proliferating, signifier-signified relationship. "I'm not interested in collages, and they amuse me only when I'm doing them with my children: then they become an exercise in relativizing and 'decontextualizing' images, an elementary exercise whose healthy cynicism won't do anyone any harm," Berio tells interviewer Rossana Dalmonte, in what reads like Berio attempting to distance himself from the haphazard image many more careless second-hand analysts have of him.
Perhaps Berio's most notable contribution to the world of post-WWII non-serial experimental music, running throughout most of his works, is his engagement with the broader world of critical theory (epitomized by his life-long friendship with linguist and critical theorist Umberto Eco) through his compositions. Berio's works are often analytic acts: deliberately analyzing myths, stories, the components of words themselves, his own compositions, or preexisting musical works. other works In other words, it is not only the composition of the "collage" that conveys meaning; Berio often offers his compositions as forms of academic or cultural discourse themselves rather than as "mere" fodder for them.
Among Berio's other compositions are Circles (1960), Sequenza III (1966), and Recital I (for Cathy) (1972), all written for Berberian, and a number of stage works, with
Un re in ascolto, a collaboration with Italo Calvino, the best known.
Berio's "central instrumental focus", if such a thing exists, is probably with the voice, the piano, the flute, and the strings. He wrote many remarkable pieces for piano which vary from solo pieces to essentially concerto pieces (points on the curve to find, concerto for two pianos, and Coro, which has a strong backbone of harmonic and melodic material entirely based on the piano part).
Lesser known works make use of a very distinguishable polyphony unique to Berio that develops in a variety of ways. This occurs is several works, but most recognisably in compositions for small instrumental combinations. Examples are Differences, for flute, harp, clarinet, cello, violin and electronic sounds, Agnus, for three clarinets and voices, Tempi concertanti for flute and four instrumental groups, Linea, for marimba, Vibraphone, and two pianos, and Chemins IV, for eleven strings and oboe.
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