Playing on Words

A Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia

David Osmond-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351553926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968) marked a return by the composer to orchestral writing after a gap of six years. This in-depth study demonstrates the central position the work occupies in Berio's output. David Osmond-Smith discusses the way in which Berio used the Bororo myth described in Levi-Strauss's Le cru et le cuit as a framework for Sinfonia. This is one of many influences in the work, which also include Joyce's 'Sirens' chapter from Ulysses, Beckett's The Unnameable and the scherzo from Mahler's 2nd Symphony. The listener who takes refuge in the score of Sinfonia, argues Osmond-Smith, finds there a maze of allusions to things beyond the score. It is some of those allusions that this book seeks to illuminate.

1
Sinfonia and its Precursors

It is no accident that often I instinctively find myself working on different projects at the same time, amusing myself with one and sweating blood over another. But it is the tendency towards reunion that justifies the tendency to many-sidedness.

Luciano Berio¹

Because Berio has found the simultaneous pursuit of two or three musical projects so congenial, his large-scale compositions have tended to take on a special role in relation to the rest of his work. They have provided the framework within which the exhilaration of these centrifugal enthusiasms could be countered by an act of synthesis. Such ‘encyclopaedic’ works recur throughout Berio’s career: Allez-Hop (1959), Epifanie (1961), Sinfonia (1968), Opera (1970) and Coro (1975–6) are all to a greater or lesser extent examples of this tendency. But whereas Allez-Hop and Epifanie unite their disparate materials simply by placing them side by side, Sinfonia and Coro go beyond this, compelling different musical concerns to interact in the moment of composition itself. This is one of the primary reasons why they occupy so central a position within Berio’s œuvre.²

In Sinfonia Berio synthesised several of his most long-standing concerns, making them literally ‘sound together’ as the title indicates. Throughout the sixties he had experimented with the resources of the human voice – not merely the range of articulation and tone that it could offer, but also the ways in which it could enhance the musical impact of language by emphasising, or indeed isolating its phonetic components. At first he had concentrated on the solo voice – in Circles (1960), Epifanie (1961) and above all Sequenza III (1965–6) – while exploring in a fairly straightforward way the juxtaposition of singing and speaking groups in Passaggio (1962) and Laborintus II (1965). But in Sinfonia he drew together these experiences in order to integrate them with an older, and in some ways more complex project: the search for satisfactory ways of extending the resources and traditions of the symphony orchestra. By using eight vocalists, the Swingle Singers, whose experience of jazz singing had accustomed them to close microphone work, he was able to blend their amplified voices into the orchestral textures – a deliberate reversal of the traditional polarity between ‘choir’ and ‘orchestra’.

Sinfonia marked Berio’s return to orchestral writing after a six-year gap (broken by Chemins I for harp and orchestra of 1965, which made only sparing use of its full orchestral resources). From the mid-fifties, when Berio first began to attract international attention, through to the last of the three orchestral Quaderni, all gathered together in Epifanie, his remarkable grasp of instrumental texture and colour had been widely acknowledged. This represented something of a personal triumph, for the wartime environment of his youth had been almost devoid of orchestral music.³ It was only after he had begun his studies at the Milan Conservatorio in 1946, and particularly his composition studies with G. F. Ghedini (a composer also noted for his fine grasp of instrumentation), that he began a rapid and voracious assimilation of the European orchestral tradition. By 1954, when he produced Nones, his first major work for large orchestra, he was already in full command of the fragmented timbre-counterpoint typical of his more radical contemporaries.

But a more individual approach to the orchestra was quickly to follow, and it was one conditioned by Berio’s work with electronic media in the Studio di Fonologia that he and Bruno Maderna had set up in Milan (1955). For here he was able to explore the superposition of layers of sonic material, each with its own complex internal structure. This affinity for a counterpoint of textures quickly transferred itself to his orchestral writing, where it was complemented by an expanded harmonic vocabulary that sought to go beyond the abstemious post-Webernian chiaroscuro of second- and seventh-based chords to a richer mix. Allelujah (1955–6) was his first attempt to come to grips with these possibilities, organising an orchestra minus upper strings into five groups – two of brass and percussion, one of pitched percussion and harps, and two of mixed woodwind and low strings – and using these to superpose layers of material. Dissatisfied with the results of this experiment, he reworked the piece as Allelujah II (1956–8), adding upper strings and a wider range of percussion to his resources, and working with more complex groupings of instruments, each separated from the other round the concert hall. Although this work allows for dialogue between relatively complex timbre-combinations (e.g. b.396–429, or the final pages), it is the superposition of distinct ‘choirs’, each with its characteristic timbre and texture, that most faithfully reflects Berio’s electronic experiences (e.g. b.39–60 and b.208–267, amongst others) and provides a foretaste of the approach that he was to bring to a more conventionally disposed orchestra in subsequent work. It was with the Quaderni – three sets of orchestral pieces subsequently interspersed with a cycle of vocal settings to form Epifanie – that this approach came to fruition. There Berio grouped his resources in a way that he was to take up with only minor modifications in Sinfonia six years later. The intervening Chemins I uses slighter resources but analogous principles.

In Epifanie there are four of each woodwind and brass family, save for six horns and a single tenor tuba. In Sinfonia grouping by four is all-pervasive (a reflection of the eight voices and of the consequent tendency towards four- and eight-part harmony), except that an alto and a tenor saxophone complement three upper double reeds and three bassoons respectively. Chemins I, grouping its instruments by threes, extends this ‘choral’ principle to keyboards with piano, celesta and harpsichord, used to articulate a rapid heterophony that is the direct ancestor of that played in the first movement of Sinfonia by an analogous group of piano, harp, electric harpsichord and electronic organ. Epifanie deploys three percussion groups separated as widely as possible from each other, but with several instruments in common (tam-tams, caisses claires, almglocken) to allow for dialogue. Sinfonia does the same, with tam-tams, snare drums and bongos in all three groups, but absorbs glockenspiel, marimbaphone and vibraphone into the groups rather than allocating them to separate players, as in Epifanie. In all three works there are eight instruments in each string section (save for Epifanie’s double basses); but as well as the two normal violin sections a third is seated in a row at the back of the orchestra, where they can provide a sustained background over which to project other layers.

Clearly, the presence of such carefully balanced strata of homogeneous timbre implies a marked interdependency between harmonic process, timbre and texture. A specific harmonic process may be marked out by a highly integrated selection of timbre and texture, as in Epifanie A where flutter-tongue flutes and muted trumpets (a favourite combination) explore a series of fixed pitch-fields at the opening and meander upward through the chromatic gamut at the end; or the start of Epifanie B where three separate layers – an ostinato-saturated major third from harps, pitched percussion and muted strings, whose complex inner life sets it off against quiet clarinet and trombone chords and violent lower string pizzicati – pursue partly independent existences. Conversely, a single harmonic ‘object’ may be passed from choir to choir, as in the opening section of Epifanie C and in the first and fourth movements of Sinfonia. The more complex harmonic aggregates that often occur in Bends orchestral music likewise depend intimately on the presence of instrumental choirs. By the use of different dynamic contours for different groups the internal structure of such aggregates can be revealed, as in Epifanie E and the third movement of Sinfonia; and the extraordinary internal variety that can be achieved within that characteristic gesture, a dense chord used as a sharp, staccato attack, by subtle variations in interval distribution and more or less integrated timbre layers is apparent throughout Epifanie – notably in the latter half of C, and the proliferating stutter attacks of D – and in the third and fifth movements of Sinfonia. The technique is seen at its most concentrated in Still (1973), an orchestral study devoted entirely to soft, staccato aggregates.

Adding an extra ‘choir’ of singing and speaking voices seems no more than a logical extension of this approach. In practice, the integration of amplified voices and orchestra has sometimes proved difficult to achieve in the concert hall, but even so it was the most cogent solution that Berio had yet found to a familiar problem. He had presumably attempted to combine chorus and orchestra in Nones, first conceived as an oratorio setting W. H. Auden’s poem of that name but then converted into a purely orchestral piece (1954). When he returned to the problem, working with Edoardo Sanguineti on the theatre piece Passaggio (1962), he chose to place a singing chorus in the pit with the orchestra and to distribute a speaking chorus around the auditorium. But his complex harmony did not benefit from the sort of projection that a conventional chorus must employ in such circumstances (the problem is a notoriously general one in twentieth-century vocal works). So when he and Sanguineti revived their collaboration in a work for smaller forces, Laborintus II (1965), he again separated speakers and singers, but specified that the latter should be used to microphone-singing, and have vibrato-less, non-operatic voices. It was this solution that he adapted to a larger scale when using the Swingle Singers in Sinfonia. Without their experience of amplified ensemble work, the synthesis that he achieved between orchestral sound and the vocal resources characteristic of his solo vocal works would have been a less inviting proposition.

Work in progress

If any single external influence is to be looked for in Sinfonia, and indeed in much else of Berio’s work during the sixties, it is that not of another musician, but of James Joyce. That this should be so in relation to Berio’s handling of texts is relatively unsurprising: the matter will be discussed in chapter two. But a more general principle, in part reflecting Joyce’s own praxis over the last twenty years of his life, governs the major instrumental works produced during this period: the Sequenzas, Chemins and Sinfonia. In producing the various pieces of ‘work in progress’ that finally emerged as Finnegans Wake, Joyce elaborated on a demotic Anglo-Irish basis an extraordinary tissue of multilingual puns, adding layer upon layer of associations. The texts often underwent several revisions, usually in the direction of greater complexity, sometimes obliterating the original proposition in the process. Certain texts were thus published in several successive versions before the Wake finally appeared. The process could, in theory, have gone on and on: Finnegans Wake is by nature intransigently unfinishable.

Berio began to explore a parallel approach with his Chemins I for harp and orchestra of 1965. He had produced his Sequenza II for harp in the previous year and, wishing to elaborate its material further, decided to add extra instrumental layers on top of it. The process was entirely compatible with his general approach to the orchestra, save that now one layer was complete before the others were added. Several more Sequenzas were produced in rapid succession in the mid-sixties, but it was not until Sequenza VI for viola (1967) that Berio once again sensed the potential for elaboration, producing in Chemins II for viola and chamber ensemble (1967) a work whose density of texture frequently obliterates the contours of the original solo line. The process was compounded in 1968, when Chemins III added an extra orchestral layer to Chemins II; and it was taken to a logical conclusion when the original solo line was entirely absorbed in an orchestral reworking: Chemins IIb.⁴ It is these works that provide the context for Sinfonia, for here, too, pre-existent musical texts are subjected to elaboration. But to understand how these processes help to shape the work it is necessary to review its large-scale structure, which is as much conditioned by Berio’s relish for creating a unity out of the most improbable diversity as it is by a search for organic proliferation.

An overview of Sinfonia

The deliberate combination of heterogeneous materials is common to several of Berio’s works of the later sixties. Questo vuol dire the (1968), close in spirit to the ‘happening’ so prevalent at the time, displays this preoccupation in its most freewheeling form: there is no score, and Berio provides only a tape and certain other materials to be coordinated as the individual performance is prepared. Opera (1970) unites disparate dramatic schemes – a mental hospital, the sinking of the Titanic, a resetting of part of Striggio’s libretto for Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo – all linked by the underlying theme of death. It also brings together, as the title punningly suggests, several autonomous works and makes them function within a dramatic framework. But so far as the synthesis of disparate elements is concerned, Sinfonia is the most rigorous and technically adventurous of these works. For where Opera can look to its dramatic framework to help hold the musical components together, Sinfonia achieves synthesis by purely musical means.

It takes three disparate projects: (a) a setting of fragments from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Sinfonia and its Precursors
• 2 Mythologiques
• 3 ‘O King’
• 4 ‘In ruhig fliessender Bewegung’
• 5 Synthesis and Dissolution
• 6 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index