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Key Questions of Antagonist Music-Making: A View from Italy

Gianmario Borio

in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a ... More

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a politicization across different musical genres. The discourse of intellectuals and artists was significantly influenced by the writings of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, and in turn led the PCI of the early 1970s to an unambiguous commitment to resist ‘any impulse to identify with any specific “poetics” or “tendency”,...to ignore the great variety of creative experiences’ (Giorgio Napolitano), whilst affirming a faith in innovation and renewal as the vehicle for oppositional sentiment. This chapter examines this complex cultural network as it manifested itself in the distinct musical terrains of folk music, rock, jazz, and free improvisation, and avant-garde music theatre.Less

 Women's Ritual Music

Janet Walton

in Music in American Religious Experience

In late 20th-century American religious experience, women gathered to use sacred music in transformative ways to change their condition in a society and in religious practices dominated by men. ... More

In late 20th-century American religious experience, women gathered to use sacred music in transformative ways to change their condition in a society and in religious practices dominated by men. Women's ritual music draws upon many different traditions, from traditional hymns with new texts to secular art music (e.g., by Luciano Berio) to popular music with African American roots (e.g., performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock). This chapter examines different occasions, most of them non-liturgical and outside congregational religious practice, and the creation of new texts from existing hymns or songs as the convergence of women's ritual practice. The rituals and repertories examined in the chapter acquire political potential, and their performance serves to empower women to act together to bring about real change in their lives.Less

Berio (1997)

Steve Reich

in Writings on Music 1965–2000: 1965-2000

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Luciano Berio. Reich says that when he studied with Berio from 1961 to 1963 at Mills, Berio early on played a tape piece of his, Omaggio a Joyce, which ... More

This chapter presents Reich's thoughts about Luciano Berio. Reich says that when he studied with Berio from 1961 to 1963 at Mills, Berio early on played a tape piece of his, Omaggio a Joyce, which showed again how speech—often broken down into the syllables of Finnegan's Wake—could be a riveting source for tape music as well. It was far more interesting to Reich than tape pieces made with electronically generated tones and it encouraged him later in 1965–66 with his own speech tape pieces.Less

Clarifications: 1956

Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (eds)

in Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews

This chapter begins by presenting the text that accompanied a letter dated January 10, 1956, which was sent to Luciano Berio for publication in his new journal Incontri Musicali. The first issue of ... More

This chapter begins by presenting the text that accompanied a letter dated January 10, 1956, which was sent to Luciano Berio for publication in his new journal Incontri Musicali. The first issue of the journal came out in December 1956. However, Nono's contribution was not published. The chapter then presents the letter to Berio that accompanied Nono's manuscript.Less

From the Homeland: Teatro Musicale

Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi

in The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body

This chapter discusses fascism and futurism in Italy; Luigi Dallapiccola; politics, improvisation, post-serialism, the return of the human voice, relationship of opera and music theater; Berio, Nono, ... More

This chapter discusses fascism and futurism in Italy; Luigi Dallapiccola; politics, improvisation, post-serialism, the return of the human voice, relationship of opera and music theater; Berio, Nono, Bussotti, Maderna; the 1968 and post-1968 generations; and postmodernism and experimentalism in the work of younger Italian composers.Less

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

Matilde Nardelli

in Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s

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 ... More

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.Less

Works for Tape

Peter Manning

in Electronic and Computer Music

This chapter focuses on the more significant electronic works produced in the 1960s and 1970s. In Milan, Luciano Berio lost interest in the studio and moved away to work at Columbia/Princeton and ... More

This chapter focuses on the more significant electronic works produced in the 1960s and 1970s. In Milan, Luciano Berio lost interest in the studio and moved away to work at Columbia/Princeton and then briefly at the RTF studio in Paris. With his departure, attention focused on the work of his contemporary, Luigi Nono. At the RTF studio in Paris, creative work polarized around the principal members of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, in particular François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Ivo Malec, and Iannis Xenakis. In Cologne, Karlheinz Stockhausen completed another major tape work Hymnen (1967). In the previous year, however, during a visit to Japan, he had completed another work in the same genre, Telemusik, at the studio of NHK Radio, Tokyo.Less

Berio's Turandot: Once More the Great Tradition

Roger Parker

in Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio

This chapter focuses on Italian composer Luciano Berio's work on the ending of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. It compares Berio's composition with that of Franco Alfano who first completed the ... More

This chapter focuses on Italian composer Luciano Berio's work on the ending of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. It compares Berio's composition with that of Franco Alfano who first completed the opera which received its first performance in April 1926. It suggests that while Alfano's completion of Turandot can certainly be accused of straying from Puccinian practice, Berio's ending is a much bolder departure at almost every level.Less

Serialism: Permutating Indefinite-Pitched Instruments

Thomas Siwe

in Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the Twentieth Century

In the 1950s and 1960s, many composers, influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, embraced serial compositional techniques. Tonal music became atonal and composers, such as Pierre Boulez from ... More

In the 1950s and 1960s, many composers, influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, embraced serial compositional techniques. Tonal music became atonal and composers, such as Pierre Boulez from France and the German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, championed this new compositional approach. This chapter defines serialism and how composers applied it to works for percussion instruments. Music examples include Stockhausen’s solo work, Zyklus, with its totally original notational system, and a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem, Circles, by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. American composer Charles Wuorinen’s use of Milton Babbitt’s “time point” system in both his solo work Janissary Music and his forty-five-minute Percussion Symphony is presented, as is the work of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, who contributed to the literature one of the twentieth century’s largest percussion works, Cantata para América Mágica, for dramatic soprano and fifty-three percussion instruments. A discussion of percussion solo and ensemble works by the Greek composer, architect, and mathematician Iannis Xenakis completes the chapter.Less

Freiheitsdreck (1)

Seth Brodsky

in From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

This chapter focuses on three works that can be seen as “counter-events” to Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein: Heiner Goebbels's Befreiung for speaker and ensemble, Paweł Szymański's solo cello ... More

This chapter focuses on three works that can be seen as “counter-events” to Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein: Heiner Goebbels's Befreiung for speaker and ensemble, Paweł Szymański's solo cello piece A Kaleidoscope for M. C. E., and Luciano Berio's Rendering, his “restoration” of the sketches to Franz Schubert's Tenth Symphony. While these events in on way compare—in terms of audience, mediation, or historical power—to the mega-events of part 1, their restaging of similar materials and scenarios in “contested” and “inverted” form is done in a kind of cultural nighttime, reconfigured as dreams configure the day's waking reality, its “recent and indifferent material,” as Freud puts it. The power that these new compositions lose as representatives of the year, they make up for as representatives of a certain truth, the truth of a collective unconscious desire—again, as dreams can tell the subject something about the truth concealed by its days.Less

Fantasy & Fantasy (3)

Seth Brodsky

in From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

This chapter argues that the present of postmodernism has come to seem like a stalled present, an agitated but idle meanwhile. This is precisely what Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein were ... More

This chapter argues that the present of postmodernism has come to seem like a stalled present, an agitated but idle meanwhile. This is precisely what Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein were trying to do, consciously and unconsciously: to show this perpetual present coming into being by putting on a show. It then considers the possibility that the pieces by Berio (Rendering), Goebbels (Befreiung), and Szymański (Kaleidoscope) are also doing the same thing. Rendering, Kaleidoscope, and Befreiung seem still to believe in modernity, or at least they wish for it and want it to appear, which is to say they act as subjects of a desire for modernity. In this they heed, before the fact, the first of Jameson's “four maxims of modernity”: they “cannot not periodize.” No one has told them that History is over. They seem still in the grip of “a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past from itself and expels and ejects it.”Less

Repetition (1)

Seth Brodsky

in From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

It has been previously argued that Berio, Goebbels, Szymański; Gervasoni, Hölszky, Riehm, Kröll, Schnebel; Ruders, Leyendecker, Andriessen; Dusapin, Kagel, Lachenmann, Penderecki, Katzer, Nono, are ... More

It has been previously argued that Berio, Goebbels, Szymański; Gervasoni, Hölszky, Riehm, Kröll, Schnebel; Ruders, Leyendecker, Andriessen; Dusapin, Kagel, Lachenmann, Penderecki, Katzer, Nono, are all repeating something. This chapter considers what they are repeating. Certainly they are repeating “themselves.” This collection of repetitions also clarifies one thing: any rhetoric of “break” here, of whatever the opposite of repetition might be, would have to remain deaf to a past these works are carrying constantly with them. It is an “immediate past” already much more than immediate, opening onto an unprecedentedly rich terrain of artifacts and attitudes near and far.Less

Mimesis and Cruelty

in The Philosophy of Improvisation

This chapter addresses a range of anti-improvisatory positions as traced across the comments of such artists and writers as Theodor Adorno, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Antonin Artaud, and others. ... More

This chapter addresses a range of anti-improvisatory positions as traced across the comments of such artists and writers as Theodor Adorno, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Antonin Artaud, and others. Adorno, Boulez, Berio, John Cage, Gavin Bryars, Artaud, and even Jacques Derrida (a complicated case) have important and not always kind things to say on the subject that cannot be avoided if a serious case for improvisation is to be made. It is the principles of individuation and freedom that Adorno discovers to be the founding ideas that inform what he describes as the “ballyhoo” surrounding jazz improvisation. His aesthetic theory promotes a mimeticism that has nothing to do with imitating or copying that which is already given. Discourses on improvisation are sadly lacking in irony both at the level of form and of content.Less

Modernists

James Wierzbicki

in Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties

This chapter demonstrates how when it comes to modernism in postwar America, the most influential European composers were the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Italians Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono, and ... More

This chapter demonstrates how when it comes to modernism in postwar America, the most influential European composers were the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Italians Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono, and the German Karlheinz Stockhausen. Being born between 1924 and 1928, all of them had seen their homelands torn by the clash of Allied and Axis forces, and they had been personally shaken by the violence that nearly brought the whole of European civilization crashing down around them. The Americans were slower to respond to the perceived need for a drastically new music than were the Europeans, and when their response did come it was not so blatantly confrontational. Although many of the American modernists also had personal wartime experiences as horrific as those of their European contemporaries, the heritage with which they had grown up was never so direly threatened as had been that of Europe.Less

Choral Symphony from Beethoven to Berio

Chester L. Alwes

in A History of Western Choral Music, Volume 2

Ludwig van Beethoven changed the world of symphonic music forever when he included singers in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, op. 125. The success of this single symphony spawned many ... More

Ludwig van Beethoven changed the world of symphonic music forever when he included singers in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, op. 125. The success of this single symphony spawned many imitators, most of which fell far short of Beethoven’s accomplishment. Nonetheless, such works as Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (“Lobgesang”) and Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette kept the genre viable until its fullest realization in the works of Gustav Mahler. In the twentieth century, “choral” symphonies become common offerings by a host of composers of all nationalities. The most important of these modern followers of Beethoven’s path include Vaughan Williams, Holst, Britten, Shostakovich, Bernstein, Berio, and Schnittke.Less

The Dream (Film)

Martin Eisner

in Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature

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 ... More

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.Less

Afterthoughts

Tim Carter

in Understanding Italian Opera

Puccini’s La Bohème was not the end of the line, although Italian opera in the twentieth century, by composers such as Gian Francesco Malipiero and Luigi Dallapiccola, drew on broader international ... More

Puccini’s La Bohème was not the end of the line, although Italian opera in the twentieth century, by composers such as Gian Francesco Malipiero and Luigi Dallapiccola, drew on broader international trends in favor of Literaturoper (treating a spoken play or other such work as itself a libretto), and also encouraged a shift to much looser poetic forms in texts for musical setting, or even to the dropping of poetry altogether in favor of prose. Thus the function of the librettist could be taken over by the composer or replaced by less formal creative collaborations. In part the influence came from such major Italian literary figures as Luigi Pirandello and, later, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. Postwar political radicals such as Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio also questioned whether opera itself remained viable in the modern and postmodern age, although Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984) inserts itself within a tradition even as it seeks to resist it.Less