Berio, L. Sequenza III for female voice

This piece was unlike anything I had ever heard before. I found it completely by accident and simply had to comment on it because it was so unique.
Luciano Berio was an Italian composer who was mostly known for his experimental work in the Sequenza series. These were a number of works for solo instruments where the main focus was to explore every possible expression of an instrument.

In Sequenza III the instrument is a woman, and simply looking at the score one can see how demanding the piece would be to sing. She is instructed to sing through every emotion one could express, moving from angry to dreamy in a second. There is no traditional melodic structure, but rather pitch indicators for the singer to follow.

The way in which her voice is forced through these motions shows her skill as i would imagine it would take a lot of strength and discipline to move from singing or almost screaming to the opposite sound with very little time for preparation. The way in which the piece begins is almost comical because you do not expect her to start the piece in the way she does. I think Berio meant for it to do this, take the audience by surprise.

Generally a great piece to listen to which aptly explores the idea of serialism.

- Sascha

Berio’s “O King”

Oh boy, looks like Berio is popular this week! Oh, and Peter, do you like the picture I’ve put up? The only audible words sung are “Martin Luther King” so guess who that is in the picture?

Essentially I have two comments regaring this piece. Firstly, I will cover the employment of texture and timbre; and secondly, because I know Peter would liek me two, I will describe some melodic transformation.

The most striking and engaging feature of this piece is the almost ethereal sound created through the orchestration. Personally, I found this what made me really engage with this composition. So how does Berio achieve this? I will look at the first six bars to provide an analytical explanation.  Berio utilises a cycle of four pitches: F, A, B, and C#. He more or less allots a pitch a certain bar, but the intruments are rhythmically dispersed. Thus we see that at bar five the piano, voice, cello and clarinet are playing C# on the first beat; whilst the flute plays C# shortly after. The violin, meanwhile, glissandis down from the previous pitch, B, into the pitch of the next bar, A. Because Berio has the instrumentalists play at the lowest dynamic possible, the piece sounds it is not played by five instrumentalists and a singer, but rather by one instrument which is gradually oscillating between sounds.

Now, let’s discuss melodic transformation. As said before, Berio uses a cycle of F, A, B and C#.  Naturally, if nothing changed in this cycle, the piece would probably be boring. But guess what? Berio changes it. At “A,” the pitch A is flattened, and Bb. Later, we see Berio adding a D to the piece as well; and atone point he shortens the rhythm of this melody to quavers in the flute part – C, Ab, Bb, C# and D.

Also worth mentioning is that Berio uses rhythmic transformation. Originally, a cycle of 4/4, 2/4, 3/8 and 3/4 is used, but as the piece progresses, Berio lenghtens the amount of time between changes in time signature.

Luciano Berio – Sinfonia

Marshall McLuhan… The Medium is the Massage. I recommend everyone with an interest in anything – especially what is wrong with this picture – to find a copy of McLuhan’s recording of The Medium is the Massage, and see if, when you get around to studying Sinfonia yourself, you don’t see a correlation.

This is incredible music. It is a composition written in 1968/69 for eight amplified voices and orchestra. Among its many interesting attributes is how the voices fade in and out of the orchestral texture – much like the cello does in Pres for Cello and Electronics by Saryaho (excuse the spelling). The voices both augment and clash with the symphony through the first two movements and at times they seem detached and at others part of the same instrument. The point of this and what I have come to realise not just from this piece, but from this study of music as a whole, is that a composer plays music. All musicians play music, a composer may just be a little more aware of it than some. Berio, in Sinfonia, really plays an orchestra. Every instrument, every musician is acting as part of the whole and this, interestingly, juxtaposes quite dramatically with the nature of Sinfonia – that is, a musical collage. There is music sampled from Bach right through to modern times, quotations of texts from librettists and quotations of music from composers past and present, and yet it is still a thoroughly unique work in itself.

The voices do not always sing, they are not conventional – nothing about this piece is conventional. The voices are as much an ‘extended technique’ as the other instruments are, punctuation dramatically either with the orchestra or against it.

I can only imagine what impact this piece would have had when it was first performed.

The score is a bit hard to follow, so I’m using my ears mostly and looking at the score as a whole rather than following it. There is certainly flow within the movements, but unlike some of the music from the previous centuries, not so much inter-movement reference. However, within each movement (especially the first two), there is an abundance of inter-instrumental conversation happening – call and response. As someone who loves improvisational music, having an understanding of this is vital to perform it.

Man, I am blown away by this piece, and this waffle of an analyses is quite, well, waffly. The big point with this piece is that, like McLuhan’s work, it is as much a social statement as a musical statement and there is a very, very blurred line between the two. Art music, movement music. Music to make you think and reflect.

Peter, I must talk about this with you.

-Vin

(PS. Here’s the first movement)

Berio’s Sequenza VII for solo oboe

hey guys,

This week, I really took a plunge and leapt into listening to a work not recommended for first years. It wasn’t something I was planning on, but Tom reckoned I should do it because by listening to this work I could be further prepared for writing our oboe and bassoon duet.

Conceptually I found this work simultaneously allienating and fascinating. In short, I liked it but found the notions presented were more complex (or rather, different) than I have come across before. The first notes that I wish to make are about the global structure of this piece. As  Tom pointed out, it establishes a tonal centre and as it progresses, the oboe part moves further away from it. In this case, the note is B natural, and can come from any sound source. The oboe starts by playing in unison with it, then moves further away.

I really liked this idea. I thought it was simple, but effective, both in the application of creating a form and providing the listener with a desire for eventual resolution.

I also liked the application of dynamics and use of harmonics. Both created more variation than I had imagined in seeing the score, and once again were simple and effective. I also liked how the composer has the oboe produce chords, and also the use of fluttertongue. For me, this was the highlight in contrasting the sounds that the oboe can produce. Where the oboe may normally have a pure, nasal, sweet tone, the fluttertongue removed the sweetness whilst the chords made it sound like a different instrument altogether.

Listening: Luciano Berio, Sequenza VII (Solo Oboe)

Luciano Berio

The score I was reading for this exercise was actually Chemins IV, which is an arrangement for Oboe and strings. However, the Oboe part – the most important – is the same.

Sequenza VII by Luciano Berio is a composition for performance on Oboe and Oboe alone. The entire series of Sequenzas, the composition of which took place over 34 years of Berio’s life and explore virtuosic applications of both listener and player.  (Garland Online)

There are a few very important characteristics about this piece, first is the continually shifting meter: 3/4, 5/8, 4/8, 7/16, 3/8, 5/16, 2/8 – basically one bar of each, and that is only the first seven bars of the piece. This makes counting the piece rather difficult, but I will quote a friend of mine: “my father used to say that the easiest way to count odd-meter is to ignore the bar lines” (Simon Hawker), but it also makes for some interesting dynamics.

Sequenza VII explores a concept that I’d known about, but never articulated: that being the exploration of a tone center and the “escape” from it (thanks Peter), or the exploration of the harmonic possibilities of that one tone center. This particular piece uses different fingerings of the Oboe to get different timbres (?) from the same note. The idea of using one single drone note as a base and exploring the potential of that one note is used a lot in free improvisation and this idea as a musical theme is quite common. The Oboe then leaps around quite radically in short bursts as if it is attempting to “escape” from the B, which it does do, only to be “trapped” again later in the piece on an F, where it then attempts to escape.

The Sequenzas, as a series, follow similar themes of sonic exploration on a solo instrument which are hard to play and hard to listen to. In this particular example, Berio has shown us that you need only one instrument to create a dynamically moving piece that is full of intensity where the only recurring theme is that of “escape”; it is otherwise a non-standard structure in that it moves from an [A] section through to an [S] section, over 9 minutes without repeating anything.

I learned some new terminology and musical ideas that would certainly be interesting to pursue, but the most interesting aspect of this composition was the use of different fingerings to change the timbre of the instrument on only one note. How, to engage a listener with minimal instrumentation, the piece needs to move very dynamically.

It was a very interesting piece to study for my first time studying music in this way as I’ve never done any classical study at all.

Vin

PS. Hopefully this is the kind of thing we’re after. I guess with a bit of practice it will get better and more in depth.