Word: berio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thema (1958) was one of Berio's first uses of electronic techniques. Another work from the same period is Differences, which pits a small chamber ensemble against a taped version of the same piece. It is a John-Henry-Versus-steam-hammer kind of conflict, only here the sense of epic struggle is all but alone. The taped sounds weave in and out of the performance, giving it an almost antiphonal quality. The only real clash comes when the taped sounds are electronically altered, creating a sense of war between the media...
...hard to tell exactly which side Berio is on. Despite the fragmented quality of much of his writing and his preoccupation with electronics, he remains a surprisingly lyrical composer. Paula Robinson, who directed a recent Harvard Chamber Players performance of Differences, likened Berio to "a troubadour being harassed by machines, yet still loving them." Individual lines are full of wide leaps and bizarre, shifting rhythms, but like Jackson Pollock's dribblings of paint, the lines fuse into a seamless fabric when played together. The sound is not thoroughly blended or homogenized like that of a Romantic string quartet, but there...
Like many composers of the past 25 years, Berio has devoted himself largely to chamber music. Like the epic poems and the panoramic landscape paintings, the symphony has been going through hard times recently. Instead of music conceived and executed on the grand scale, composers have turned to smaller forms because they offer greater involvement for both performers and audiences...
...chamber music, it is easy for the performers to join in the compositional process through improvisation. Berio's manner of notating his pieces calls for vast interpretive powers from the performers. His Circles, for example, has no bar lines. Berio does indicate some points at which the singer, harpist, and percussionists are expected to arrive at the same time, and notes of specified pitch which are written at varying distances from each other to suggest duration. But within that skeletal visual framework, the performers must create the piece. There are also areas, set off in boxes, within which the performers...
...this kind of notation restores the performer to the eminence he enjoyed during the Baroque era when the written notes were often treated as a rack on which to drape gaudy ornaments. But those ornaments were determined by narrowly evolved traditions, while in Berio there is the love of chance for its own sake. Berio has helped to transform the delicate creature of Baroque ornamentation into an ugly chance-created monster which often seems to subsume the composed framework. It is a monster that Berio uses to express the disorder of contemporary life...