Word: berio
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...part our thoughts down to a manageable, communicable shape. But what goes through our own minds is not ordered speech at all. It is more a dark, undifferentiated jumble held loosely together in some incomprehensible pattern. It is this realm of internal speech, of irrational and fragmented emotions that Berio explores in his works...
...Berio's, usual treatment of poetic texts is another example of his desire to real things apart, to lay them bare. Instead of using words for their meaning, he uses them purely for sound value. He manipulated consonants and vowel sounds like musical elements, altering them and recombining them to create emotional effects...
...Berio wrote O King as a tribute to Martin Luther King. In it, a women sings the sounds that form King's name over whispered instrumental chords. At the climatic end of the piece, the whole name finally emerges. At first, it is as if we have penetrated beneath the meaning of the name to the purely sensual sounds that underlie it. And at the end, the whole name rises up above the surface like an emerging volcanic island...
...Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), Berio uses the reverse process. At the beginning, a woman reads a passage from Ulysses. When she is done, the sounds are broken down and reorganized by electronic means. The effect is like hearing Homer being read in Greek; you can be deeply affected by spoken sounds without any knowledge of their meaning. The demands of literature restricted Homer's musical achievement, but Berio uses spoken sounds as he would use notes and reveals some of the musical underpinnings of the English language...
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...