Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...music comment on society? To the extent that electronic sounds suggest the dissonances in everyday life? Perhaps. But, as Italian-born Composer Luciano Beno says, music "cannot lower the cost of bread. It is incapable of stopping wars, it cannot eradicate slums and injustice." Granting that much, Beno, a leading innovator of musical forms, refuses to accept the conventional barriers. He is appalled that composers today seem to regard music as an isolated phenomenon, created in a vacuum for the "greater glory of musical systems."" Never before, he says, "has the composer come so dangerously close to becoming an extraneous...
Basically, it is music for the man who likes the plays of Samuel Beckett, the paintings of Marcel Duchamp and the films of Antonioni. It begins in a mood of tension: excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss's writings on Brazilian mythology are read against a highly dissonant background. In the haunting second part, the name Martin Luther King is recited and sung over and over again, the syllables spilled out here, squeezed there, so that the name is uttered in an endless variety of permutations. In the impassioned third section, the vocalists speak and sing excerpts from Beckett...
...orchestral writing. Sinfonia contains some of the most novel rhythms and chords since Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Great columns of dissonant, atonal sound seem to rise up with a towering permanence that belies the fact that the sound is composed of constantly moving parts. Often the music has a complexity that is normally achieved only with electronic synthesizers. At other times, it has the air of unexpectedness that is characteristic of chance, or aleatory, writing. Yet Berio employs neither electronics nor chance. Sinfonia is essentially music that could have been produced only by the control and unfailing...
This is what Berio, 42, has been driving at in all his work. To him, what counts is man's civilized conscience. His best previous theatrical works-Laborintus, Circles, Passaggio-were promising examples of music as a "social act." At first, he explored opera, since it seemed to him that it offered the best form for social comment. Now he has no use for it. "As a musico-dramatic form, opera is completely useless," he says. In Sinfonia, Berio suggests a new kind of dramaturgy encompassing music, drama, word sounds and, eventually, lighting and stage effects. Other composers have...
...Haven Arena was filled with blue light and rows of teenyboppers turning every now and then from their ill-concealed joints to stare at the stage door. They finally appeared, mesmerized their listeners and, without ever once letting up, proceeded with ninety minutes of the music that has all but become the language of our time. "White Room," "Crossroads," "I'm So Glad," "Traintime," "Toad,"...there couldn't have been many in the audience who did not already know these songs inside out. But their charisma doubled. Everyone knew this was the end. Cream had announced their splitting...