Word: sequenza
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...PART of the River Arts Festival, DANCEWORKS, a modern dance studio in Boston run by Susan Rose and Joy Kellman, performed "Sequenza" during afternoons last week on the Cambridge Common. Designed for two to two hundred people, and in this version with around fifteen, the work uses an easy, loppy movement style. From a distance, I thought it was a baseball game and not the dance I had come to see. It is a lot like a game, and makes you laugh without being humorous. Interesting to watch is how the simplest actions, like running and forming lines...
...this is not sheer madness. It is Sequenza III for female voice by Luciano Berio, one of the three or four most successful living composers. The words are incomprehensible, as the music also, seems to be, but as a dramatic stream of consciousness, this piece has the same kind of compelling emotional logic as Joyce's Ulysses...
Written ten years ago, Sequenza III is similar to many other Berio compositions in its use of "non-musical" effects. In addition to sighing, groaning and coughing at specified moments, their performer must portray carefully indicated emotional attitudes like "accusing," "Whimpering," and "langorous." The result is a tortuous emotional odyssey with no clearly articulated form. Yet there remains a strong subconscious sense of inevitable progression from moment to moment...
Berio has begun to create a new kind of music-drama, a miniaturized answer to the Wagnerian epics of the last century. His Sequenza V for trombone is really a theater piece which grows out of a musical core. Body movements are a carefully indicated in the score as the notes. There are instructions about standing and sitting, and the position of the instrument as well as the usual grunts and vowel sounds. To add to the effect, the player is expected to wear a clown costume. It is this sense of theater, this reliance on dramatic rather than musical...
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