Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia

104 Pages·2016·5.63 MB·English

by  David Osmond-Smith

Playing on Words
a Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia
ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION MONOGRAPHS
General editor: David Fallows
This series is supported by funds made available to the Royal Musical
Association from the estate of Thurston Dart, former King Edward
Professor of Music in the University of London. The editorial board is
the Publications Committee of the Association.
No.1: Playing on Words: a Guide to Luciano Berids Sinfonia (1985)
by David Osmond-Smith
No. 2: The Oratorio in Venice (1986) by Denis and Elsie Arnold
No. 3: Music for Treviso Cathedral in the Late Sixteenth Century: a
Reconstruction of the Lost Manuscripts 29 and 30 (1987) by
Bonnie J. Blackburn
No. 4: The Breath of the Symphonist: Shostakovich's Tenth (1988) by
David Fanning
ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION
MONOGRAPHS
Playing
on Words
a Guide to Luciano Berio's
Sinfonia
DAVID OSMOND-SMITH
Lecturer in Music, University of Sussex
First published 1985 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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First published in 1985; unaltered reprint 1989
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Osmond-Smith, David
Playing on words: a guide to Luciano
Berio's Sinionia. - (Royal Musical
Association monographs; no. 1)
1. Berio, Luciano. Sinfonia
1. TItle II. Series
785.1 '1'0924 MU10.8491
ISBN: 9780947854003 (hbk)
This book is typeset by Goodfellow & Egan., Cambridge
The music examples were produced by Paul Courtenay
Copies may be obtained from:
Brian Jordan (agent) or RMA Secretary (members)
12 Green Street
Cambridge
CB23JU
Transferred to Digital Printing 2014
Contents
Preface vii
1 Sinfonia and its Precursors 1
Work in progress 4
An overview of Sinfonia 5
2 Mythologiques 8
The sources of Berio's text 9
Isolated words and their function 12
Phonetic materials 13
The poetics of fragmentation 13
Coherence as structure 15
Musical structure 15
3 '0 King' 21
Structural properties of the pitch set 22
The pitch set in macrocosm 23
Climax and epilogue 25
The rhythmic set 26
Upbeat patterns 27
The growth of rhythmic stability 28
Rhythmic commentary in Sinfonia 30
Parallel processes in rhythm and pitch 30
Selective resonance 31
Independent melodic lines 32
Pitches outside the set 33
Harmonic commentary upon the chamber
version in Sinfonia 34
v
The text and its structural potential 34
Permutation and troping 37
4 'In ruhig f1iessender Bewegung' 39
From sermon to scherzo 40
Texts for a sermon 41
Obliteration as form 43
Reduction and distortion 46
Quotation 47
Chromatic clusters 50
Semantic associations of Mahler's scherzo 53
Sources for the text 54
Interactions between text and music 56
An inventory of interrelations 57
5 Synthesis and Dissolution 72
The fourth movement 72
Rhythm and texture 73
The text 74
The fifth movement 74
Before '0 King' 77
Materials from '0 King' 78
Superposed materials 79
The final monody 81
Text and music 86
Firevs. Water 87
M.l vs. M.124 88
'La vie breve' 88
6 Epilogue 90
Bibliography 92
Index 94
vi
Preface
This study is indebted to several people. First, and most obviously,
to Luciano Berio - not only because he provided the subject matter,
but because he suggested to me many years ago that Sintonia would
repay close attention. He read a version of the resultant monograph
several drafts back, and I must thank him for some all-too pertinent
criticisms. I must also thank Joan Peyser for permission to reprint
materials from an essay on Berio and Levi-Strauss that appeared in
The Musical Quarterly, and David Fallows for the benign editorial
harassment without which this study would have made more
arduous reading than it now does. None of these beneficent critics
(d. p.ll and 88) is responsible for the lacunae which I wish other
analysts the joy of discovering.
I base my observations throughout on the printed score of Sintonia
issued in 1972 (Universal Edition, no. 13783). This replaced a photo
copy of the manuscript that was made available in 1%9 (no.13f783).
It corrected a number of errors in the manuscript version (though
alas, not all) and also allowed Berio to rethink various matters of
detail. In two instances where this reworking has rather wider for
mal implications the differences between the two versions have been
noted; otherwise, I have confined myself to the 1972 score, regarded
by the composer as definitive.
The aim of the study is not to give a complete deScription, but
rather to pursue through the work all musically pertinent processes
- to avoid, in other words, the tautology of reasserting in words
what will be self-evident to the score-reader, while seeking to
deploy analytical propositions where they are most useful to the
musician: in suggesting a wider formal context within which
individual details make sense.
vii

1
Sinfonia and its
Precursors
It is no accident that often I instinctively find myself working on different
projects at the same time, amusing myself with one and sweating blood
over another. But it is the tendency towards reunion that justifies the
tendency to many-sidedness.
Luciano Beriol
Because Berio has found the simultaneous pursuit of two or three
musical projects so congenial. his large-scale compositions have
tended to take on a special role in relation to the rest of his work.
They have provided the framework within which the exhilaration of
these centrifugal enthusiasms could be countered by an act of
synthesis. Such 'encyclopaedic' works recur throughout Berio's
career: AlIez-Hop (1959), Epifanie (1961), Sinfonia (1968), Opera (1970)
and Coro (1975--6) are all to a greater or lesser extent examples of this
tendency. But whereas AlIez-Hop and Epifanie unite their disparate
materials simply by placing them side by side, Sinfonia and Coro go
beyond this, compelling different musical concerns to interact in the
moment of composition itself. This is one of the primary reasons
why they occupy so central a position within Berio's reuvre.2
In Sinfonia Berio synthesised several of his most long-standing
concerns, making them literally 'sound together' as the title
indicates. Throughout the sixties he had experimented with the
resources of the human voice - not merely the range of articulation
and tone that it could offer, but also the ways in which it could
enhance the musical impact of language by emphasising, or indeed
isolating its phonetic components. At first he had concentrated on
the solo voice - in Circles (1%0), Epifanie (1961) and above all
Sequenza III (1965--6) - while exploring in a fairly straightforward way
the juxtaposition of singing and speaking groups in Passaggio (1962)
1 Berio 1985, p.lOO.
2 It is also, no doubl, one of the reasons why Sinton", in particular has attracted a
good deal of commentary. The studies by Altmann and Hicks are referred 10 in Ihe
lexl, bUI Ihe reader should also nole Budde 1972, Dressen 1982, Flynn 1975, Jahnke
1973, Krieger and Stroh 1971, Ravizza 1974 and Stoianova 1974.
2