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Luciano Berio: A-Ronne, part 5 (1974-75)

From the album A-Ronne / Cries of London

It is an unforgivable cliché to speak of some innate lyricism in connection with Italian composers, as it is to speak of French sensuality, German rigor, or (perhaps worst of all) American earnestness.  But Luciano Berio—who happens to be an Italian composer—is without quarrel one of the greatest vocal composers of the 20th century.  Berio explores the full diapason of the human voice: from guttural murmurs and throat noises to precise rhythmic utterances and undulating, inflected verbalizations that sound like some invented language.  Sometimes, he even has his singers sing.  

Like its predecessor, Cries of London, which also appears on this disc, A-Ronne is actually among the most traditionally lyrical of Berio’s vocal works: there are entire passages in which the ensemble intones in gorgeous madrigalian harmony. Berio always knows when to lay on the sweetness, and (more importantly) when to let it curdle.

A-Ronne (the name is an old Italian idiom meaning “from A to Z”) is based on a short text by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, with whom Berio worked on a number of projects, including Epifanie (1959-60) and Labyrinthus II (1965). Sanguineti’s poem is a patchwork of short, fragmentary phrases, quotations, and allusions to sources such as Dante, Goethe, T. S. Eliot, the Bible, and the Communist Manifesto. 

Berio described A-Ronne as a “documentary” on Sanguineti’s text, a “theater of the ear,” in which, according to Nina Horvath, ”disparate vocal and textual elements combine into a unified whole, just as the many sides of a theatrical piece (such as staging, actors, lighting, and scenery) are synthesized to generate a total sensory experience.”  Commissioned by the Dutch radio station Hilversum, the work was originally written for 5 voices and radiophonic effects.  Berio later rewrote the piece for 8 voices, which is the version performed here by the Swingle Singers.

November 10, 2010, 11:48pm

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Crystal Castles: “Air War”

From the album Crystal Castles (2008)

Here’s a fun little exercise in the infinite cultural recursion of the information age: In 1922, Irish modernist author James Joyce writes the novel Ulysses, a radically experimental work that plays with the musical potential of “nonsense” speech.  In 1958, Italian composer Luciano Berio, one of the foremost members of the international musical avant-garde and co-founder of the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, creates a piece for magnetic tape entitled Thema (Ommagio a Joyce), based on a recording of renowned vocalist Cathy Berberian (to whom Berio was married at the time) reading from the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses.  In 2008, the Toronto-based electro-rock band Crystal Castles releases their eponymous debut studio album, including the track “Air War,” which samples Thema at length, turning Berio’s music (and Joyce’s prose) into an estranged psychedelic sound-layer atop the band’s catchy lo-fi electronic dance grooves.

October 14, 2009, 4:43pm