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8
focus Luciano Berio
It is perhaps through this capability that it will one
day be possible to create a ‘total’ performance where
a profound continuity and a perfect integration can be
developed between all the component elements (not
just between the actual musical elements), and where
it is therefore possible to also create a relationship of a
new kind between word and sound, between poetry
Berio always went looking for writers who didn’t give him a libretto,
a story or even some performable phrases.
and music. In such a case the true aim would not be
to place two different expressive systems in opposition
or even to mix them together, but instead to create a
relationship of continuity between them, to make it
possible to pass from one to the other imperceptibly,
without making clear the differences between perceptive
conduct of a logical-semantic type (that adopted in
dealing with a spoken message) and perceptive conduct
of a musical kind […].” 4
Berio was, in this respect, certainly one of the most
cultured musicians of his generation, capable of going
in search of music even where it was thought there was
none.
Just think of when, starting up the Studio di Fonologia,
he immediately began asking himself about what
phonology actually means, seeing that it had been given
its name by the technical engineer, gino Castelnuovo.
And he obtained Saussure’s Cours de linguistique
générale and Troubetzkoy’s Principes de phonologie,
from which he at first concluded that the phonology of
the structuralists was not the phonology of musicians.
And so it was that the copies of the two volumes, which
I still own, are the ones I borrowed from the Studio di
Fonologia and which naturally I have never returned
through right of conquest and, as Roger Bacon suggested,
if ideas are good they must be saved from the infidel
tamquam ab iniustis possessoribus.
But was Berio really an unworthy possessor of these
two books? Let us consider some facts. First, he quickly
realised that his musical activity was most certainly linked
to the phonology of the phonologists, even if in technical
terms he worked more on etic than on emic, and became
aware of this when he began his electro-acoustic work
with the human voice.
There again, if we read various interviews with Berio
we see unexpected (but in my view fundamental) refer-
ences cropping up here and there, for example to the
philosophy of Merleau Ponty, and therefore to a phenomenology
not just of perception, but of corporality. Almost
all musicians have had a rapport with the word, with
language, depending on the extent to which they work
with music for voice, but verdi’s relationship with
Fran cesco Maria Piave, and perhaps Mozart’s with Da
Ponte, is different from Berio’s with Sanguineti. Berio
always went looking for writers who didn’t give him a
libretto, a story or even some performable phrases –
indeed I have never seen a musician so arrogant and
imperialistic towards his librettists (this, too, is my own
personal experience, as well as Sanguineti’s and Calvino’s),
a musician prepared to distort the texts they had given
him, to break them up, to use only what was left over
as it suited him. Berio never set the words of others to
music. He went searching among the words of others
for musical elements that were potentially (sometimes
actually) contained in them, and this he did through a
competence in the phenomenon of language that I would
describe as scientific, through a philosophical attention to
the mystery of the spoken word and the voice.
When we think of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), we
can understand how Berio gave prominence to those
formants that for structuralist phonology were, or rather
would be, the distinctive features of phonemes. And I
say “would be” because Fundamentals of Language by
Jakobson and Halle would be published just a year after
the opening of the Studio di Fonologia. 5 I don’t remember
whether Berio had read it but the fact is that he