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12
focus Luciano Berio
and ordered procedure: a first attempt at order, namely,
of a more musical nature. This is a series of exchanges
between one language and the other that will be carried
out on fixed points and determined – on the basis of
results from previous superimpositions – using criteria of
similarity or contrast. [...]
With the organised encounter of three different languages
one is immediately stimulated to catch, above all,
the pure sound connections of the mix, not so much to
follow the various linguistic ciphers, since in the presence
of different messages spoken simultaneously one can
be conscious of only one, whereas the others, automatically
ranked as musical complements, become parts of
an actual polyphonic scheme. It is interesting to note that
at a certain moment, when the mechanism of changes
has begun and become settled, this type of listening will
be adopted entirely: the passages from one language to
the other will no longer be perceived as such but, being
completely ignored, will become instead a single musical
function.”
Berio could now abandon his reading of Joyce to take a
crucial step towards a more musical development of the
text. A development which seemed to him already implicit
in the original Joyce, “above all in the original English
which is free from any reference to a quantitative, syllabic
meter characteristic of Latin prosody (and therefore, to a
different degree, characteristic of Italian and French) but
which is instead based on possibilities of accentuation
and tone typical of the English language.” 13
This was the moment to use electro-acoustical means
to multiply and enlarge the transformation of voice colours
provided by a single voice, to dismantle words and to
reorder the resulting vocal material with different criteria.
I don’t want to describe here all the work that followed,
and I need only refer to Berio’s own account of
all the manipulations carried out on the English text,
finally arriving at his work on the formants of various
particular sounds or (as he said in his note on the documentary)
at the secret life of the vowels and consonants,
to the point where the original text vanished in the
original swish of the “s” (“Pearls: when she. Liszt’s rhapsodies.
Hissssss”). And here we have moved on from
Omaggio a Joyce to Thema.
Many listen to Thema without knowing about the
documentary to which it formed the background. Perhaps
in judging Berio as a musician there is no need to be
familiar with this distant story. But I am grateful to Luigi
Rognoni for his good offices in recovering the original
documentary tape in some dark recess of the RAI, or
Belgian radio – I don’t recall which – because the continuous
line leading from Ulysses to Thema tells us a great
deal about the cultural foundations, the interdisciplinary
curiosity and the vocal acoustic gluttony that nurtured
Berio’s musical inventiveness.
Omaggio a Joyce, Berio’s commentary and my essay on
the open work had all appeared in 1959 and, in the year
before, Pousseur’s article had appeared on La nuova
sensibilità musicale (The new musical sensibility) which
had inspired all of us to some extent (Berio never concealed
his debt to Pousseur’s theoretical work). Pousseur
declared that:
“New music [...] tends to promote acts of conscious
freedom. And since phenomena are no longer linked
together, one to another, according to a consequent determinism,
it is for the listener to place himself voluntarily
amidst a network of inexhaustible relationships, to choose
for himself, so to speak, his own degrees of proximity, his
own points of contact, his scale of references (but well
knowing that his choice is conditioned by the object he is
contemplating): it is now for him to strive to use simultaneously
the greatest quantity of possible gradations and
dimensions, to make his ways of assimilation dynamic, to
multiply them, to widen them to the extreme.” 14
It should be noted that Pousseur was no longer speaking
of a distinction (which I would introduce in the next
issue of the journal) between open works in general and
“works in movement”; he spoke of a general tendency
of contemporary art to present ambiguous forms that
encouraged different interpretations on the part of the
listener/viewer. In this passage there is also a very important
qualification: the freedom of the listener/viewer is
restrained by the object he is contemplating. I emphasise
this point since, while at the beginning of the 1950s it
was provocative and perhaps beneficial to emphasise the
freedom of the audience, over the following decades this
freedom was extended by so-called deconstructionism to
such a point as to induce the old supporters of interpretative
freedom to recall that it must always take account
of the pre-existing reality which is the textual material,
whether musical or literary or visual. To such an extent