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14
focus Luciano Berio
It was already clear that Sequenza I was “in movement”
in a different way to the other two works, and allowed a
fairly limited freedom of initiative to the performer, which
did not compromise the syntactic structure of the piece.
But the interest at the time was to put forward “extreme”
examples to emphasise these very aspects of openness.
Now, however, a philologically well-founded dispute
has broken out over the supposed freedom that
Sequenza I allows its performer. of
the essays in the recently-published
Berio’s Sequenzas, I will refer only
to those by Cynthia Folio and
Alexander R. Brinkmann (Rhythm
and Timing in the Two Versions of
Berio’s “Sequenza I” for Flute Solo:
Psychological and Musical Differences
in Performance), by Edward
venn (Proliferations and Limitations:
Berio’s Reworking of the “Sequenzas”) and by Irna Priore
(Vèstiges of Twelve-Tones Practice as Compositional Process
in Berio’s “Sequenza I” for Solo Flute). 18
The first essay suggests that I had misunderstood Berio’s
work which, in fact, does not constitute an example
of work in movement. In venn’s essay it is said that in
publishing my article Berio was complicit in spreading this
misunderstanding (and Venn does not know that Berio
was complicit not only in publishing the article but in
suggesting and supervising the expressions I had used).
It therefore seems that Berio had changed his idea at a
certain point, as is confirmed by what he had said in 1981
to Rossana Dalmonte in Intervista sulla musica:
“The piece is very difficult; for this I had adopted
a very particular notation but with certain margins of
flexibility so that the performer could have the freedom
– psychological rather than musical – to adapt the piece
here and there to his or her technical stature. Instead, this
very notation has allowed many performers – whose most
shining virtue was certainly not professional integrity – to
make adaptations more or less unauthorised. I intend
to rewrite Sequenza I in rhythmic notation: it will be less
‘open’ and more authoritarian, perhaps, but certainly more
reliable. And I hope Umberto Eco will forgive me ...” 19
Berio was interested
in the poetics
of the open work.
In fact in 1992 he wrote a second version (published in
1998) where the freedom of the performer was considerably
reduced. I will not venture into any subtle musical
analyses showing how Berio changed the notation of his
piece from 1958 to 1992, but I will try only to explain the
mystery of the two versions of Sequenza I, recalling that
for Berio, and for me, the so-called “movement” was
important only as a limited example of the poetics of the
open work – so that the examples
of the work in movement occupied
only two pages out of 22 in my es-
say and would occupy three pages
out of 370 in the final version of
The Open Work.
But readers at the time had
no doubt been so struck by the
examples and the appeal of the
work in movement that in the end
they took the view that works in movement were the only
open works we were thinking about, and all the others
were, as someone said, “closed”. If I had known this, I
wouldn’t have included those two opening pages, which
were no more than a drum roll to make readers sit up in
their seats or, si licet parva componere magnis, something
like the four opening blasts of Beethoven’s Fifth.
Fedele d’Amico also became involved in the error, yet
he made some essential observations. on the one hand
he observed that the fact that Severino Gazzelloni had
made one choice rather than another, perhaps with Berio’s
consent, was a private matter of no musical importance,
because what the listener then heard would be the
final result of that choice and therefore something, so to
speak, just as authoritative and untouchable as a classical
piece. on the other hand he clearly stated that
“The open work is not a new fact that belongs to the
history of the avant-garde, nor is it a post-Webern phenomenon:
everything that contains basic linguistic ambiguities
is an open work [...] as are the works of Schönberg
at least from the period 1908-1912. The new fact is that
the idea of it is introduced under various names. And it
is an important fact, because it marks perhaps a crucial
phase in the self-awareness of the avant-garde.” 20