Remembering the future by Luciano Berio - chapter 1 "Formations"

After reading the first chapter of Berio’s Remembering the future I decided to copy some highlights I did on the book and to document some responses.

On page 1, Berio write: “Of course, I am not inviting you to abandon words and take refuge in purely sensory experiences — nor to play games with music in some hermeneutic “hall of mirrors.” But I would like to suggest to you some points of reference that I have found useful in my work, and in my reflections on that strange, fascinating Babel of musical behaviours that surrounds us.”

He continues on page 2, “I will not concern myself here with music as an emotional and reassuring commodity for the listener, nor with music as a procedural and reassuring commodity for the composer. It is my intention to share with you some musical experiences that invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past, and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory.”

On the bottom of page 3, he starts to link music with other art: “In music, as in literature, it may be plausible to conceive a reciprocal shifting of focus between the text’s supremacy over the rear and the primacy of the reader becoming his or her own text. As Harold Bloom remarked << you are, or you become what you read >> and << that which you are, that only can you read. >>

He continues on page 4 saying, “The implications of these statements are endless. When applied to music they have to take into account performance, so that the question of supremacy becomes overly complicated: to perform and interpret a musical text is obviously not the same thing as to read and interpret a literary one. Perhaps the difficulties composers encounter when they talk about texts arise from their feeling that they themselves are a musical text, that they live inside a text and therefore are lacking the detachment necessary to explore, with some objectivity, the nature of the relation they entertain with themselves as text. It is not an accident that the most rewarding commentaries written by composers are on other composers, and that composer-writers — such as Schumann and Debusy — were << hinging >> behind a pseudonym. The same may be true today, even without pseudonyms, provided that the main concern of the composer who comments on the work of another composer is other than to prove that his analysis << works >> and that it is immune from pre-conditioning.”

    In responde to this las paragraph I wrote that my goal in this research are, not he one hand talk, analyse, critique and write about my music and its processes of construction without hiding myself in the shelter of a pseudonym; on the other hand, I also want to be able to talk about other composers’ work.


Berio, on the bottom of page 4 says, “I tend to admire << analytical listening >> and the so-called << analytical performers, >> but I also believe that delicate balance must be maintained, at whatever cost, between recognition of conventions, stylistic references, expectations, and, on the other hand, the concrete experience of giving a new life to an object of knowledge.”


In response with what Berio said I wrote that following my goals, I believe that I would create new knowledge for other composers that are interested in talk about their work, analyse their one work, self-critique their own work and its process of construction.

“” All these mus be an object of knowledge - but how??””


On page 6, Berio says “The attempt to establish a dialectic between music’s practical and conceptual dimension goes back a long way and has sometimes assumed a radical epistemological importance. For this reason I propose that we pay a fleeting, non-archaeological visit to the Roman philosopher Severinus Boethius, who rose to fame in the early sixth century A.D. He was also a musical theorist. For him music was a silent text; it was indeed one of the chief tools of philosophical speculation; it was governed by numbers, and was therefore << harmonic. >> The laws of the universe were, for Boethius as for Pythagoras before hum, laws of an essentially musical nature. Deriving the concept of music from the Greeks and proposing it to his contemporaries (and to the the entire Middle Ages), Boethius conceived music above all as a means of knowledge. His evaluation of beauty in its relation to art and to music is secondary. His vision stems from Soicism, a philosophy according to which beauty is a question of appearances and hence has a purely formal value. Although his speculations on music induced him to praise Pythagoras for having tackled the subject without making any reference to the faculty of hearing, Boethius claimed that the surest path to the human soul passed through the ear. Of this he had no doubt. Music, he wrote, affects human behaviour, and so it is essential to be aware of its constituent parts and of its ethical value. This Neoplatonic view of the musical ethos reflects the idea of music as part of the medieval quadrivium, together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy — the higher division of the seven liberal arts (the others being grammar, rhetoric and logic: the trivium).”

Musical ethos - ??


On page 8, “How then shall we approach Boethius’s teaching? As a kind of philosophical manifesto of abstract musical functions, or as a very distant ancestor of our segmented musical world?”


In responde tho this sentence, how I relate Boethius’s approach to my research and way of composing?

On page 10, Berio says: “My view of linguistic units may appear somewhat simplistic, but it seems to me that the linguistic sign is not translatable into musical terms. Let’s look at the binary, pragmatic elements of language: signifier and signified. Signans and signatum, deep level and surface level, largue and parole, and also the binary use of distinctive features: the relationship between them, when transposed into músico, turns out to be significantly undefinable. The binary elements themselves are not readily identifiable even in the highly structured and codified classical forms which were the most << linguistic >> in music history (like the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart). The semiological misunderstanding stems from the fact that linguistic categories are applied to a música texture whose mophologival and syntactical elements cannot be separated. Furthermore, all the elements of language-grammar, syntax, morphology, lexical conteve the, and so on - have to work together in a way established by culture, whereas a similar ordinary among musical elementos has to be constantly reconsidered. It is no coincidence that Gestalt theory developed on the basis of what you see, rather than what you hear. In language, a word implies and excludes many diferente things, said and unsaid, and the name of a thing is not the thing itself. Whereas the musical << word >>  the musical utterance, is always the thing itself.

[linkable with page 24]



In response to the last paragraph, I wrote: in my research would be good if I can talk more about my training on the past and journey so far. That is experience and experience also influence on the way of composing, sketching and thinking today. How this training and past experiences can connect with my training now and the most recent experiences? How those past-experiences and training, when related with the ones now, may or may not influence other composers and researchers?



On page 11, Berio continues: “A melody by Schubert or a musical configurations ] by Schoenberg are not the pieces of a musical chessboard; they carry within themselves the experience of other melodies and other configurations, and their transformations are inscribed, so to speak, in their genetic code.



In response to the last paragraph I wrote: what is the experience or what are the experiences, that my music carry within my own experience and training?



On page 12, Berio cuote: “But the point is that every musical work is a set of partial systems that interact among themselves, not merely because they are active at the same time, but because they stablish a sort of organic and unstable reciprocity”



In response to this cuote, I wrote: in whichever harmonic series the partials are active partials that need to interact with each other. For that reason, my music can reach other level of harmonic perfection if each partial is shaped, in a way that they can be part of an harmonic series, of a chord, or part of an active and organic melody.



Still in page 12, “We like to think that music performs itself before it ever comes to performance, not only because a composer can play it out silently in his or her Ming, but also because all of its meaningful layers exhibit conceptually both their autonomy and their reciprocal interactions.” 



In response to this paragraph I wrote: when composing it is necessary to think in the autonomy of the materials and also the reciprocal interactions between the materials.



On page 13 “Let’s imagine a pitch-cell, for instance, or a pitch-sequence that generates melodies, figures, phrases, and harmonic processes. A rhythm configuration shapes those melodies and generates patterns, time glissando, and discontinuous or even statistical distributions of those same melodies and figures. Dynamic layers, instrumental colours and techniques, can nullify or enhance the individual characters of each process, the nature of their evolution, and the degree of their independence.”



In response to the last paragraph, I wrote about the underline words or phrases: do you think that the way I generate melodies, figures, phrases and harmonic processes can be consider as a technique?

About the paragraph: there’re not new processes of composing. However, what’s interesting is to know what/which technique(s) a composer may or may not use to generate, transform, shape its material as rhythm, phrases, harmonic processes, etc., into a piece of music. And my way of doing is ......



On page 14, “Extreme situations, from the simple to the very complex, will entail different and often contradictory ways of listening, from the most analytical to the most global, from the most active to the most passive. This instability, this mobility of perspectives, must be carefully composed as part of a meaningful musical architecture, and occasionally can stretch to the point of opening itself to outside visitors, to strangers, to happenings, to musical figures coherently loaded with associations. O have explored that possibility myself in works like Visage or in the fifth part of my Sinfonia.

Berio continues “A musically significant work is always made of interacting meaningful layers that are at once the agents and the materials of its existence. They are the actor, the director, and the script all in one—or, rather, they are like the lake of an Indian tale, which sets out in search of its own source. So what is the musical text? Is it water itself, or the urge to seek out the source. The wellspring?”



In response to the last paragraph, o wrote: Berio relates Music with text, in a way of construction, form, narrative and performative process of the text itself. How can I relate my music with visual arts in a way that my music it’s not static and visual art, 100% of the cases, is static? How a visual-art can be non static? Relating : visual art vs my own music



On the same page Berio contiues: “It has been said that Music changed because its materials change. While it is true that the advent of iron and glass brought about a change in architecture, it is also true that architectural thought had already changed and was thus prepared to perceive how iron and glass might be used. The old sound-generator in the electronic music studios of the 1950s did not change the essence of music. Musical thinking had already changed the moment musicians began to consider the possibility of a meaningful interaction between additive and substractive. Riteria, looking, for instance, for a structural continuity between timbre and harmony.”

On page 16, “Turning the score into a visual object may allow associations to proliferate. It may evoke the <<beauty>> of Bach’s manuscripts, or the <<ugliness>> of Beethoven’s sketches; but that <<beauty>. And that <<ugliness>> have nothing to do with musical processes and functions: they are mere aestheticised gestures that, in their detachment from Amy form of musical thought and form its realisations in sound, become a para-musical merchandise, as superficial and self-promoting as those <<new sounds>> that often end up as jungles, advertising a singular absence of musical thought”

On page 17, “Nevertheless, there is also something attractive in the unwillingness to bridge the gap between musical gesture and acoustic result. I am thinking of that sacrificial and somehow clownish impulse that seeks to defy an object in its original function: a piano becomes a gamelan or the workshop of a happily mindless ironsmith; the concert hall is filled with the amplified sounds of whales or the noises of intergalactic magnetic storms… It is possible to see in this rejection of the <<artistic>> a link with the studiedly <<careless>> art of Marcel Duchamp (think of his ready made, of his Mona Lisa with moustache and a <<hot bottom,>> of his urinal, that is, his Fountain)—as exemplary as that of John Cage, to whom I dedicate these thoughts.”



In response to musical gesture and acoustic result, I wrote: what’s the relation between the musical gesture on the scale and the acoustic result? - Edition and Orchestration - Timbre selection…

In responde to “defy an object in its original functions” I wrote: change an object from its original function - Harmonic series opposite pole.

The quote is very important, specially because Duchamp it’s relevant for my investigation.



On page 24, Berio says: “A theoretical manifesto has indeed become a declaration of poetics (…) is in fact the attempt to formalise Schoenberg’s own poetics—one of the most generous, complex, and dramatic of our story."

“In the process of rebuilding and revising the past with our reflection of the future, we cannot invent a new, utopian musical language, nor can we invent its instruments. Yet we contribute continuously to their evolution.”


In response to the last paragraph above made a connection between what Berio said here and on page 11.


On page 25: “Musical instruments are tools useful to man, but they are tools that lack objectivity: they produce sounds that are anything but neutral, which adquire meaning by testing meaning itself with the reality of facts. They are the concrete depositories of historical continuity and, like all working tools and buildings, they have memory. They carry with them traces of the musical and social changes and of the conceptual framework within which they were developed and transformed. They talk music and—not without conflicts—they let themselves be talked by it. The sounds produced by keys, strings, wood, and metal are in turn all tools of knowledge, and contribute to the making of the idea itself. Verbum caro factum est (the world became flesh), with sweat and technique.

On page 27: “The story of music has always been marked by new ways of engaging with instruments and with the human voice.”

On page 28, “The instrument becomes a fetish to be desecrated.”