Remembering the future by Luciano Berio - chapter 4 and chapter 5

Chapter 4 - 
Not so many responses on this chapter.

On page 82: “Opera Aperta (The Open Work) by Umberto Eco, 1962.

On page 89: “Michelangelo <<you cannot work on one thing with your hands and another thing with your head, especially when it comes to marble.”



Chapter 5 - Seeing Music

On page 99: “When someone asked him how he invisaged the stager production of his dramas, Wagner replied that he thought of them as musical action becoming visible (...) to Mozart the same question would certainly have seemed extravagant, even incomprehensible (...) Debussy seems to give visual substance to the ellipses of his musical thought in an opera, Pelleas et Melisande, which has no fore plot, which emerges from nothingness and dissolves into nothingness, neither eliciting nor resolving moral conflicts (...) Alban Berg, with Wozzeck, seems to synthesise on the stage the intensity and rigor of his musical thinking, whose structural complexity is visualised and condensed in a sequence of self-sufficient scenes.”

On page 109: “In La Vera Storia (The True Story), a musical action in two parts (...) We wanted to approach the essence of opera theatre in its prime elements, and we also wanted to suggest that a “true story” is always different from the way it appears at first sight and that in back of it there may be another story that is even truer.”

On page 117, 118: “The exorbitant number of musical functions and relations in Circles can briefly be described as follows. The three poems by e.e. Cummings, of increasing complexity, are repeated twice: I, II, III and III, II, I, in an ensemble of five episodes. Poem number I is taken up again at the end with musical elements of the second episode, while poem number III, in the third episode, repeats itself backwards. The harp reproduces and expands upon the modes of attack of the voice and the percussion instruments: e.e. Cummings’s text, interpreted by the voice, is then developed musically and extended acoustically by the harp and percussion. The three Cummings poems take on the role of generator of musical and/or acoustical functions. There is a continual oscillation between periodic figures, bounded by specific constellations of intervals, and complex gestural events characterised by a notable degree of indeterminacy. The choice and use of the percussion instruments and of the harp are dictated by specific phonetic models: the instruments play, so to speak, the voice and the words. They play different modes of attack’s, vowels and consonants (fricativas, sibilants, plosives, and so on). The instruments translated and prolong the vocal behaviours, insisting upon them, in a sort of onomatopeia or,m rather, vocal-instrumental bilingualism. The relationship between a female voice and two frequently unrestrained percussion players can present problems of balance. the singer must therefore move around, following an itinerary which will allow her, in succession, to be accompanied by the instruments, to be like them, and, in the end, to be completely absorbed by them. this very intense dialogue between the musical diimension, the phonetic-acoustical dimension, and the spatial dimension is maintained and developed through a particular coordination assigned to musical signals and mainly to the gestures of the singer’s hands; she seems to be celebrating a rite of total identification with the other performers. The signals are assimilated to the musical process, making Circles a theater of over-abundant relationships. The score itself becomes a multilayered protagonist that is evoked, realised, and translated in visible and diversified musical behaviours.”



In response to all this, I think this is a particular and interesting way to talk about music. I need to have this tools and skills to talk about mine. It is good for learning how to do it.