Remembering the future by Luciano Berio - chapter 3 “Forgetting Music”

On page 61: “There are a thousand ways of forgetting music, and I am mostly interested in the active ways of forgetting rather than the passive and unconscious ways. In other words, I am interested in voluntary amnesias, although the desire to possess and remember the history of all times and all places is an integral part of modern thought, and the practical means of satisfying this desire are certainly available in out day and age.”

In response to how Berio started, I wrote: it is possible to link this with what I said and feel — if I am composing, although I love their music, I cannot hear Mahler or Shostakovich, for example, because I know I will be very influenced by them in my composition.



On page 62: “But conversation of the past also makes sense in a negative way, becoming a way of forgetting music. It provides listeners with an illusion of continuity; it gives them the illusion of being free to select what appears to confirm that continuity, as well as the illusion of being free to censure everything that appears to upset it.”


In response to this: I think this is very linkable with what was talked on the Composers Collective at the Southbank centre by Essa-Pekka Salonen. The distance between Beethoven and composers today is measured by an elastic. Every day, the distance between Beethoven and composers today is bigger, so the elastic is pushed, every day, even further. What may happen is, there will be a day where the elastic just breaks and, on the one hand, we have no connection to Beethoven and we will be focus on the young composers or, on the other hand, we have no connection to the young composers today and we will keep Beethoven (and other older composers). For that reason, Essa-Pekka suggested that we should reinforce our “elastic”. The middle of it should be as a tree trunk, strong and robust to support, not only our historical roots (Beethoven, in this case), but also all the branches, plants and flowers that grow from a tree (young and emerging composers of today).



On page 66-67: “Through new technologies, one can enter new acoustic and musical dimensions. Already in the 1950s Karlheinz Stockhausen, with Zeitmasse, Gruppen, Kontakte, and the related theoretical apparatus (Wie die Zeit vergeht, “how time passes”), was looking for an extreme, and often paradoxical, conceptual homogeneity among qualitative and quantitative sound dimensions, among time proportions, frequency, and timbre, among micro- and macro phenomena and forms, in the attempt to reach a quasi natural, quase divine, total fusion of all positive qualitative and quantitative parameters.”

On page 70-71: “In Sequenza III there are certain curious absences. The work has no memory of vocal music; it lacks linguistic autonomy because there is no possibility of linear comprehension of the text. It lacks a specifically musical autonomy because the meaning of the event lies in the everyday vocal gestures; consequently, it lacks a reference to the complexity history of reciprocal formalisations which, in the history of our vocal music, marks the relationship between text and music. These absences, I feel, are an invitation to listen afresh, and to witness that miraculous spectacle of sound becoming sense—perhaps a sense that we have not encountered before: an invitation to follow the transition from unreleased vocal sounds and gestures to a meaningful state of urgency. Something meaningless doesn’t make any sense, but something that doesn’t make any sense can be meaningful; without this basic awareness, there would be little point in developing, extracting, and inventing musical experiences from the total face (to use Jakobson’s image) of a vocal sound body.


He is talking about his music, on page 70-71, so might be important to learn the tools to do the same.



On page 78: “Why then forget music? Because there are a thousand ways to forget and to betray its history. Because creation always implies a certain level of destruction and infidelity. Because we must become able to call up the memory of that which is useful and then to forget it with a spontaneity that is paradoxically rigorous. Because, in any case, as Heraclitus said, <<it is not possible to go into the same river twice.>> Because the awareness of the past is never passive, and we do not want to be the obliging accomplices of a past that is always with us, that we nourish, and that never ends.”


Linked to what I wrote in response to page 1: "if I am composing, although I love their music, I cannot hear Mahler or Shostakovich, for example, because I know I will be very influenced by them in my composition.”