Acousmatrix - History of electronic music VII : Berio - Maderna

×

Acousmatrix - History of electronic music VII : Berio - Maderna

Close

Most followers of electro-acoustic music recognize the contributions both Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio have made to the field, mainly due to their collaborative work Ritratto di Citta, which established the Studio di Fonologia in 1955. Fewer, however, are familiar with their individual projects from the late '50s and early '60s that clearly set them apart from their counterparts in Cologne. Berio and Maderna were both obsessed by the human voice as a basis and endpoint in electro-acoustic music. Consequently, many of their works from this period (1957-1964) are voice-centered. Of Berio's three contributions, his Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is the most memorable. A series of clipped and found sounds are registered as a backdrop against a female vocalist multi-tracked on tape reading and accentuating from the 11th chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. Words come up from the ether in English, Italian, and French, inserting themselves into one another, causing one another to erupt with new meaning and sonic resonance as they collude, combine, and resist their electronic counterparts. Visage, composed as the soundtrack to a radio drama that never came to pass, is the longest and most disturbing work, as it showcases the human voice in all kinds of extreme situations plied out of tape manipulations and reinserted into a matrix of other sounds. Vast emotional and physical soundscapes are charted and deconstructed, mapping a virtual psychic terrain of human expression as it transcends the limits of the body. Maderna's two works, Le Rire and Invenzione su una Voce, are both extremes of the splicing technique. The voice and the taped sounds are so distorted, removed from their center of gravity and context, that they become merely sonic elements in a collage of rhythm, sound, and dynamic. Indeed, the scratching technique used by DJs today was used to extreme – but like – example in 1960. The final piece is for sonic environments and human voice. Rather than the voice being cut up by splicing, it has a single mood (laughter) that is reinvented via tape speed contoured by rounded electronic sounds. While many may view these works as merely quaint today, they still have plenty about them that is shocking and even disturbing, because of their foreignness in our (societal) perception of everyday life. Yet, strange as it may be, they are nothing more than the sounds of everyday life itself being manipulated by outer forces – does that sound familiar?

Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

×

Acousmatrix - History of electronic music VII : Berio - Maderna

Close

Berio/Maderna is the seventh installment in a series of discs from the Dutch label BVHaast that is canvassing the output of the pioneering European electronic music studios, such as the ORTF in Paris, the WDR studio in Cologne, and, in this case, the RAI Studio di Fonologia in Milan. It contains several of the key electronic pieces produced at this facility in the late '50s and early '60s by two early masters of the genre, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna.
Fans of John Cage's early electronic masterwork Fontana Mix, created at the Studio di Fonologia in 1958, may be surprised to find Berio drawing from the same pool of taped sources as Cage in his work Momenti (1960). This is its first appearance on CD, whereas it is the second for both Thema – Omaggio a Joyce (1958) and Visage (1962). Yet it is not particularly easy to find RCA's Berio album Many More Voices, which is out of print, containing both of these pieces. Thema – Omaggio a Joyce (1958) and Visage (1962) are famous milestones within the history of electronic music and feature the irreplaceable artistry of Berio's then-wife, soprano Cathy Berberian.
Maderna's electronic music is generally not well known outside of Europe, and the appearance here of Le Rire (1962) and Invenzione su una voce (also known as Dimensioni II) (1960) is most welcome. Whereas in Cage's electronic music, where one laughs but the composer doesn't seem to get the joke, Maderna revels in outwardly ridiculous, fragmented sounds, clearly choosing and combining what pleases him personally without the slightest recourse to apparent structural procedures. The "una voce" is once again Berberian, utilizing an unusual text source, the notorious Letteristic book by Hans G. Helms Fa:m'Ahnewgwow published in 1959 and entirely made up of word fragments devoid of "sense" or story. The sound on this BVHaast disc is great, as through some miracle they have transferred the vintage and artifactual tapes to disc without the slightest hint of tape hiss. Contrary to the notes, both Le Rire and Invenzione su una voce have appeared on CD before, in an Italian collection of Maderna's electronic music on the Stradivarius label. Yet as with Many More Voices, who can actually find a copy of it? By any measure, Acousmatrix 7: Berio/Maderna is an excellent option for these key early electronic works.

Uncle Dave Lewis , All Music Guide

×

Acousmatrix - History of electronic music VII : Berio - Maderna

Close

Since their first joint tape composition, the radiophonic poem 'Ritratto di Citta' (1955), wich can be considered the starting point for the 'Studio di Fonologia' founded at the Italian broadcast RAI [Milan]), Bruno Maderna (1920-1973) and Luciano Berio (1925-2003) set out a path for electro-acoustic music which was quite different from the aesthetic conceptions of the already existing studios in Cologne and Paris. They were conscious of the fact that electro-acoustic music was above all radiophonic music, and by this they included not only 'concrete' sounds but also - the richest and most complex of them all - the human voice. Though both composers have often integrated rigid compositional techniques which had been developed in Paris and Cologne, they never used those techniques which had been developed in Paris and Cologne, they never used those techniques in an orthodox way. Both Maderna and Berio brought the production techniques of electro-acoustic music close to the techniques of film composition, creating musical 'takes' and 'scenes' putting them together by techniques of 'montage'. In 1961 when I assisted Maderna in producing a montage of spoken texts for Luigi Nono's opera 'Intolleranza', I was initially amazed that he came to the studio without any written concept. But after working with him for one afternoon, I understood that this man had incredible intuition, stronger and clearer than any prefixed score.

If one looks back at the electro-acoustic production by Berio and Maderna, a fascinating variety pf aesthetic options and technical solutions can be seen, reaching from abstract and rigid compositions to surrealistic pieces full of free phantasmagoria. Let's not forget that Berio's 'Thema - Omaggio a Joyce' was one of the first electro-acoustic compositions which treated literary language as onomatopoetic musical material and that Maderna's 'Musica su due Dimensioni' (conceived already in 1952) was the first composition which united the worlds of electro-acoustic and instrumental music. Both composers were considered initiators of a new kind of musical thought : that the significance of electronic music lies 'in the possibility it gives the composer of integrating a larger domain of sound phenomena into a musical thought' (Berio). Herein we can see the profound difference with the aesthetic ideas of the then young serial composers from the Cologne Electronic Studio, though Berio and Maderna never constituted a musical 'party' against other schools or groups. Both maintained cloth links with the musical tradition, avoiding in this way a mere technological approach to the new means of musical production.

Berio's Momenti was composed in 1960 in the 'Studio di Fonologia.' The composition belongs to the category of abstract, rigid pieces which were produced mainly during the early years of Milanese studio.

Thema - Omaggio a Joyce (1958) is based on the beginning of chapter XI of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (the so-called 'siren chapter'. 'Ulysses' is a universal book, integrating all kinds of epic, lyric and dramatic literary genres. Berio did not intend to confront or to mix up music and literature, but he wanted to create, as he says, 'continuity between them, to make possible an imperceprible transition from one to the other.' As chapter XI begins with onomatopoetic passage ('Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn…'), Berio could try to enable 'the worlds to assimilate the musical facts completely and to cause them at the same time.' Incidentally the original text was used in a French or Italian version, but nevertheless the English original dominates. To transform the material in a musical sense, the different words were treated in accordance with such terms as glissando, staccato, tremolo, etc. Moreover the words are spread in a polyphonic way, with juxtapositions from one language to the other which strengthens a purely musical perception of language. To this 'texture' some electronic sounds (complex tones and colored noise) were added.

Visage is the last piece Berio composed in the Milanese studio. As he states, it is 'purely a radio programme work : a soundtrack for a drama that was never written.' Consequently its destination is not really the concert hall but rather any conceivable medium for the reproduction of words. Based on the sound symbolism of vocal gestures and inflections with their accompanying 'shadow of meanings' and their associative tendencies, 'Visage' can be heard also as a metaphor of vocal behaviour : it means discourse mainly at the onomatophonic level.' As a matter of fact, the vivacity of 'Visage' is based for a considerable part on the universal vocal virtuosity of the late Cathy Berberian (who also lent her voice to 'Thema'), who, by crying, laughing, hooding or wailing, creates akind of meta piece which can be situated between music and radio phantasmagoria. Thus she unchains the singer's voice from the classical conceptions of singing. The electronic sounds appear in various functions : as a dialogue partner, as a kind of dream projection, as space, and towards the end of the piece as a medium which absorbs the human voice.

Like Berio, Bruno Maderna felt attracted to electro-acoustic music because it added, as Massimo Mila says, 'a new dimension to the composer's metier.' Mila calls Le Rire (1962) a 'great electro-comic mess' and in fact, it is one of the most joyful pieces of electro-acoustic music. In fact, the laughter in 'Le Rire' is rather suppressed, which produces the humorous aspect of the piece because you imagine many possible variables which lie behind that laughter : delicious acoustic voyeurism… Even synthetic sounds try to laugh in 'Le Rire.'

Inventione su una voce (1960) is also known as 'Dimensione II.' This piece is based on phonemes composed by the poet Hans G Helms (whom Maderna had met during the late fifties in Cologne and who wrote a book 'FA:M' AHNLSGWOW' on a basis of radical structuralism). Helms' phonemes do not constitute a realistic text and Maderna uses them as distinct
elements. In 'Invenzione', we also have to deal with an abstract radio play (though the piece was premiered in a concert at the Venice Biennial in 1964). Though the phonemes have no concrete meaning, the way they are pronounced creates specific 'rhetorical gestures.' The piece is composed in a free technique which Maderna has often used in his electro-acoustic pieces : listening carefully to the material and then taking on-the-spot decisions on its position within musical texture.

Konrad Boehmer, from the attached booklet