April 8, 2021, at 7:30 pm
Natchitoches, Louisiana
LUCIANO BERIO FESTIVAL
Adam Hudlow, trumpet • Paul Christopher, cello
Paul Forsyth, saxophone • Malena McLaren, clarinet
Justin Kujawski, double bass
Program Notes by Jackson Harmeyer, NSU Alumnus 2013
In 1957, in a lecture titled The Development of Serial Technique,the Italian composer Luigi Nono characterized himself, Bruno Maderna, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen as belonging to a so-called Darmstadt School whose role in history it was to extend the serial practices of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern into an overarching compositional aesthetic. Whereas the serialization of pitch was Schoenberg’s main concern, Webern had envisioned bringing serial structure to other musical elements, like rhythm and instrumentation. Yet, according to Nono, it was his own generation (i.e. the Darmstadt School) who had finally accomplished this feat in what has become known as integral serialism. Throughout the 1950s, this was the unified mission of the composers who would gather each summer in the German city of Darmstadt to discuss and share ideas. There were of course others in attendance, but Nono considered these four to be leaders and proceeded to demonstrate their accomplishments through analyses of their scores. Interestingly Nono had previewed that he would also discuss Luciano Berio (1925-2003), the composer whose music tonight’s Festival honors. In no surviving version of the text, however, does Nono analyze the music of Berio. In a written exchange, Berio had apparently recommended, You should secure the fact that the series is dead and buried: it is used only to prepare the material from which the music is invented. This suggests that perhaps Berio did not see himself as part of the logical, historical progression Nono theorized; that his music was separate from theirs. Indeed, soon after Nono delivered his lecture, disputes would arise to divide the Darmstadt School, so that the common purpose of the 1950s was replaced by a much-fragmented avant-garde in the 1960s.
Luciano Berio was born in the town of Oneglia in northwestern Italy. At the conclusion of World War II, he entered the Milan Conservatory where he studied with Giorgio Ghedini, gaining his first exposure to Modernist music primarily through the guise of the various neo-tonalities. Serialism was not emphasized, so after graduation Berio applied for the 1952 Tanglewood summer festival in Massachusetts where he could study with Luigi Dallapiccola who was then considered the foremost Italian exponent of serialism. While in the United States, Berio also encountered electronic music for the first time, and upon his return to Milan found employment at the Italian radio corporation, RAI. There he proposed the creation of an electronic music studio; when this Studio di Fonologia opened in 1955, he was made its co-director alongside Maderna whom he had met two years earlier at a conference dedicated to electronic music. Berio and Maderna became fast friends, and this initial connection would over time lead to many others. In 1956 Berio attended the Darmstadt summer courses for the first time. He regardless maintained his aesthetic distance, perhaps because he arrived relatively late after his own idiom had already formed through experiences in Milan and at Tanglewood. Still there were many parallel developments between Berio and the Darmstadt elite, like his utilization of open form in his celebrated piece Circles. This composition was written in 1960 for his first wife, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, and it sets the poetry of e. e. cummings.
Even in his earliest works, Berio sought an approachability that the Darmstadt School stubbornly disavowed. His works accordingly won acclaim both in Europe and the United States, so that from the 1960s he was receiving prestigious commissions and teaching posts. The latter included stints at Mills College (as substitute for an ailing Darius Milhaud), Harvard, and Juilliard while his greatest compositional success came in 1968 with Sinfonia for eight amplified voices and orchestra. Commissioned by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic for the orchestra’s 125th anniversary, Sinfonia is one of very few works by an avant-garde composer to win popular approval. While its Second Movement honors the recently-assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., its Third Movement fully assimilates the Scherzo of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony. With this familiar material as undercurrent, additional quotes and allusions to Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Stravinsky, and even his colleague Boulez (to name only a few) are overlaid into the crowded texture. With contemporaneous works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Peter Maxwell Davies, Sinfonia is one of the defining works of polystylism and early Post-Modernism; it would also inspire the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke as he made polystylism his trademark idiom over the following decades. Aside from Sinfonia, the series of fourteen Sequenzas is probably Berio’s other major compositional accomplishment, but more on these momentarily. Before his death in 2003, Berio would serve as director of the electro-acoustic section of IRCAM in the 1970s, found his own electro-acoustic center at the Villa Strozzi in the 1980s, premiere two operas at La Scala, and deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. Evidently Berio was someone who could straddle the intellectual, cultural establishment and the fierce polemics of the mid-twentieth century avant-garde.
Our program tonight begins with Gute Nacht, a 1986 work for solo trumpet. This short piece, lasting only one minute, was Berio’s contribution to a volume entitled Fanfares: New Trumpet Pieces for Young Players released by Universal Edition. The volume was edited by Edward H. Tarr, the American trumpeter who did so much to revive the early trumpet repertoire, especially the works of Giuseppe Torelli, while also passionately advocating for Modern music. Aside from Berio, other composers who contributed to this volume included Morton Feldman, Mauricio Kagel, and Wolfgang Rihm. The clear model for Gute Nacht is Taps, the bugle call used by the United States military and at funerals. Berio’s version, however, contains some rhythmic hesitation and chromatic distortion as if the young player has not quite mastered the desired tune. Afterwards we hear Les mots sont allés which Berio subtitled a recitative for solo cello. This work was commissioned and premiered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in honor of Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and music patron, in celebration of his seventieth birthday. Pieces were commissioned from twelve prominent composers, including Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux, and others. Most of these works were then premiered by Rostropovich at a special concert on May 2, 1976. Like others in this cycle, Berio’s piece translates Sacher’s name into pitch material, so that its letters are represented through the pitch classes, Eb-A-C-B-E-D. These six notes are played clearly and deliberately at the outset before variants on this theme begin. The texture becomes increasingly busier as the music proceeds. Only at the end does momentum slow as the first two pitches, Eb and A, are reiterated for tonal closure.
The majority of our program is dedicated to three Sequenzas. This series, begun in 1958, saw over the next forty-four years the completion of fourteen solo works for many of the instruments of the orchestra as well as a few outliers like piano, guitar, and accordion. They are at once virtuosic showpieces written for the premier players of their day and works concerned with the intelligent communication of musical ideas between composer, performer, and listener. They treat the solo instrument as cultural artifact and several explicitly engage with aspects of its performance and social history. Often this is done with humor and irony, challenging not only the performer’s technical ability but also their emotional resolve. We first hear Sequenza VIIb for soprano saxophone, an adaptation of the original work which was for oboe. Indeed several of the Sequenzas exist in multiple versions, and Berio sometimes integrated a Sequenza or its ideas into ensemble pieces. The oboist Heinz Holliger was the dedicatee and first performer of Sequenza VII at its completion in 1969. Berio maintained that all of his Sequenzas for monophonic instruments require a polyphonic listening. He commented of Sequenza VII, in particular, [Here] I carry on the research of a latent polyphony putting into perspective the complex sound structures of the instrument with an ever-present ‘tonic’: a B-natural that can be played pianissimo by any other instrument, behind the stage or in the audience. This drone provides a harmonic foundation from which sounds can emerge and against which the soloist can react. This remains true of the version for soprano saxophone, created by Claude Delangle in 1993 and premiered by him on May 20 of that year in Strasbourg. A second version for oboe, revised from this saxophone version, was created by Jacqueline Leclair in 2000 and termed Sequenza VIIa.
Sequenza IX for solo clarinet, composed in 1980, also exists in versions for alto saxophone and bass clarinet, although it is the original which we hear tonight. The clarinetist Michel Arrignon was the dedicatee and first performer, giving its premiere in Paris. According to Berio, Sequenza IX is concerned with melody and opposes a seven-note set whose register is largely fixed with a second five-note set which continues to change register. He wrote of the work, “It is essentially a long melody implying like almost every melody redundancy, symmetries, transformations, and returns. The contrast of the two sets forms the basis for melodic development. Our program concludes with Sequenza XIVb, an adaptation for double bass of the original for cello. Nevertheless in this case the two versions were only created two years apart: the original of 2002 was one of the final works Berio composed while its second version was an authorized adaptation by bassist Stefano Scodanibbio completed in 2004, a year after the composer’s death. Scodanibbio gave the premiere on June 15, 2004 in Stuttgart. The role played by the dedicatee of the cello version, Rohan de Saram, however, was crucial to the work’s composition and cannot be forgotten. This cellist of Sri Lankan origin introduced Berio to several instruments indigenous to this island nation in the Indian Ocean. The Kandyan drum, in particular, gave Berio the inspiration needed to approach the long history of the cello. Berio noted that All aspects of this piece live a double life, so that while the cello is often played in a traditional manner, the performer must also, for instance, tap the body of the instrument as if he were a percussionist. These aspects, as with previous Sequenzas, carry over into the version for double bass.
© Jackson Harmeyer 2021
About Jackson. Jackson Harmeyer is a freelance concert annotator based in Alexandria, Louisiana. He serves as Director of Scholarship to the Sugarmill Music Festival and as Marketing Chair to the Chamber Music Society of Louisville. A project he is developing for the 2021 Sugarmill Music Festival, A Scholarly Presentation in Lecture and Music: Solomon Northup in the Central Louisiana Sugarhouse, has been awarded a prestigious Rebirth Grant by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In August 2020, Jackson began a Master’s of Library Science with a specialization in Music Librarianship at Indiana University where he is the recipient of a May Copeland Fellowship and serves as Secretary/Web Administrator to the Students of Music Librarianship Group. Previously Jackson earned an M.M. in Music History and Literature from the University of Louisville with a thesis entitled, Liminal Aesthetics: Perspectives on Harmony and Timbre in the Music of Olivier Messiaen, Tristan Murail, and Kaija Saariaho. There he was a recipient of the Gerhard Herz Music History Scholarship and was employed at the Anderson Music Library where he did archival work for the unique Grawemeyer Collection of Contemporary Music. Jackson has shared research at two meetings of the South-Central Chapter of the American Musicological Society; the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival; the Music by Women Festival; and the University of Louisiana System Academic Summit. Aside from his studies, Jackson is a music blogger, composer, choral singer, CD collector, avid reader, and award-winning nature photographer.
Read additional program notes by Jackson at www.JacksonHarmeyer.com.
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