Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio (b. 1925–d. 2003) was a leading figure in the postwar avant-garde. His subsequent reception and ongoing contributions to the history of 20th-century music during his own lifetime have only confirmed his reputation alongside Luigi Nono as one of the most important Italian composers of his generation. Berio studied composition in Milan with Giorgio Federico Ghedini and briefly at Tanglewood with Luigi Dallapiccola. The emergence of a distinct compositional voice by the early 1950s was shaped by an ambivalent if nevertheless foundational encounter with serial procedures, an engagement with folk materials, his experience in the electronic studio, lessons drawn from the fields of linguistics and semiotics, experiments with the human voice, and the idea of transcription. From the 1950s onward collaborative work assumed an important place in his creative practice, initially in the context of the Studio di Fonologia with Bruno Maderna and Umberto Eco. Collaborations with several prominent Italian writers soon followed, including Edoardo Sanguineti and Italo Calvino, both of whom provided texts for Berio’s most important stage works. A lifelong interest in collaborating with performers is best exemplified in his extraordinary creative partnership with Cathy Berberian (1925–1983). An extended stay in the United States (1960–1971), during which time he held teaching positions at Mills College and Juilliard, precipitated a return to Italy where he was once again able to devote the bulk of his energies to composition. During his final decades he received numerous awards and honors, including his appointment as the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1993–1994). Berio’s compositional practice was guided by a set of specific concerns that included pursuing the wide transformational trajectory of a musical idea and imposing an inner logic and unity on heterogenous materials. A belief that counterpoint and analysis served as the basis of a composer’s craft is connected to his interest in the history of music, something that also informed his practice of reworking earlier pieces through the addition of layers of commentary that possess an “analytical” dimension (as in the Sequenzas recomposed as Chemins). Scholarship on Berio has long reflected a decidedly formalist orientation often rooted in sketch studies. While other perspectives have hardly been absent, more recent scholarship that situates his music in the larger social and political context of its time represents a welcome development. Although Berio’s music has given rise to a vast secondary literature in French, Italian, and German, the emphasis here is placed on English-language sources.