Berio's Sequenzas: Essays on Performance, Composition and Analysis Hardcover – 22 August 2007

Now that the 20th Century is over, or has been, it's good to take stock of what it represented, if in fact we learned anything from its challenges, complexity and horrors. These Sequenzas of Luciano Berio are indeed a necessary focus for contemporary expressions, their structure cuts across many boundaries, where we come to see the truth elements in serious music of the post-war period... Music is pedagogy, if you can't teach music it doesn't exist... if you can't communicate through art,music, neither exist. It's a point where high entropy destroys what we have.The is a welcome collection,compendium of essays on most of Berio's Sequenzas, just the Cello and Bassoon Sequenzas are neglected since no offerings were made.For post-modernity there has always been a tendency for the massive, the colossal, the over-extended; So it's always useful to focus on a few pieces,to see what they have in great detailed level of contemplation, not gulp entire repertoires of anything. Theodor Adorno had predicted(in the 1950s) that avant-garde music of the post war period would come to acquire an over-extended blinded playfulness of "sporting events", games, as "happenings", operas that are not really operas, and music that comes to franchise itself out, as the Sequenzas Nines the "sisters 9A,(Clarinet) 9B(Alto Sax),9C, (Bass Clarinet); performance of all the Elliott Carter string quartets, (simultaneous,differing evening in succession with the Bartok Quartets). There was a performance( Arditti Quartet (who else),) of all the Quartets by Brian Ferneyhough in two evenings.You will find analysis and discussions here that are far from games. We have hard-core concepts are what makes a work interesting, charts on pitch structure, dynamics, and timbral analysis, as well as performative insights. This all written many times by musicians of the instrument in discussion.For Berio and the compositional process there was always a question of what does time do?, What is duration and sound? when we experience it,what is the "now" for music.We all know each in their own way Proust and Husserl answered this, that time is whatever can be recalled,(for the human constitution) and what is remembered, is art. What spaces does music reside in; a shared space, a private existential space, or an administered one. In some way the substance of these Sequenzas throws light on these paradigms.The Oboe Sequenza is a good place to start, the idea of representing time in a linear way,beat by beat, or to spatialize the materials, pitches and timbres, trying to find a middle ground between the two. Here a great chart is provided that gives how often tones are heard and it what context relative to other tones fixed around the continuously heard B-natural.The Flute Sequenza represented a beginning point of this pitting the registers High(very High), Middle and Low against each other to create a "polyphony" timbral counterpoint. This "polyphony" becomes developed over time into timbre. The Cello- Sequenza is an excellent example of spatialized timbre,gestural pointillism, where materials are deployed in rapid successions of extended plucked noises,drummed tones and sounds.This book is divided into three regions,1) Performance Issues,2) The Compositional Process, and 3) Analytical Approaches. Each talks to each other,if you read the book this way.This is where we come to comprehend the truth element in an unaccompanied work shall we call it, in these works.Curious that Berio never resorted to electronics accompaniment,gimmicks as many do today, for these unaccompanied solos. He was a lapidarian, and sought to struggle through his materials as originally constituted as a solo voice that becomes multi-plied, juxtaposed.The lonely trumpet Sequenza is here represented; my least favorite of the lot. But Berio tried anyways with the utilization of the piano as a resonant chamber, to excite a certain arrays of tones. Here you have clear graphic representation of cells of tones,materials going up in half-steps as the hard-wired past of the piece, the pre-compositional structure that guides the timbres of the trumpet.Berio came to the piano quite late, his friends Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen had by the time of the Piano Sequenza had completed all their primary works for the solo piano. The "Six Encores" are also a good place to start to see Berio's ultimate evolution of the piano's timbre, that into lyrical situations, soft gentle plaintive pieces. This Piano Sequenza has a pitch base that is full provided here, and the contrasting timbres, of the blocked chopped chords(via Sostenuto pedal resonances), and more developed, filigree, fast moving arpeggiations, cluster chord punctuation. Here the author also proved comments on the latter Sonata for Piano by Berio, written a few years prior to his death.There are similar compendiums of graphic representations for the Guitar,Flute, Viola, and Piano Sequenzas with a chapter on Berios "Chemins" series of ensemble works that were developments, extensions, amplifications of these Sequenzas in slect numbers.

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