Note: One of the original postmodern musical geniuses who was highly adept at “merging conversations”, Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI[1] (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003), is best remember for “Sinfonia”, especially for the III movement. If you haven’t heard it before, check out the YouTube version here. However, the YouTube video segment stops before the verbally powerful conversation really blossoms – with phrases that will last a listener for a lifetime. For a better clue of the complexity, familiarity, pathos, grit, and humor of the piece, we offer the below analysis of the musical content:
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Uploaded by alejita1679 on Jul 7, 2010
This is the first part of the complex scherzo of this sinfonia, which is based on the scherzo movement of Gustav Mahler’s symphony nº2, known as Resurrection.
This movement is famous for the musical quotations that Berio used in its construction:
* Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement (violent opening scale played by the brass)
* A brief quotation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 (Mahler) just before…..
* Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, third movement (the only quotation that is ongoing)
* Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime
* Berlioz’s idée fixe from the Symphonie Fantastique (played by the clarinets)
* Ravel’s La Valse (orchestra plays octave motif with piccolo playing a chromatic scale)
* Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (the “Dance of the Earth” sequence at the end of the first tableux)
* Stravinsky’s Agon (upper oboe part from the “Double pas de quatre”)
* Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (one of the waltzes composed for the opera)
* a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach
* Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (the drowning scene late in the third act)
* Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony, second movement (melody stated with the clarinets)
* (Schoenberg segment quoted again)
* Debussy’s La Mer, second movement “Jeux de vagues”
* Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli, very first chord of the entire piece from the first movement (“Don”)
* Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras (during the introductions of the vocalists near the end)
Berio also used texts by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and from street graffitti.
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(a comment by mchlcooper)
“This is a wonderful example, I think, of how postmodernism can engage with the phenomenon of conversation. Here, the scaffolding is of course the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony. The dense web of verbal quotations engages in complex polyphony with an equally dense web of musical quotations, and all are in conversation with the Mahler scaffolding. But no two listeners are likely to construct the same dialog out of this series — each creates his/her own conversation!”
(a further clarification on what “conversations”, or “an open web of quotations” meant to Berio)
Rather, each quotation carefully evokes the context of its original work, creating an open web, but an open web with highly specific referents and a vigorously defined, if self-proliferating, signifier-signified relationship. “I’m not interested in collages, and they amuse me only when I’m doing them with my children: then they become an exercise in relativizing and ‘decontextualizing’ images, an elementary exercise whose healthy cynicism won’t do anyone any harm,” Berio told interviewer Rossana Dalmonte