Luciano Berio Overview

20th-century Italian composer Luciano Berio embraced many forms of music, from twelve-tone modernism, to Romanticism, to folk musics. His works range from pieces for solo instruments (called Sequenzas), to electroacoustic works, to works for orchestra. Berio was particularly fascinated with the... [more]

20th-century Italian composer Luciano Berio embraced many forms of music, from twelve-tone modernism, to Romanticism, to folk musics. His works range from pieces for solo instruments (called Sequenzas), to electroacoustic works, to works for orchestra. Berio was particularly fascinated with the capabilities of the human voice, and explored these capabilities in works written for his first wife, soprano Cathy Berberian. These works include Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), an electroacoustic work based on a passage from Ulysses, and Circles, a chamber work based on poems by e.e. cummings. Quotation of music, as well as text, was important in Berio’s work. In the third movement of Sinfonia, one of his most famous works, Berio quotes most of the scherzo from Mahler’s second Symphony, with quotations from numerous other pieces overlayed on top. In Recital I, Berio has Cathy Berbarian perform a monologue in which she interrupts her speaking with short quotations from a variety of songs and arias in her repertoire. Berio even quoted or transcribed his own works and recast them in different versions (for example, Sequenza II for harp became Chemins I for harp and orchestra). Berio studied with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood and attended Darmstadt. He founded an electronic music studio in Milan in 1955, then moved to the United States in 1960. There he taught at Mills College and later the Juilliard School. His students have included Louis Andriessen and Steve Reich. [show less]