Sinfonia (1968–69), for eight amplified voices and orchestra, was part of a wider pattern of response to the musical crisis of the 1960s, during which avant-garde composers began once again to look to music of the past for material and inspiration – a turn towards so-called "meta music", or music about music. The third movement of Sinfonia is one of the most famous and remarkable examples of this approach: a dense fabric of verbal quotations contained within a musical quotation, the Scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2, which is borrowed virtually wholesale and then used as a kind of musical armature around which Berio concocts a dazzling semantic and musical labyrinth, including further quotations (from Mahler, Ravel and Debussy, among others) and chattering texts drawn from Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Nicht eilen, bitte
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i love this; i never heard it before.
ReplyDeleteI think you would also love Berio's "Recital" written for Cathy Berberian; a soprano begins a Monteverdi recital (La lettera amoroso) but everything goes wrong and she starts inserting quotes from other songs ("je ne veux pas travailler, je veux fumer"), arguing witht the instrumentalists etc. Berberian changes voice, language, musical style every few seconds.
ReplyDeleteFragments here:
http://www.amazon.com/Berio-Recital-Cathy-Songs-Weill/dp/B000003FOS
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ReplyDeleteI have to get it.
ReplyDeleteThis is really great too:
http://www.amazon.com/Berio-Un-re-ascolto-Maazel/dp/B000004C14
Yes it is! (And with a Calvino libretto!)
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