A Troubador Beset by Machines

A large women walks onto the empty concert stage. Before the audience has had a chance to quiet down, she begins to make strange animal-like noises. Shrieks and grants alternate with sung vowels and machine gun like repetitings of consents as her voice gyrates wildly like a deranged roller-coaster. Her mood and the accompanying facial contortions change every few seconds.

But this is not sheer madness. It is Sequenza III for female voice by Luciano Berio, one of the three or four most successful living composers. The words are incomprehensible, as the music also, seems to be, but as a dramatic stream of consciousness, this piece has the same kind of compelling emotional logic as Joyce's Ulysses.

Written ten years ago, Sequenza III is similar to many other Berio compositions in its use of "non-musical" effects. In addition to sighing, groaning and coughing at specified moments, their performer must portray carefully indicated emotional attitudes like "accusing," "Whimpering," and "langorous." The result is a tortuous emotional odyssey with no clearly articulated form. Yet there remains a strong subconscious sense of inevitable progression from moment to moment.

As in the fiction of Samuel Beckett, a clearly evolving narrative line has been sacrificed in favor of a radically fragmented, almost pulverized texture. Directional melodies and harmonies have been replaced by sudden bursts of sound, explosions of something not quite rational or explicable.

When we speak, we part our thoughts down to a manageable, communicable shape. But what goes through our own minds is not ordered speech at all. It is more a dark, undifferentiated jumble held loosely together in some incomprehensible pattern. It is this realm of internal speech, of irrational and fragmented emotions that Berio explores in his works.

Berio's, usual treatment of poetic texts is another example of his desire to real things apart, to lay them bare. Instead of using words for their meaning, he uses them purely for sound value. He manipulated consonants and vowel sounds like musical elements, altering them and recombining them to create emotional effects.

In 1968, Berio wrote O King as a tribute to Martin Luther King. In it, a women sings the sounds that form King's name over whispered instrumental chords. At the climatic end of the piece, the whole name finally emerges. At first, it is as if we have penetrated beneath the meaning of the name to the purely sensual sounds that underlie it. And at the end, the whole name rises up above the surface like an emerging volcanic island.

In Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), Berio uses the reverse process. At the beginning, a woman reads a passage from Ulysses. When she is done, the sounds are broken down and reorganized by electronic means. The effect is like hearing Homer being read in Greek; you can be deeply affected by spoken sounds without any knowledge of their meaning. The demands of literature restricted Homer's musical achievement, but Berio uses spoken sounds as he would use notes and reveals some of the musical underpinnings of the English language.

Thema (1958) was one of Berio's first uses of electronic techniques. Another work from the same period is Differences, which pits a small chamber ensemble against a taped version of the same piece. It is a John-Henry-Versus-steam-hammer kind of conflict, only here the sense of epic struggle is all but alone. The taped sounds weave in and out of the performance, giving it an almost antiphonal quality. The only real clash comes when the taped sounds are electronically altered, creating a sense of war between the media.

And it's hard to tell exactly which side Berio is on. Despite the fragmented quality of much of his writing and his preoccupation with electronics, he remains a surprisingly lyrical composer. Paula Robinson, who directed a recent Harvard Chamber Players performance of Differences, likened Berio to "a troubadour being harassed by machines, yet still loving them." Individual lines are full of wide leaps and bizarre, shifting rhythms, but like Jackson Pollock's dribblings of paint, the lines fuse into a seamless fabric when played together. The sound is not thoroughly blended or homogenized like that of a Romantic string quartet, but there is a dramatic movement which, like the individual drops of water which merge to create a wave, can sweep a listener along.

Like many composers of the past 25 years, Berio has devoted himself largely to chamber music. Like the epic poems and the panoramic landscape paintings, the symphony has been going through hard times recently. Instead of music conceived and executed on the grand scale, composers have turned to smaller forms because they offer greater involvement for both performers and audiences.

In chamber music, it is easy for the performers to join in the compositional process through improvisation. Berio's manner of notating his pieces calls for vast interpretive powers from the performers. His Circles, for example, has no bar lines. Berio does indicate some points at which the singer, harpist, and percussionists are expected to arrive at the same time, and notes of specified pitch which are written at varying distances from each other to suggest duration. But within that skeletal visual framework, the performers must create the piece. There are also areas, set off in boxes, within which the performers are to improvise freely on certain pitches.

In a way, this kind of notation restores the performer to the eminence he enjoyed during the Baroque era when the written notes were often treated as a rack on which to drape gaudy ornaments. But those ornaments were determined by narrowly evolved traditions, while in Berio there is the love of chance for its own sake. Berio has helped to transform the delicate creature of Baroque ornamentation into an ugly chance-created monster which often seems to subsume the composed framework. It is a monster that Berio uses to express the disorder of contemporary life.

Berio has begun to create a new kind of music-drama, a miniaturized answer to the Wagnerian epics of the last century. His Sequenza V for trombone is really a theater piece which grows out of a musical core. Body movements are a carefully indicated in the score as the notes. There are instructions about standing and sitting, and the position of the instrument as well as the usual grunts and vowel sounds. To add to the effect, the player is expected to wear a clown costume. It is this sense of theater, this reliance on dramatic rather than musical necessity, that is the driving force behind this and other Berio works.

According to Robinson, the clown is a fitting emblem for Berio personally and for his music--a distraught, confused surface which believes a deeper pathos and sensitivity. And like a clown, Berio is deeply motivated by the theatrical impulse. So despite the fragmentation and lack of hummable tunes in his music you can sense that he has remained committed to the audible dramatic gesture.