ABSTRACT

In Thema, Luciano Berio took the process a stage further, allowing that word-music its autonomy by breaking down the text-fragments into their phonetic components, and using the articulatory relationships between them as the basis for a musical structure. Berio's work in looking for isolated images that will 'stand for' a complex whole is thus already half-done by Levi-Strauss's mode of analysis. The mythical universe that Levi-Strauss sets out to explore gravitates towards no central point. But Levi-Strauss has created a complex conceptual structure which, although it must perforce be expounded sequentially, is fundamentally synchronic. By fragmenting the order into a further set of 'donnees apparement arbitraires', Berio proposes to release the poetic potential of Levi-Strauss's language, to restore ambiguity where coherence had supervened. Berio compounds the listener's estrangement from the structural relations of Levi-Strauss's text by presenting different fragments simultaneously, forcing him to grasp at momentarily comprehensible gestures within the general melee.