ABSTRACT
As editor of the journal Incontri Musicali, Luciano Berio published an article in 1959 by his friend and sometime collaborator Umberto Eco, in which Eco first outlined his theory of the open work. 1 Developed at greater length in Opera Aperta, 2 Eco’s concept of the open work forms part of ‘a general aesthetics of modernism’ that has continued to provoke debate over the last five decades. 3 In a rhetorically powerful exposition of his ideas, Eco opens with a list of instrumental musical works that he describes as ‘works in movement’. 4 In such works, the performer is free to re-order the constituent elements of the work, in what might be classed a virtual collaboration with the composer. This definition is unproblematic for a work such as Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI (1956), but it is not immediately clear how Berio’s Sequenza I (1958), which appears in the same list, belongs within the same category. Indeed, Eco evidently misunderstood the spatial notation used in Sequenza I, stating that it granted the performer free licence to ‘hold a note within the fixed framework imposed upon him, which in turn is established by the metronome’s beats’. 5
