ABSTRACT
Berio’s Sequenza VIII for violin (1976–77) opens with the forceful and insistent repetition of a single pitch, notable for its dynamic strength – marked fff in the score – and rhythmic regularity. Over the next minute, this music develops into a restless oscillation around a pair of pitches, unrelenting in both pulse and intensity. This music communicates simultaneously a sense of urgency and a strange immobility, and its two central notes become an inescapable focus for the listener. These sounds form a perfect rhyme to the image portrayed at the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum (originally published in 1988), a novel by Berio’s close friend and sometime collaborator, Umberto Eco. At the opening of Eco’s book, the pendulum of the title, suspended from the ‘only stable place in the cosmos’, sways ‘back and forth with isochronal majesty’. Like the opening music of the Sequenza, it promises to ‘oscillate for eternity’. 1
