ABSTRACT
Luciano Berio produced the chamber version of O King in 1967 in response to a commission from the Aeolian Players and as a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King, whose name, slowly constituting itself from a series of phonetic fragments, furnishes the verbal material for the piece. When Berio decided to incorporate this piece into Sinfonia in the following year, he chose to maintain the original materials more or less intact, but added extra instruments that would be able to provide a subtle elaboration of each of the functions mentioned above. But from the start the Sinfonia version has a richer harmonic texture due to the presence of sustained pitches from outside the set. By thickening out the harmonies in this way, Berio establishes a greater measure of harmonic identity between 'O King', and the first, fourth and fifth movements of Sinfonia-particularly the fourth, where chords of alternating thirds and seconds over wider-spaced bass notes are fundamental feature.
