ABSTRACT
Luciano Berio's choice of musical language is deliberately simple and graphic, and it operates within a circumscribed range of technical concerns. The coupling of vivid, directly comprehensible musical gestures and partly baffling verbal fragments is entirely characteristic of Berio. For Berio uses explicit musical processes to establish continuity and security, while allowing words, half grasped, to provoke a state of aesthetic risk where intuitive sense may or may not emerge amongst the isolated images of a semantic non-sequitur. In thus transforming the playing upon words so dear to Joyce in Finnegans Wake – making layer upon layer of superposed material sound together around a musical or verbal core – Berio reactivates one of the central experiences of the 'modernist' tradition. The listener, troubled by the rich confusion of what he has heard, may well seek refuge in the score; but there he will discover a maze of allusions to things beyond the score.
