Youtube Twitter Facebook
italiano print send send Skype
profiles - composers

Composers

Luciano Berio
Sequenza I
(1958)
for Flute


Length: 06:00
Editor: Universal Edition - Wien
1� Performance: Festival - Darmstadt - 1958

The Sequenza for flute, the first of the series, displays all the characteristics that Berio subsequently developed in the whole cycle. Written at a time when the virtuosity of Gazzelloni inspired a profusion of literature for the flute, Sequenza I is an example of the essential, intense relationship between instrumental gesture and the work of formalization. At first, the composition gives the impression of an ample highly variegated flow of sound. Some typical features articulate this continuum, since virtuosity is no longer linked to the rapidity of finger action but rather to mastery of the various continually modified degrees of organization of the work.
At pitch level, the opposition stands out between two harmonic structures (chromaticism/diatonic scale, polarized pitches/transposed pitches), combined with specified styles of performance (vivace/moderato, staccato/legato, fortissimo/piano).
Berio, however, does not maintain set entities which would present always the same characteristics. Each event is already a complex organism in itself whose elements can be dissociated, developed or combined in different ways: a certain structure of chromatic pitches will be subjected later to a "legato" performance, or else to a distribution expanded in time; another structure, based on a diatonic scale, will be played "staccato", "vivo" or "fortissimo"… so that the almost motivic dimension of the figures of the initial group is often obscured by the process of development: melodic-harmonic proliferations, transpositions either literal or transformed in the relations of tessitura, modifications of the style of performance. An identical succession of absolute pitches can in this way have a different significance at two different points of the piece. At macrostructural level, the form utilizes this ambiguity between hidden coherence and characteristic elements, that is between two levels of iterative perception (a process which will recur in Sequenza IX for clarinet): Berio uses two times the very same succession of absolute pitches presented at the beginning, as though it were a form of rondo, but in such a way that the listener does not experience any impression of recurrence or ritornello.
Consequently there are different levels of coherence and recognition in the composition: i.e. the organization of the pitches, which are based on utilization of the total chromatic (the first phrase presents the 12 sounds without Berio conforming to a mechanistic serial development, since the series - as occurs also in the works of Boulez of the same period - defines here harmonic fields inside which the single pitches are interchangeable), and the "motivic" character of certain figurations or of harmonic oppositions and performance modalities.
All the parameters used maintain a constant global density, while two of them are invariably at their maximum level of intensity. As the composer himself explains: "The temporal dynamic dimension of the pitches and the morphological dimension are characterized by a maximum, medium or minimum degree of tension. The degree of maximum tension of the temporal dimension (which is also the degree of exceptionality in relation to a general standard of conventional performance) occurs at moments of maximum velocity of articulation and at moments of maximum duration of the sound; the medium degree is always given by a neutral distribution of somewhat lengthy values and of somewhat rapid articulations; the minimum degree consists of silence or tendency to silence. The dimension of the pitches is at the maximum degree when the notes cover ample zones of the register during intervals of major tension, or when they persist on extreme registers; the medium and minimum degrees are the logical consequence of this. The maximum degree of the dynamic dimension occurs of course at the moments of maximum sound energy and of maximum dynamic contrast. What I call morphological dimension places itself, instead, under certain aspects, at the service of the other three and is one could say their rhetoric implement. It wishes to define the degree of acoustic transformation in relation to an inherited model which, in this case, is the flute with all its historical-acoustic implications" (Luciano Berio, interviewed by Rosanna dal Monte, Bari, Laterza, 1981).
This explanation enables us to understand the numerous changes of intensity which appear at first sight to be those typical of a serial composition of the Fifties, but which here correspond to a precise function linked to the scoring of other parameters. The continual mobility within each parameter, like the relationship between the various parameters, permits a superficial discontinuity characteristic of all the Sequenze (in this connection compare Sequenza IV).
Just as there is no thematic organization, nor an autonomous system of hierarchization of intensities, nor a reference vibration, in the same way the form eludes any pattern, since the music keeps developing all the time from its original material and from the relationships which, during the course of the work, give it coherence. The last page is however perceived as a long concluding section, an approach which appears in most of the Sequenze (see the final melody of Sequenza III or IV, the impression of recapitulation in IV, etc.). In this way, the form appears to become "closed", while the material is in endless expansion. Certain elements, for instance the appoggiature, develop linearly throughout the work. At the beginning they appear as ornamentation, but then evolve until they acquire autonomy and modify their function: at the last page, the appoggiatura has eroded the succession of principal notes in a sort of reversal of hierarchies. A process of this kind is common in the Sequenze (see Sequenza IV or VII). Such concurrence between a process of development or of continual variation and a closed form in which the functions of climax and coda (that is to say the typical dramaturgical functions of the closed form) are integrated is typical of Berio's music.
It should also be noted that the composition utilizes for the first time multiple sounds, which in this case have the value of symbols of a latent polyphony. In the same way, the sound effect produced with the clefs appears as a trend of a harmony which evolves towards noise (compare the use of "frullato" in this Sequenza, p. 4). These "effects", therefore, are not gratuitous but rather linked to the organic development of the composition. The compositional dialectics are established between continuity and discontinuity, between restricted and expanded textures, between chromaticism and diatonicism, between the different modes of articulation - but also between what is registered by the memory and the profound coherence which goes unnoticed: it is on this dialectic that the theatricality of the performance is based, this kind of dialogue within the piece itself which appears like the projection of the relationship between the musician and his instrument, between the traditional image of the instrument and the originality of Berio's work.
Philippe Albèra
Introduction aux neuf sequenzas
"Contrechamps", 1 September 1993.