берио.симфония

1968: «Симфония». Стремление объеди­нить в новой звучащей форме разнооб­разные сферы искусства и природы при­водило к тому, что Берио вновь и вновь обращался к цитатам самого разнооб­разного музыкального материала. Так, в своей «Симфонии» (1968) для восьми голосов и оркестра он цитирует в тре­тьей части скерцо из до-минорной сим­фонии Густава Малера. Однако Берио с другими современными ему композито­рами 60-х годов объединяла не только эта техника коллажа, но и склонность к сценической музыке и эксперименталь­ному театру. Уже его произведение «Круг», законченное в 1960 году, демон­стрирует сценическую концепцию, построенную на жестах и движении вока-листов по сцене. В 1970 году состоялась театральная премьера «Оперы» Берио.

Composed for the New York Philharmonic originally in 1968 as a four-movement work, but expanded to five movements the year after, Berio's Sinfonia takes as its starting point the notion, buried in the deep history of the symphony, of "sounding together". That's the Greek root of the word, after all (symphony is a combination of Greek words meaning "sound" and "together"), and it's why the genre got going in the first place: instead of single expressive or musical ideas being explored in individual movements, the 18th century symphony was all about combining different moods, keys, emotions. Berio simply - well, actually extraordinarily densely, but we'll come to that - takes that idea as the fundamental aesthetic principle of his Symphony, so that the work is about the sounding together of musical layers and textual references. It's a kaleidoscope of musical pasts and presents, including a collage of orchestral music from Beethoven to Stockhausen, as well as Berio's own oeuvre. It's a symphonic palimpsest that's both obsessively, microscopically structured, and completely open-ended in the variety of responses it induces in its listeners.

So let's begin at the beginning: the piece isn't just scored for large orchestra, but includes crucial parts for eight amplified voices (at the premiere and many subsequent performances, the Swingle Singers). That allows Berio to include the entire range of vocal possibility as part of the soundings-together in the piece, from austere vowel sounds to spoken quotations from Samuel Beckett, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, self-reflexive commentaries on the performance as it's going along, and even excerpts from Berio's own writings. Berio's orchestra is a multi-layered reference machine that includes a shadowy third section of violins who play at the back of the ensemble behind the percussionists, as well as a couple of electronic organs and saxophones.

A "reference machine"? Here's what I mean - Berio's Symphony is a flabbergastingly rich strata of writings-on and writings-over that includes, but is not limited to, the following: in the first movement, the main textual material for the singers is Lévi-Strauss's pioneering work in the deep structures of myths from all over the world from which Berio chooses a sequence of myths and connections that focus on water and death. The second movement is an amplification of Berio's own piece, O King, written in 1968 as a memorial to Martin Luther King; it's a musical meditation that circles around cycles of pitch and rhythm and puts Martin Luther King's name together from the individual phonemes that make up those words. The short fourth movement returns to a world of myth and reflection, and the fifth movement turns the rest of the piece itself into the basis of an even more extraordinary palimpsest that reviews, re-writes, and reconstitutes the rest of the piece into a seven-minute kaleidoscope that both sums up the project of this symphony, and opens up even more questions about what it all means.

And there's the third movement, the Symphony's most famous section. It's notorious because this entire central panel of Berio's Symphony is written on top of the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony. The Mahler is inescapable because Berio makes his music the foundation of a spiralling chaos of quotations, allusions, and transformations of fragments of orchestral repertoire from Ravel's La Valse to Debussy's La Mer and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, from Berg's Violin Concerto to Boulez's Pli selon pli. And dozens of others. (David Osmond-Smith's detective work in tracking down nearly every reference in this movement is extraordinary and unsurpassed.) Sometimes the Mahler is right there in the musical foreground, almost exactly as it appears in the Second Symphony, at other times, Berio reduces Mahler's music to a skeletal framework of a melodic line, rhythm, or harmony. And at still other moments, it's obliterated by Berio's own idiom - as well as the near continuous textual and vocal polyphony of the eight singers, here mostly concentrating on words from Beckett's The Unnameable. The structure of the scherzo is, however, always there in the background, and Berio preserves the shape and trajectory of the Mahler, however subcutaneously.

The question is: why? One answer is that Berio wants to reveal the essential palimpsest of listening that defines all musical experiences. Every time you hear a new piece of music, your brain is filtering it through the works you know already, and the images, experiences, and words that it calls to mind. One way of thinking about the Sinfonia's third movement is that it writes out that process. (Although in fact Berio's range of references was limited to the scores he could get hold while composing the piece - he was on holiday in Sicily and had to confine himself to what he'd taken with him and those in the public library.)

The other reason for the Mahlerian foundation of the third movement is that the Second Symphony's scherzo fits perfectly into the bigger programme of Berio's Symphony. Mahler's is a piece about water, existential futility, and by extension, death. It's also itself another palimpsest: the scherzo, as David Osmond-Smith shows, is not only an expanded version of a song that Mahler wrote setting a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn about St Anthony's unfortunately pointless sermonising to the sinful fishes, it's also, in Mahler's own description, a tragic vision of a dance watched by an observer who can't be part of the revels. And - and! - Mahler's music quotes Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, Beethoven's violin sonata, op.96, and a song from Schumann'sDichterliebe that imagines a lover watching his beloved marry someone else. Even before Berio's intervention, Mahler's scherzo is already multi-layered with musical and extra-musical meanings.

Often held up as pre-figuring a joyful postmodernism in music, the expressive effect of the third movement of Berio's Symphony is, I think, anything but an indulgent wallowing in the mud of musical history. There is a funny, punning reflexivity at the end of the movement when the singers list the performers and thank the conductor, but the bleak quotations from Beckett and Berio's own essay, Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse prove Berio's real point: to find a way of keeping going, going on, even if music "can't stop the wars, can't make the young older or lower the price of bread". Yet, "There must be something else, otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless... Where now? When now?" The true function of the third movement is revealed only in the fifth movement, when Berio really does go through the mirror and pulpate his whole Symphony in music that's a resolution and a dissolution of the entire work's modus operandi.

Berio's Symphony is a search for meaning that's endlessly renewed every time it's played or heard. If you haven't listened to it yet, throw yourself into the labyrinth right now; and if you have, listen again - and again. You will always find something new, I promise.