New Works: Words without Song

How can music comment on society? To the extent that electronic sounds suggest the dissonances in everyday life? Perhaps. But, as Italian-born Composer Luciano Beno says, music “cannot lower the cost of bread. It is incapable of stopping wars, it cannot eradicate slums and injustice.” Granting that much, Beno, a leading innovator of musical forms, refuses to accept the conventional barriers. He is appalled that composers today seem to regard music as an isolated phenomenon, created in a vacuum for the “greater glory of musical systems.”” Never before, he says, “has the composer come so dangerously close to becoming an extraneous or merely decorative figure in his own society.”

In all likelihood, that will not be the fate of Luciano Berio. Last week at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, Berio led the New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers in the world premiere of his Sinfonia. It is a white-hot musical experience that invokes the malaise of the times better than all the sit-ins, beards, beads and clubbings that wrench contemporary life.

Squeezed Syllables. Sinfonia, a 28-minute work for full orchestra and eight “amplified” singers, is pure surrealism, voiced in sound. The words of its text are employed as much for their acoustic qualities as for their semantic meaning. The result is a kind of anti-opera in which verbal and musical ideas constantly dissolve into one another, yet are finally apotheosized into a grand, compelling musical sonorama.

Basically, it is music for the man who likes the plays of Samuel Beckett, the paintings of Marcel Duchamp and the films of Antonioni. It begins in a mood of tension: excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss’s writings on Brazilian mythology are read against a highly dissonant background. In the haunting second part, the name Martin Luther King is recited and sung over and over again, the syllables spilled out here, squeezed there, so that the name is uttered in an endless variety of permutations. In the impassioned third section, the vocalists speak and sing excerpts from Beckett’s The Unnamable, swatches from James Joyce, even slogans that were scribbled on the walls of the Sorbonne during last May’s student insurrection. All the while, the orchestra plays a convoluted version of the third movement from Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, as snippets of Debussy, Bach, Stravinsky and a dozen other composers float in and out of Berio’s nightmarish stream of semiconsciousness. In one sense, the words do not matter; Berio is not interested in making a song. He is communicating a kind of life attitude that shrinks at the prospect of some unnamable terror. It is a musical collage of headlines persistently giving a warning of holocaust.

Columns of Sound. Along with that utterance goes Berio’s prodigious orchestral writing. Sinfonia contains some of the most novel rhythms and chords since Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. Great columns of dissonant, atonal sound seem to rise up with a towering permanence that belies the fact that the sound is composed of constantly moving parts. Often the music has a complexity that is normally achieved only with electronic synthesizers. At other times, it has the air of unexpectedness that is characteristic of chance, or aleatory, writing. Yet Berio employs neither electronics nor chance. Sinfonia is essentially music that could have been produced only by the control and unfailing instincts of one man.

This is what Berio, 42, has been driving at in all his work. To him, what counts is man’s civilized conscience. His best previous theatrical works—Laborintus, Circles, Passaggio—were promising examples of music as a “social act.” At first, he explored opera, since it seemed to him that it offered the best form for social comment. Now he has no use for it. “As a musico-dramatic form, opera is completely useless,” he says. In Sinfonia, Berio suggests a new kind of dramaturgy encompassing music, drama, word sounds and, eventually, lighting and stage effects. Other composers have attempted the same thing, but along the way they have lost the sound and the sense of music. In Berio’s intensely affecting work, the music is paramount—and everything in it is a powerful declaration of musical achievement.