Festivals: Frightening the Fish

When she was growing up in New York, Cathy Berberian used to sing along with recordings of Lily Pons in The Bell Song and Basso Boris Chaliapin in The Song of the Flea—note for note, pitch for pitch. The vocal range she developed eventually settled into an astonishing reach of three octaves —minus one note—more than enough | to sing both Tristan and Isolde. But every sound she is capable of making is required by the freak music she now sings. At 35, Cathy Berberian is the first lady of far-out song.

Plain Fury. Her career in contemporary sounds began in 1958 with a Rome performance of John Cage’s Aria with Fontana Mix, in which phrases in English, French, Italian, Armenian and Russian were scattered all over the scale, with marginal indications that they be sung in a “baby or Marilyn Monroe voice,” a “Marlene Dietrich foggy voice,” or a jazz singer’s voice. There were also—as there are in much of the music she sings—passages calling for whatever noises she cared to make —a dog’s bark, a grunt, a sigh. The audience responded with plain fury, moving Cage to recite a Zen parable in Berberian’s defense: In a far country there lived a beautiful girl who was desired by all the men who saw her. One day she found herself alone at a river bank and decided to swim. She took off all her clothes and went into the water naked—and when she did all the fish were frightened.

Last week Berberian was in Warsaw, where there are no fish to frighten. Through nine adventuresome days at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, mocking smiles and catcalls were stillborn while Warsaw held fast to its reputation as the only city in the world where people really like contemporary music. Berberian sang Circles, a free and atonal composition by her husband, Luciano Berio, in which even punctuation marks in an E. E. Cummings poem have musical counterparts—an aspirate gasp, for example, indicating an exclamation point. Warsaw was delighted.

The Nice Part. Some of the world premieres played during the week were clearly also swan songs—the one and only performance of some trail blazer’s lapse into buffoonery. But the au courant audience had come to hear a conclave of the bizarre as well as the beautiful, and like buyers at a fall fashion showing in Paris, they cherished the new and outlandish for its own sake.

Rhythm was present only as a sort of prose pulse, often interrupted for long, breathless silences. Harmony was so spare and skeletal that the few familiar chords struck were as pleasantly refreshing as rain on a barn roof. Melody’s status slumped so badly that it became only an intermission joke—”Sing me that nice part of the thing we just heard.” But most of all, precise composition yielded to aleatory music—the music of chance, in which performers are free to improvise with little control beyond their own musicality. In all the baffling proceedings, Berberian and Roman Flutist Severino Gazzelloni were godsends to composers and audiences alike.

Gazzelloni’s virtuosity in a composition for solo flute by Japanese Composer Kazuo Fukushima astounded the audience; he bent tones into microtones

Like rain on the roof.

while running the gamut of timbre from piercing squeals to whispered pianissimos that dwindled into silence without a break. Back of his every performance is his soulful belief in the music he plays. Once, while rehearsing a wildly advanced composition with the Rome Radio Orchestra, Gazzelloni drew on his 20-year tenure to chide his giggling colleagues: “Boys, I was practically born in this orchestra, so let me tell you something—you have to play this with the same love you give Mozart.”