Two Great Italian Composers Of Our Time:

Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono

by

Mehmet Okonsar



Discography by Mehmet Okonsar



J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"
All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

Luciano Berio And His Major Works

The life and main works by a very important Italian composer of our time: Luciano Berio.



J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"



F. Liszt: "modern" works


J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"


Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"


J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations


Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.


Luciano Berio (1925-2003) was born in Onegia, northern Italy.

His father and grandfather were chapel organists and composers. After preliminary studies together with his father, Berio joined the Milan Conservatory, concentrating in piano, performing, and composition and after graduation labored being an operatic coach and conductor.

In 1951 he received a scholarship towards the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, in which he worked along with Luigi Dallapiccola, an Italian, the serialist composer.

Dallapiccola's influence is apparent within the works Berio authored after his going back to Italy.

"Nones" (1955), written to W. H. Auden's poem "Ninth Hour," is "entirely regulated" that is, not merely the actual tones but also the rhythms, dynamics, and articulations consume a preconceived serial order.

Luciano Berio was among the first composers who recognized within the music a possibility around the mixture of electronically amplified voices and acoustic instruments.

Ironically, Berio's curiosity about electronic music, he first viewed it as the musical coming trend, was supported with a deep curiosity about traditional folk music as well as in singing too.

His goal ended up being to extend the plethora of vocal music and also the spoken word by meshing all of them within musical structure. To do this, he frequently set to music experimental literary texts, by authors like Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and Italo Calvino.

Luciano Berio's style within the nineteen fifties, like this of his compatriots Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, stressed Webern serialism and electronic techniques.

His subsequent work, however, has proven a change in interest to indeterminacy in addition to to classical approaches. It has frequently been expressed inside a highly personal eclecticism. Sometimes including a tonally centered music by which quotes using other composers and from himself happen to be placed.

However in all of the approaches he has adopted, all bear the stamp of the intense personality touched by profound human concerns, particularly in which the documents of others, for example Brecht, Dante, Joyce and Auden, have fired his imagination.

Berio's electronic works goes generally from his particular period at Milan's "Studio di Fonologia." Essentially the most influential works he created there's "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" (1958), depending on Berberian reading through from James Joyce's "Ulysses."

A later work, "Visage" (1961) sees Berio developing a wordless emotional language by dicing and ordering a recording of Berberian's voice.

Berio's "central instrumental focus", if this type of factor is available, is most likely using the strings, the piano, voice and also the flute. He authored many amazing pieces for piano which change from solo pieces to basically concerto pieces ("Points about the curve", "Concerto for 2 pianos and Choir") that have a powerful backbone of harmonic and melodic material entirely in line with the piano part.

Among Berio's other creations are Sequenza 3 (1966), Circles (1960) and "Recital I" (for Trina) (1972), just about all composed intended for Berberian, as well as several stage compositions, with "In RE in ascolto", some sort of cooperation along with Italo Calvino are the best known.

Sequenza 9 for Solo Clarinet is definitely dreamy, shrill, anxious while Sequenza 10 for Solo Trumpet is vibrant and exuberant just the opposite from the less serious trumpet recital.

Like a finite assortment of music, The Sequenzas exist as one of the most important compositions of the 20th Century.

In Sequenza 3, the instrument is really a lady, and just searching in the score it is possible to observe how demanding the piece is to sing. She is expected to sing through every emotion you could express, moving from angry to dreamy inside a second. There is no traditional melodic structure, but instead pitch indications for that singer to follow along with.

Rather as an "Etude", Sequenza 6 focuses on one problem: the introduction of a type of polyphony of various textures. Getting away the monodic restrictions of numerous instruments is a central feature in most of Berio's solo Sequenzas.

Sequenza 4, for piano, centers around the interplay between what is being performed about the keyboard and harmonies held through the sostenuto pedal, while Sequenza 5, for trombone, explores a polyphony of vocal versus. instrumental sounds.

It is as though the extension of Sequenza 6 happens out of your time. The viola part continues to be changed by its new surroundings from the time-dependent search for shifting curves and spaces right into a time-independent object, any kind of which may be adopted through the surroundings at anytime.

In this way, all Sequenza 6 is concurrently present through a lot of "Chemins 2", as though the Sequenza were a painting or, better, a sculpture. As a result areas of "Chemins 2" possess a peculiarly stationary quality.





Usage rights:

You can use this article under the Creative Commons License CC-BY. This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon my work, even commercially, as long as you credit me, by displaying the information on me given below verbatim for the original article.


Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".



Discography by Mehmet Okonsar



J.S. Bach "Die Kunst der Fuge"
All CD's available at amazon.com and (partly) at cdbaby.com

The Social Concerns Of A Great Composer Of Our Time: Luigi Nono

The life and works of Luigi Nono. A great composer of our epoch and his social deeds.



J.S. Bach "Musikalische Opfer"



F. Liszt: "modern" works


J.S. Bach "Well-tempered Clavier"


Recital: "Live at Salt Lake City"


J.S. Bach The Goldberg Variations


Piano Solo Improvisations: "Shadowy Arcade"

  1. All CD's can be auditioned entirely and freely at their respective pages. Click on the images.


Luigi Nono was born inside the city in which he'd spend lots of his existence, Venice, in 1924. He died in 1990.

Just like a youthful composer he was connected with new trends of music developing the serial ideas espoused within the Darmstadt courses in the fifties. As his mentor he viewed the fathers of the second Viennese school; Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. After his marriage to Schoenberg's daughter Nuria, he was literally be capable to call Schoenberg his father.

Luigi Nono accomplished prominence after World War 2 becoming an uncompromising modernist attempting to transform music in Europe. As well as fellow Italians like Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, Nono visited the particular significant Darmstadt Summer Courses and more and more connected with other modernists, for instance Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

In 1950, inside the course in Darmstadt, his first orchestral composition, "Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg" was performed.

He returned there every year until 1960, meeting several influential artists, giving lectures, and getting several works created.

His curiosity about electronic music started in 1952, through lectures and demos given in Bonn by Werner Meyer-Eppler. His most significant composition throughout this era is most likely "Il Canto Sospeso" (1956), for soloists, choir and orchestra. One innovation of the piece was his fracturing from the text to distribute the syllables all over the subdivided voices.

He was probably the most original and influential composers to live and operate in post-War Italy. Being always led by an enthusiastic understanding of social issues, he became a member of Italy's Communist Party in 1952, Nono's works frequently take the form of highly strengthening and significant public spectacles.

In lots of ways, Nono was essentially the most extreme among all his contemporaries, selecting to mix an enthusiastic political engagement, using a musical direction that blends austere elegance together with ferocious strength.

A couple of the composer's most well-known historical champion performers are Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado.

Nono visited Soviet Russia where he awakened the country, amongst others, to the work by Alfred Schnittke within the contemporary practices of avant-garde composers from the West.

Sixties and also Seventies have been notable by his repeated journeys overseas, lecturing within Latin America, and making the acquaintance of top left-wing intellectuals and activists.

It have been to grieve the murder the leader of Chilean Revolutionary Front: Luciano Cruz that Nono created "Como una ola fuerza y luz" (1972). Greatly within the bold, expressionist type of "Al gran sole", by using a tape, sizable orchestra and electronics, it grew to be a form of piano concerto together with additional oral discourse.

The background music of "Prometeo", heavily with in debt towards the Japanese idea of "Ma", in which the silences between notes are as essential as the notes themselves, could easily fall flat with an unsympathetic audience.

Nary a whisper might be heard through the work's non-stop 140-minute duration. The extended silence that welcomed the barely audible final with the devastating yet existence-reinforcing sonority, brought towards an extremely positive reception by the performers. This is entirely justified and deserved.

Nono's music comes with an important political dimension. You find references to political upheaval in Vietnam, Cuba and South America, Auschwitz and the Algerian revolution. For his texts he finds the documents by Machado, Pavese, Lorca and Ungaretti and these grew to become progressively just one particular voice.

A lot of other Nono's works were highly significant and individualistic configurations of texts from authors as diverse as Nietzsche and Caesar Chavez, towards the anonymous inscriptions of political criminals. He saw those being an ultimate expression of humanity. That usage of the texts frequently mixes with the latest technical advances in electronic processing.

For Nono, the composer must be involved with existence, required to study history, gather experience, and be up to date with the most recent advances in science, technology and art to be able to more fully be an energetic participant in society.

Couple of composers have worked out as dynamic a political mind as did the late Luigi Nono. Commencing his career as being a devoted 12-tone composer and Schoenberg's son-in-law, Nono purposely searched for to transform both music and society in the large output.

The miracle of Nono's music may be the tremendous beauty and intensity he could forge using such disparate material.





Usage rights:

You can use this article under the Creative Commons License CC-BY. This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon my work, even commercially, as long as you credit me, by displaying the information on me given below verbatim for the original article.


Mehmet Okonsar is a pianist-composer-conductor and musicologist. Besides his international concert carrier he is a prolific writer. Founder of the first classical music-musicology dedicated blog-site: "inventor-musicae" as well as the first classical-music video portal: "classical videos".


Top of the page
Return to the articles index page
Back to homepage