A leader of the avant garde

Luciano Berio, a grand old man of modern music, is the focus of RTÉ's new Living Music Festival at the Helix Centre in Dublin. The composer talks from Florence about some of the landmark works of the last five decades.

The Italian composer Luciano Berio has been at the forefront of music for over half a century. His Sinfonia, one of 18 works commissioned for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1968, was almost instantly recognised as a key statement about the 1960s.

Time magazine, not usually noted for its effusiveness about classical music, called it "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". The piece, for small vocal group (the Swingle Singers) and orchestra, includes a movement dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, sets texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and has a dazzlingly-executed, central, showpiece movement which wraps Bach, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Berlioz, Brahms, Berg, Hindemith, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Boulez and Stockhausen, among others, into Mahler and and Samuel Beckett.

He captured the public imagination with a still ongoing series of solo pieces under the title Sequenza, wrote a set of Folk Songs (some actually by himself) which showed how even in the mid 20th century such an undertaking could marry popularity and creative viability for an avant-garde composer. And, while rejecting the label of opera, he has written significantly for the musical theatre (his collaborators have included Italo Calvino, Eduardo Sanguineti and Umberto Eco). He recently added to his long list of original works a new completion of Puccini's Turandot.

Berio, who was born into a family of musicians in Oneglia in 1925, grew up in a fascist Italy that had turned its attention away from modernism in music. Taking a cue from a remark he made that "the easiest way for a musician to talk coherently about himself is by talking about other people, about the things that he has around him, and behind him," I asked him about the Italian musicians who had been important to him when he was young. I was thinking of people such as the profoundly humanist Luigi Dallapiccola, who introduced Schoenberg's 12-tone technique to Italy (and with whom Berio studied in the US) and Bruno Maderna, composer, conductor, and colleague - they worked together in the electronic studio Berio set up in Milan in 1953.

"I must confess the musician who influenced me most was Monteverdi," he says. "Still now, I'm still working on Monteverdi, I'm preparing a new revisitation of L'Incoronazione di Poppea, which is going to be done in Los Angeles next January. He's an immense figure. And then my teacher at the conservatory, Ghedini, who was a really remarkable musician. I think sooner or later he's got to be known more. He's the only Italian musician I know who really made a link between the old, glorious Renaissance music and today, the only one who never indulged too much with the neo-classical experiment that ruined so many musicians. Not Stravinsky, of course. That was something unique. Otherwise, neo-classicism in Italy, and in a good part of Europe, was a kind of chastity belt, to prevent the aggressions of music, of a density, of an expressive or expressionistic invasion of music.

"Then Maderna. We were like brothers in a way. We worked a lot together. I was very close to him also, because we had the very same type of musical education. Like me, he did this very strict counterpoint stuff.

"Then he had a practical, a concrete relation with the music. I think it was Wittgenstein who said truth is always concrete. Music, too, like everything else . . . love, politics. I like in Maderna this attachment to the factual, the pragmatic dimension of music.

"I knew Dallapiccola. I had an enormous respect for him, but also a certain distance. In Italy, he was precious, because he opened up Italy to European music. But he was not concrete, not pragmatic.

"He had these visions, sometimes a vision that did not fit with the practical aspect of his creativity - sometimes, yes, of course, like Canti di prigionia, or a later work like the Goethe Lieder, which are a remarkable achievement. But he was not in peace, himself, with music. And I will stop there about Italian musicians."

What about Luigi Nono, another giant of Italian music, who was a year older than Berio, and who died in 1991? "Yeah, we met each other many, many, many times. But, our nature didn't fit. Also because he had a kind of history. His approach to music was," he hesitates, and then laughs at himself as he continues,"not pragmatic, so to speak. He had a great visions which most of the time were outlined by discourse, declarations, very often . . . I don't want to use heavy words, but sometimes they were rhetorical things, the substance was not there."

Berio is of the generation that has been branded by Darmstadt, the German city near Frankfurt, with a summer course which became the hotbed for avant-garde developments in European music in the 1950s.

"I was there late, in a way, 1954. I met wonderful friends like Pousseur - the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, whose pupils included Belfast composer, David Byers - Boulez, of course, with whom I maintain close contact, and to a certain extent with Stockhausen." The names of Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen are often bracketed together through their prominence in, even dominance of, the 1950s. Did they have that much in common?

"No. Because there were certain experiences . . . like Boulez did a wonderful exploration - somebody had to do it and he did it - his so-called total control of events, of serialisation. It was very interesting. I never had creatively much relation with that, although I am full of admiration for certain works by Stockhausen and Boulez. Because they approached that experience not so much as a creative tool but as an analytical tool. Still now, my approach to many aspects of music - it could be the music of the past, Monteverdi, for instance, or even a certain aspect of folklore, of popular music -- would have been different without that experience. It was a great lesson in rigour, and in analysing and connecting the micro-element with the mega-element, the morphological and the syntactical, the smallest element to the larger design and perspective in the work. I learnt a lot with this.

"Any creative experience cannot do without analysis. It's implicit in a way. The danger is when the analytical tool becomes something removable, when you can detach it. A great danger for a while, less now, with the younger generation, was the need of verbalising the musical experience to the extreme. It's very interesting. But that is not an analytical tool," he says.

"There are composers, I don't want to mention names, they think in terms of verbalising what they are going to do. If they cannot verbalise, they stop. It's a kind of handicap to think that the verbalisation of music is an analytical tool. It's understandable as a rhetorical tool, but not as an analytical tool."

"He was a great person," says Berio when I ask about Cage. "Musically, I didn't learn much from him. The attitude towards music, his sense of irony, was very, very important. After him, a musician cannot forget that irony is an important parameter of music, too. He built up his own poetics, and he lived that in a beautiful way. There was a sense of purity in his attitude toward everything, even towards mushrooms."

Berio's conversation is as lucid, engaging, and sometimes provocative as his music. When we met, in the spaciously spare studio of his Florence apartment, his neck was in a brace, the result of losing two vertebrae to the threat of a tumour. Yet his sense of involvement, hisquickness of mind, his curiosity, and his musical appetite all seem undimmed, although, he told me, his piano playing has suffered - he fell and broke the little finger of his left hand, which has set so that he now misjudges his stretch and plays wrong notes.

He talks about electronic music - "fundamental, again, to study the possible connection between the minima, the micro aspect of acoustics and the vision".

About his first wife, the late, lamented singer, Cathy Berberian, who inspired many of his works, he says: "she had a vocal intellect which was unique, she didn't have one voice, she had many voices . . . her voice was not an instrument, but a field of possibility".

Of the gap that opened up between performers and composers in the 1950s, when there was a fracture between "the two dimensions, the practical one, and the expressive, creative one, a happy disorder of functions".

About the present: "I'm very happy to see that many young composers are also performing, they're closer to the concrete dimension of music, which is very healthy".

About minimalism: "I'm very attracted to minimalism, also because two of the most interesting minimalists were students of mine, Steve Reich, and Louis Andriessen".

About his series of Sequenzas for solo instruments: "I was jealous of Bach, who wrote a Partita for solo flute in which he could imply counterpoint . . . I wanted to create a substitute for the same richness of old solo instrumental music where many, many things are implicit"; a Sequenza for cello has just been finished, others are planned for horn and percussion.

About opera, he says: "to tell a story was natural for opera . . . now there's a virtuality of stories inside, not one story".

If you want to find out more, there's the Living Music Festival itself, where you can hear 15 of his works, and find the composer in conversation with the festival's artistic director, Raymond Deane. The composer's doctor is not allowing him to travel at the moment, so the plan is for the conversation to take place via a live link.

The RTÉ Living Music Festival opens with a seminar on Berio, Eco and Joyce with Berio scholar David Osmond-Smith on Friday at 11 a.m. There are 14 events in the festival, which runs until Sunday night. Details from The Helix, Dublin at 01-700 7000.