Fabulated Culture — Chris Stover

fabulated culture

chris stover

(This is the English version of an invited essay that appears in Dutch as part of the 360º Berio festival at the MATRIX Centrum voor neuwe Muziek, 2021. The published Dutch version can be found here.)

‘Countless folk melodies made their way across Europe, transforming themselves and turning up in the most unlikely places’. (RF, 34)

Luciano Berio was, in the first place, a collector of sounds. His sources were astonishingly diverse: the poetry of Auden, Beckett, Joyce, Neruda; the prose of Brecht and Calvino; the orchestral music of Debussy, Mahler, Schubert; the cries of London street vendors and Sicilian abbagnate; Central African heterophony; Lennon and McCartney; folk songs from Yugoslavia and Azerbaijan, and much, much more. Often Berio borrowed material directly from scores, recordings, or texts. Other times he invented new material that aimed to recreate the essence of a particular practice (for example, ‘us[ing] the technical resources of folk-melody as a starting point for his own melodic invention’ [B, 79]). What Berio understood that ‘essence’ to be in any particular case is a compelling and complex question, transcending (or at least eliding) conventional notions of authenticity or cultural context. In light of how we understand the imperialistic forces of Global Northern ‘high’ culture to function—as well as Berio’s commitment to that high culture, his trenchant critiques of its uses and abuses notwithstanding—are these problematic questions as well? I’ll return to this below, but as a teaser I will suggest here that this is a question that needs to be kept open rather than resolved either as absolution or indictment.

Berio was, second of all, a transformer of sounds. His techniques for doing so are prodigious. He developed and deployed ‘paradigmatic techniques’, borrowed from semiology, to isolate and meticulously recombine tiny gestural ideas from his source materials, a point musicologist Martin Scherzinger illuminates in a revealing essay on Berio’s Coro. He sought ever new ways to atomize musical gestures, breaking them apart into nearly imperceptible units, as we hear most clearly in Thema, Sequenza V, and ‘O King’. He would bend one musical syntax into another (for example in his treatment of Schubert’s music in Rendering) or outside of syntax altogether, as a close listen to the structural unfolding and eventual dissolution of points on the curve to find reveals. A kind of liminal space is created when two syntaxes are ‘bent’ into each other; Berio suggests a productive, almost utopian program when he describes his attempts to ‘in one way or another assimilate without a stylistic break ...[taking] a few steps forward in the search for a unity underlying musical worlds that are apparently alien to one another’. (TI, 106) Berio’s, however, seems to be a unity without universalism, or perhaps better, resonance without reduction.

Very often, his techniques involve juxtapositions both subtle and overt. But in all of these cases, the bare fact of juxtaposition should not be taken as the focus of aesthetic or structural interest. Berio was no more interested in postmodern irony than he was in dogmatic serialism (‘I’m not interested in collages, and they amuse me only when doing them with my children’ [TI, 106]; ‘any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar ... is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects’ [TTH, 169]). In every event it is a question of what work is being done when two seemingly incommensurate referents are brought into contact. What ‘story’ does each reveal in the other?

Third, then, Berio was what we might call a fabulator of histories. As he describes the famous third movement from Sinfonia, the process by which the ‘skeleton’ of a Mahler scherzo is newly embodied with a seemingly endless proliferation of intertextual references amounts to a creative remapping of the history of European art music (TI, 107). New constellations of meaning are enacted through individual juxtapositions, through the commentary of Beckett’s The Unnameable (and dozens of other texts), through Berio’s own compositional distensions, and through self- referential repetition. If Berio’s liminal syntax-bending amounts to a form of storytelling, of newly mapping worlds, then what story is he telling?

The notion of musical composition as a fabulatory practice that remaps worlds seem to me among Berio’s signal contributions to the landscape of twentieth-century experimental composition, and it is crucial for understanding the composer’s relation to his sources, found or otherwise. Like many of his Darmstadt colleagues, and to a greater extent than most, Berio passed through serialism, picking up residues (and, importantly, techniques) but resisting its ideological hold, always finding ways to escape the frame of a quantized compositional rigor. Like his one-time teacher Luigi Dallapiccola, one way this escape was achieved was via a turn (or return) to lyricism, which we find even in nominally serial works like Nones. What is important here, however, is not the tool, but the eroding of orthodoxy that was afforded. Lyricism may have been anathema in the post-Webern high-modernist milieu, but as Georgina Born reminds us, that milieu was and is itself a space of music-cultural praxis, and Berio’s overtly political project was to refuse high-modernist claims of somehow standing outside the gritty messiness of (low) culture. As Scherzinger writes, ‘Berio elaborates moments of ethnographic contact to seek out unguessed-at histories of association and unity. His is a meticulous mode of surreal aesthetic blending that aims at once to liberate history from sedimented notions of cultural difference and also to resist collapsing ethnographic regions into mundane sameness.’ (LBC, 421)

These ideas—Berio as collector of sounds, transformer of sounds, and inventor of new histories—play out most clearly, and probably most controversially, through the ways Berio incorporated actual material from global folk traditions into his multivalent compositional language. Berio’s practice of incorporating folk materials into his music is well documented, spans his career, and can be heard in some of his most well-known compositions: Folk Songs, Coro, Naturale, Voci. In all of these works, and many others, ‘found’ musical utterances are deployed as source material for Berio’s sonorous experimentations. The originals are variously audible in Berio’s renderings: sometimes unequivocally as melodies set in dialogue with novel accompanimental textures (as in Folk Songs or Beatles Songs), sometimes as the hint of a melodic trajectory that folds into an altogether different music-syntactic space, as in Voci or Naturale, other times as a discovered or perceived procedure extracted from a vernacular syntax and repurposed within Berio’s high-modernist language (as in Coro). Some questions loom over all of these activities, however: where are the voices of those from whom Berio has borrowed these songs? What authority has been granted the composer to take them and repurpose them for his own compositional ends (with, it must be mentioned, material gain)? What power relations come into play when the high-culture, urban, well-connected and -resourced Berio draws upon the music of a culture that is not his, but more important, upon the specific utterances of whatever singer Berio happened to have heard, who now must stand in for an entire culture and performance practice? What reciprocal actions—what retributions, what concrete decolonial activism—might have been possible, whether taken or not?

In a 1993 Norton Lecture at Harvard University, later anthologized in Remembering the Future, Berio locates his work along a trajectory that also includes Bela Bartók, who, ‘rather than transcribing folk melodies’ would strive to capture ‘their inherent, implicit meaning. Therefore, in most cases [Bartók] invents them’ (RF, 56). Berio is making two profound points here. First, that Bartók’s field transcriptions fabulate their sources through the very process of fixing them in a notation system. This is well known and true of any transcription project. Second, more important, Bartók invents a trans-syntactic dialogue between his source materials and his own compositional language, which turns out to animate an ever richer intertextual milieu, which Berio illustrates by describing the first five pitches of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta as the cross-germination of ‘four cultural seeds’ stemming from Bach, Webern, Hungarian folk music, and Bartók himself. That Berio finds the seeds of his own compositional procedures in Bartók’s music is not immediately obvious, but makes very good sense from this perspective.

If we indict Berio for the failures in his commitment to anticolonialism, then of course we need to indict Bartók and countless other as well. It’s probably okay to do so; indeed, we probably ought to, not to shame or cancel, but to ensure that we remain vigilant to ongoing needs for accountability in all such matters. But as they say, it’s more complicated than that. Berio at times seems quite aware of the need for cultural sensitivity, suggesting at one point that while it is okay to ‘pulverize’ Bellini (‘frankly, I reckon he deserves it’!) other sources ought to be treated more carefully. (TI, 101) In other words, Berio is not silent on the question, even if he is not as careful with his sources as he insists on being, or as we ought to wish one would be.

For example, Berio insists on a fundamental plurality and diasporic movement of folk songs that need not be categorically removed from the experimental attitude of a modernist (or postmodernist) compositional aesthetic. For one famous example, he studied the coordinated hocketing procedures of Central African Banda Linda music in order ‘to transfer the principle, the idea, into other dimensions of music’ and to bring them into interactive relations with techniques from other cultural contexts. Importantly, as Berio points out, ‘the Banda Linda themselves had already traveled a long way’ (RF, 59); the composer then suggests at least an analogous connection to similar compositional practices in medieval Europe.

Just before this passage, however, he also suggests that ‘appropriating [the music of another culture] with the intellectual tools of our music no longer needs to be a matter of cultural colonialism but can be an act of awareness and respect, of love...’ (RF, 57). This is a powerful sentiment, but we ought to proceed cautiously: that word ‘appropriating’ is telling, and it takes more than simply asserting we are not doing so to wave cultural colonialism away. We might— again, perhaps we should—take Berio at his word, but the questions linger like spectres of lost horizons. How, in the end, might some of these relations have gone otherwise if that awareness, respect, and love had indeed led to a more reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange? (Could that Sicilian fisherman have benefited from the composer’s cultural capital?) I ask these questions then, not necessarily to trouble Berio’s legacy or our understanding or appreciation of his miraculous musical imagination, but to stimulate the activist urge to never stop thinking about how to do better, so new generations of composers following in Berio’s footsteps can be acutely aware of anticolonialist techniques for cross-cultural exchange such that everyone benefits, not just the colonizers.

Sources

[TI] Luciano Berio, Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga, translated by David Osmond-Smith (Marion Boyers, 1985)

[TTH] Luciano Berio, ‘Meditations on a Twelve-Tone Horse’ (Christian Science Monitor, 1968, reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby, Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, Schirmer, 1996)

[RF] Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Harvard University Press, 2006).

[LBC] Martin Scherzinger, ‘Luciano Berio’s Coro: Nexus between African Music and Political Multitude’, in Luciano Berio: Nuove Prospettive, ed. Angela DeBenedictus and Talia Berio (Accademia Musicale Chigiana, 2011).

[B] David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford University Press, 1991).