Ritratto di Città

"Ritratto di Città" is an experimental radio show written by the ethnomusicologist Roberto Leydi in 1954.

Build in "Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Milano" of the RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, with music scored by Luciano Berio &  Bruno Maderna, this piece is a real avant-garde of what this kind of composed radioplay could be at that time as well the first electronic music piece ever recorded in that studio.

The movie and the two voices of the two italian actors Nando Gazzolo & Ottavio Fanfani just send you in a lyrical journey across a city, even if you don't understand well the italian langage.

in 3 parts



Second part here
and third part here

 

 

-_-M-_-

Omaggio a Joyce

"Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" is an amazing composition by Luciano Berio, using tape and the voice of Cathy Berberian, his wife, the intense and unique contemporary avant-garde music vocalist. Words are issued from chapter XI "Les Sirènes" of  "Ulysses", the James Joyce's famous novel. As an electroacoustic composition, the piece uses the possibilities of combining phonemes and the meaning of sounds that Joyce used in his text.

A first version, titled "Omaggio a Joyce. Documenti sulla qualità onomatopeica del linguaggio poetico" was for a radio documentary and was build at "Institute of Musical Phonology", in Milan, Italy. Initially conceived for four audio channels, this version was finaly recorded in stereo in 1958 under the title "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" and published on a Turnabout' LP. In 1995, it was digitally restored as the definitive version.

"... I tried to interpret musically a reading of Joyce’s text, developing the polyphonic intent that characterizes the eleventh chapter of Ulysses (entitled “Sirens” and dedicated to music), whose narrative technique was suggested to the author by a common procedure of polyphonic music: the fuga per canonem..."  

Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian

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"... par les moyens électroniques, le compositeur multiplie les bribes-mots, décompose et recompose les énoncés continus, les déforme (jusqu'à l'abstraction totale, fouillis de gazouillis et pépiements, souffles), en les manipulant selon des critères d'organisation différents de l'écriture du texte (par essence contraint par la nécessaire signifiance), en variant les vitesses, les durées et les bandes de fréquences..."  

source   

The electronic cry: Voice and gender in electroacoustic music

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Noises & waves

Marino Zuccheri & Luigi Nono at RAI Studio of Phonology  - courtesy of Fondazione Archivio LN

The Milan "Institute of Musical Phonology", designed by sound engineer Alfredo Lietti, was created in June 1955 at the RAI headquarter by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. 

From that year, Milan became a essential point in the international electroacoustic music post-war scene, through a new expressive language, which was a synthesis of the concrete and electronic experiences happening in Europe at the Studio für Elektronische Musik (WDR) in Cologne and at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris.

"The RAI Studio of Musical Phonology is the outcome of the matching between music and the possible new means of analyzing and processing that sound has" - Luciano Berio

A short document (in 2 parts)

Marino Zuccheri and Luigi Nono

 


 


 
about Alfredo Lietti:
“Two of the first electronic works in my record collection – Berio’s Visage from 1961, and John Cage’s Fontana Mix from 1958 – were created there with Zuccheri (Designer and technician at the RAI Studio) . Even today, both of these pieces sound impressively vivid and dynamic, and what we should now recognise is that such qualities should be attributed to the technician as much as to the composer.” - David Toop, The Wire, 2008 


& don't miss to listen to "ritratto di citta" 

 

Sinfonia

"Sinfonia per 8 voci e orchestra" was composed by Luciano Berio in 1968.
This premiere in Germany with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra
was conducted by Ernest Bour.
This piece is symptomatic from the 60s as it includes different musical quotations from Malher, Schönberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz...

It uses texts issued from Claude Lévy Strauss ("Le cru et le cuit")  and Samuel Beckett ("L'innommable") sung by 8 amplified voices.

details of the piece on IRCAM website (in french)

Colori della luce

An experimental movie directed in 1963 by the italian artists Bruno Munari (1907-1998) who was involved with futurism and concrete art when he was young & Marcello Piccardo, both founder members of the "Studio di Monte Olimpino" in 1962
with an original music by Luciano Berio