Luciano Berio

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Berio was born in Oneglia (now part of Imperia), on the Ligurian coast of Italy on 24 October 1925. He was taught piano by his father and grandfather, who were both organists. During World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day, he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked and spent three months in a military hospital. After the war, unable to continue studying the piano because of his injured hand, he instead focused on composition. He studied at the Milan Conservatory, studying counterpoint with Giulio Cesare Paribeni and from 1948 composition with Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He was exposed to the music of Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School. In 1947, he had the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano. He met the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian while accompanying singing classes; they married in 1950, shortly after graduating, and divorced in 1964. Berio wrote a number of pieces that exploited her distinctive voice. In 1952, Berio went to the United States to study with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, from whom he gained an interest in serialism. From 1954 he attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. He became interested in electronic music. He worked for the broadcaster RAI in Milan from 1953 to 1960, where he co-founded, with Bruno Maderna, the Studio di fonologia musicale in 1955, which became one of the most important studios for electronic music in Europe. He invited a number of significant composers to work there, among them Henri Pousseur and John Cage. He produced an electronic music periodical, Incontri Musicali, from 1956 to 1960. In 1960 Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as Composer in Residence, and in 1962, on an invitation from Darius Milhaud, took a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California. He became a resident of the United States in 1963. In 1965, he began to teach at the Juilliard School, and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performances of contemporary music. In 1966, he married the noted philosopher of science Susan Oyama. They divorced in 1972. His students included Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Berio won the Prix Italia in 1966 for Laborintus II, a work for voices, instruments and tape with text by Edoardo Sanguineti. His reputation was strengthened when his Sinfonia was premiered in 1968. In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980, he was the director of the electro-acoustic division of IRCAM in Paris. He married the musicologist Talia Pecker in 1977. In 1987, he opened Tempo Reale, a centre for musical research and production based in Florence. In 1988, he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London. The following year, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. The same year, he became Distinguished Composer in Residence at Harvard University, remaining there until 2000. In 2000, he became Presidente and Sovrintendente at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Berio died in a hospital in Rome on 27 May 2003, at the age of 77.

Reader's Guide

Luciano Berio's significance lies in his experimental approach to composition, particularly his integration of extended techniques in the Sequenza series and his pioneering work in electronic music. His 1968 orchestral work Sinfonia, which incorporates literary and musical quotations in its third movement, remains one of his most famous pieces. Berio's use of spoken texts as basic material, as seen in works like Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), based on Cathy Berberian reading from James Joyce's Ulysses, and Visage (1961), which creates a wordless emotional language by cutting up and rearranging a recording of Berberian's voice, expanded the boundaries of vocal music and electroacoustic composition. His collaborations with poets such as Edoardo Sanguineti produced works like Laborintus II and Coro (premiered 1977), which explores folk music from Chile, North America, and Africa, and repeats the line 'come and see the blood on the streets' from a poem by Pablo Neruda. Berio's influence extended through his teaching at institutions including Mills College, the Juilliard School, and Harvard University, as well as through his direction of the electro-acoustic division of IRCAM and the founding of Tempo Reale. His legacy includes a body of work that challenges traditional distinctions between music, speech, and noise, and his contributions to electronic music helped establish the field in Europe.

Did You Know?

• Berio injured his hand on his first day of army conscription while learning how a gun worked, spending three months in a military hospital.
• He co-founded the Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan in 1955 with Bruno Maderna, one of Europe's most important electronic music studios.
• Berio's piece Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) is considered the first electroacoustic composition in Western music made with voice and technological elaboration.
• He gave a two-hour seminar analyzing Beethoven's 7th Symphony as a work of radical genius, then the next day gave another two-hour seminar showing why it was hopelessly flawed.
• Paul McCartney attended a 1966 concert of Berio's Laborintus 2 and spoke to Berio afterward, inspiring The Beatles' use of sound collage on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.