Sequenza VIII for solo violin

Luciano Berio comes from a musical family, and his studies began with his father and grandfather, both professional musicians. The defining experience of Berio’s early compositional career occurred in 1951 at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. It was there that the 25-year-old met countryman Luigi Dallapiccola, one the century’s most eloquent proponents of serialism (in brief, a compositional style that organizes pitches, rhythms, dynamics, etc., according to a pre-ordained numerical sequence). Personal contact with Dallapiccola inspired Berio’s own move to serialism. Returning to Europe, he took a position at the center of the Darmstadt Institute, a mecca for avant-garde composers; Institute residents have included Messiaen, Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, and Cage, to name a few. In the late 1950s Berio also directed an electronic music studio under the auspices of Italian radio.
Berio composed the Sequenzas for various solo instruments beginning in 1958; the most recent, Sequenza XIV, was completed in 2002. They are among the most successful compositions of the past 40 years. Each was inspired by Berio’s relationships with the world’s finest performers, and he attempted to craft something of a dialogue between composer and performer in beginning this on-going project. As Berio puts it, “the construction of these pieces almost always takes as its point of departure a sequence of harmonic fields, from which spring, in all their individuality, the other musical functions.” The goal is to suggest harmony through melody, and Berio approaches polyphony in a metaphorical sense “as the exposition and superposition of differing modes of action and instrumental characteristics.” Virtuosity serves that purpose since it signifies a tension between a musical idea and its realization on an individual instrument. Each sequenza represents Berio’s attempt to express the soul of the instrument for which he is writing.
Sequenza VIII for solo violin was written for Carlo Chiarappa in 1966, when Berio was teaching in the United States. In this piece the composer “pays a personal debt to the violin . . . one of the most enduring and complex instruments in existence.” Two pitches, A and B, form the pivots upon which the entire work turns. Like a chaconne—Bach’s famous one in D minor comes to mind—use of these two pitches helps articulate the progress and recurrence of structural divisions in the piece. Sequenza VIII often appears with its poetic epigram:

“for you I have multiplied my voices, my words, my vowels and now I cry out that you are my vocative.”

(c) Jason Stell