Remembering the Future by Luciano Berio

Remembering the Future by Luciano Berio

In his 19931994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Luciano Berio skillfully explores the whirlpools and eddies of musical time, the intricate interplay between the moment-to-moment experience of music and the idioms, traditions, and histories that form our musical memory.

Music, in Berio’s view, is palpable and pliable, but also unstable, ready to be altered as more futures intervene in more pasts—just as he, in his own works, intervened in Schubert, in Monteverdi, and in Sicilian folk songThe six lectures nominally move from one topic to another: the nature of music as memory, of musicians as operator in ‘an immense library of musical knowledge’: the ways in which stretches of musical time can be re-traversed in copies, arrangements, and more distant adaptations; the impossibility of forgetting, and yet also the need for the new; the endless openness of the musical work, always remaining to be completed not only by further performances but also by further compositions that will excite sympathetic vibrations in it; opera as music made visible; and the interpenetrations of poetics and analysis. Yet these are by no means watertight compartments. Tidal swells wash through… Like any great artist, Berio speaks of himself when he speaks of others. A lot of his own music, as much as Stravinsky’s, has to do with collecting and copying precious objects—objects which become more precious in the process… Reading Remembering the Future is a valuable adjunct to listening to Berio’s music, the two experiences so much resembling each other in their richness of reference. Poignantly, the book even remembers the future of the composer’s own output. In an early passage he compares music to ‘a huge, protective building, designed by history and constructed over several millennia,’ where we may wander through ‘the Ars nova room, the Baroque room, the Schubert, Mahler, and Stravinsky rooms,’ and so on. Rooms—Stanze—was to be the title of Luciano Berio’s last completed composition before his death in 2003. -- Paul Griffiths * Times Literary Supplement *
These texts are a long way from the multilayered, often abrasive allusiveness of Berio’s best compositions, yet even he was able to go some way to justifying the claim that a composer can still, occasionally, be the best commentator on his own works. -- Arnold Whittall * Musical Times *

Luciano Berio (1925–2003) was an Italian experimental composer whose work spanned opera, symphony, and electronic music. An honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music, Berio is best known for his 1969 composition Sinfonia and his fourteen Sequenze, solo works that each explore the possibilities of a different instrument.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780674021549
ISBN 10	0674021541
Title	Remembering the Future
Author	Luciano Berio
Series	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Year published	2006-05-01
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.