Sequenza VIIb for Solo Soprano Saxophone - Luciano Berio
Performed by Wallace Halladay. [Arragement from the Sequenza VII by Claude Delangle].
"Your profile is my frantic landscape; kept at a distance is a false fire of love that is minimal: it is dead ". This is the poetry with which Sanguineti describes his impressions when he heard, in 1994, the interpretation of the series Sequenzas and more specifically of sequenza VII for oboe, clearly gathering in it the purpose and descriptive sensation suggested by music.
Berio wrote the sequenza VII for oboe in 1969 and dedicated it to Heinz Holliguer. From this was born sequenza VIIb for soprano saxophone, in 1993 by Claude Delangle. The sequenzas are a series of works for solo instruments in which the techniques of virtuosity are used to the extreme limit, pulling out the instruments of their tradition, expanding them in extension and technical and musical possibilities. Invent, in a game of manipulations and metamorphosis, new forms, new resources. Its roots are found in serialism, although this style will be noticed in the form of brushstrokes: very pointy, chromatic and rhythmically difficult music.
Berio is an Italian composer and theorist born in 1925 (Oneglia) and died in 2003 but influenced by Dallapiolla (his teacher) in the US, as well as studying orchestra conducting and piano (with which he could be heard improvising jazz at night). Until 1953 his work moves between the neoclassical influence of Ghedini, the admiration for Stravinsky, and the appeal of serialism. Between 1954 and 1963 his music is ascribed to serialismomelodism and a clear Italian and Mediterranean sense. The later works show a taste for very eclectic materials united by a homogeneous stylistic language and a desire to achieve varied and complex cosmos in each work. integral, but even within this controlled technique shows a special.
It is in this last stage where Berio composes the sequenzas: around the USA in 1955, together with Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, he creates the RAI phonology study. It will be an important center in which the new forms linked to the boom will be experienced with the contact of electroacoustic music. Berio affirms himself as a pioneer, an explorer: he is interested in folk and rock, consecrating them and mixing them in the melting pot of his music, which is free, without borders. Berio is glowing, brilliant, lipid, baroque, who constantly refines his works, elaborating new versions. Part of texts of poets, dismembered on the edge of the tragic: crazy about theater and literature devours poets especially modern and postmodern writers of the twentieth century, such as Joyce, Cumings or Sanguineti. It is in sequenza VII a taste for light and games of memory, of what was good loved, understood, found. Everywhere recreates heartbreaking or peaceful situations arising from the vocal or instrumental inflections of the tension of the No (Japanese lyric drama) as well as Hindu music.
In the same year that Sequence VII creates Sinfonia that highlights one of his musical concerns: to compose a work that works on several psychological levels at the same time (using a melody of Mahler as a curtain, he writes over fragments sung by eight singers and in different languages and at another level small orchestral appearances). This purpose of working at several levels simultaneously develops it with great intensity in his operas but we will also see it in our sequence. We will find in the work a simple harmony, subcategorized to the texture. He insists on returning to the harmonic dimension as the central disposition of his music: he tries to get it by training his musical education to find his way thinking that the musical jungle is the first step for a subject of brilliant intuition, but was absorbed by focusing on a work in the structure exploring the consequences of harmonic projection from a line. These fruits of the exploratory process led to most of the 80s and 90s, but it already introduces them into the sequence. Berioexplorativa of the electrical results, living with the risks or rewards of working in the search of new sounds. A third concept to take into account is the search for balance with the continuous expression of open-close with the different elements. The sequenza is generated as an improvisation, understanding its rhythms and melodies as such. is admired as one of the great composers of the second half of the 20th century for his exuberance
Sources from this spanish page with an analysis of the work: https://www.adolphesax.com/index.php/es/actualidad/articulos/analisis-de-obras/1258-sequenza-viib-de-luciano-berio
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