The writing of music and the music of writing

Composer Gary Barwin is writing new series of posts for Lemon Hound, “Music for Writers.” The posts are thoughtful meditations on the relationship between text, speech, song and music in a particular composer’s work. This week Barwin focuses on Luciano Berio:

Perhaps Berio's most famous piece is the extraordinary Sinfonia for orchestra and eight amplified voices. The voices sing, speak, whisper, shout, and use other vocal sounds. The third movement incorporates “found” music from Mahler and Alban Berg, as well as text from Beckett’s novel The Unnameable, text from Claude Lévi-Strauss, and much self-referential text. It is a witty, self-referential, metaphysical romp. In a later post, I’m going to discuss this piece more when I speak about appropriation and recontextualization in music in compositions from the modern and the Medieval periods.

But not only is Barwin concerned with drawing analogies between compositional strategies in music and literature, he is even arguing for the ontological twinning of the composer and writer (they are both predicated on the word and the originary sound of the voice):

In Berio’s opera, Un re is ascolto (staged in a representation of a giant ear) a king whose only contact with his kingdom is by overhearing the voices and conversations of his people begins to conflate the sounds of the auditions and rehearsals of a troupe preparing to stage The Tempest, with events in his kingdom. This is a perfect metaphor for the composer and the writer. For Berio, language, the voice, indeed listening itself, creates a kingdom, a world. In the beginning was the word. It might have been someone else’s word. It might have someone singing. Or quoting. Or laughing. Or all three at once. Listening, like culture, is a labyrinth created by listening and culture.