Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

So, there's this composer, Luciano Berio. He wrote a lot of great music, as some compoers are wont to do, and died in 2003 (Wow, was it really that long ago? It feels more recent to me, like he and Ligeti both died a short time apart, in the last couple of years. I guess memory can really distort one's sense of time.). One of his most widely-known works is his Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra, written in 1968 for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic.

The third movement of the Sinfonia is particularly notorious among music students, for its unusual collage construction. For the base layer of this collage, Berio started with the scherzo from Mahler's second symphony, which you can listen to here. On top of this scherzo, which runs continuously throughout the third movement of the Sinfonia, Berio adds a number of shorter musical quotations from other composers, ranging from old masters like Monteverdi and J. S. Bach to Berio's contemporaries, including Stockhausen and Boulez. Additionally, the eight vocalists make their own contributions to this medley, with spoken lines taken from Beckett and other sources. The end result of this collage can be heard in two parts, here and here. Go ahead, take a listen.

Fun stuff, isn't it? You might recognize some of the quotations, you might not. I certainly can't name them all. But it certainly sounds like a collage. Snatches of music which clearly come from disparate sources fade in and out like radio signals, and the underlying Mahler scherzo, though often obscured, still runs through it all, like a river which periodically disappears behind trees and hills. Charles Ives used a similar collage technique in his symphonies and other works some fifty years earlier, but not to the full extent that Berio did in Sinfonia: Ives would often slightly alter the melody of a hymn tune or patriotic song in order to better fit the musical texture, and used original material to harmonize these quotations and tie them together, while I believe every note of the third movement of Sinfonia (though not necessarily every word) can be directly tied to a pre-existing source. This doesn't mean that Berio's collage is better or worse than those of Ives; the two composers used similar techniques for similar but slightly different evocative purposes, and they both succeeded in realizing their intents effectively.

Once upon a time, a couple years ago, I read a post on some composer's blog -- I want to say it was Lawrence Dillon's blog at Sequenza21 (which, incidentally, takes its name from a series of solo works by Berio) but failed to find the post after a cursory search -- about the Sinfonia. In reference to the third movement, the author said something to the effect of, "At last! Somebody's written a piece that sounds like what goes on in my head all the time!" And many other musicians commented on that post, agreeing with the sentiment. I, too, concur; I have a mishmash of heard and unheard music running through my head almost constantly. But while Berio's collage limits its musical sources to the European "classical" tradition, my mind often casts its net in much wider waters, whether I like it or no.

Recently, my roommate has gotten me hooked on Fraggle Rock, and we have been working our way through the second season on DVD. I had only vague memories of Fraggle Rock from my childhood, as it aired on HBO, and the only place I was able to watch it was at my maternal grandmother's house, which I visited maybe twice a year. But now I can watch it at my leisure, and it's good. It also has songs. Fun songs, happy songs, silly songs. One of the episodes we watched tonight included the song "Shine On Me," which you can watch here. In case you're interested the full episode yourself, I won't say much about the context of the song -- though plenty of context is hinted at in the clip itself -- except to say that the song was a total letdown from my perspective. I was expecting something more substantial, and got... that... but it is catchy, if you're in the right mood. And I guess I was in the right mood, because it stuck in my head for a while afterward.

But not long thereafter, my head started making impromptu mashups, as it is wont to do. The chorus, as disappointing as it is, pretty clearly resembles, both lyrically and musically, the chorus to "Instant Karma", so that went in the mix. And for the verse, I was, for some reason, reminded of, um..."Barbie Girl". "What did you saywrite? I can hardly hearread you!" Okay, fine. "Barbie Girl". Running through my head, I've got "Shine On Me", "Instant Karma", and "Barbie Girl"! I don't have the technical chops to actually realize this mashup, and you should probably be thankful for that. But maybe you can try to imagine it, and get it stuck in your head, too.

Mr. Berio, I'll see your Samuel Beckett, Gustav Mahler, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and raise you Jim Henson, John Lennon, and Aqua.