Sequenza IXb by Luciano Berio (Derek Granger, saxophone)
Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia, Italy in 1925. His father and grandfather, both organists and composers, gave him his musical start as a pianist. Berio was conscripted into the army during WWII, where he injured his hand, leading to his eventual turn to composition after the war. Through his studies with Dallapiccola, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, among others, Berio became interested in serialism and electronic music. His award-winning compositional output includes music for orchestra, voices, stage works, electro acoustic works, transcriptions of his and others’ works, and the virtuosic Sequenze. Berio passed away in 2003.
The Sequenze are a collection of 14 solo works, composed over 38 years. Each work tests and exploits the technical and acoustical limits of the instrument or voice it was written for. The Sequenze are virtuosic, though sheer virtuosity was not their aim. Berio stated that the ideal interpreter of this music bears “...above all, a virtuosity of knowledge,” implying that the technical difficulty exists to serve the musical structure of the works. The Sequenza IXb is Berio’s own transcription of Sequenza IX, written for clarinet in 1980. He says of the work: “Sequenza IX...is essentially a long melody implying - like almost every melody - redundancy, symmetries, transformations and returns. Sequenza IX is also a “sequence” of instrumental gestures developing a constant transformation between two different harmonic fields: a seven-note one (F sharp, C, C sharp, E, G, B flat and B natural) appearing always in the same register, and a five-note one appearing in ever-different registers. The latter penetrates, modifies and comments on the harmonic functions of the first seven-note field.” (notes by Derek Granger)
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