"Modernism has always entailed a multiplicity of perspectives."—Berio

Nineteenth-century music's notions of linear development and narrative progression have sustained endless deconstruction under Berio's pen: he's stewed simple chronological time into a vortex again and again, and has astonished listeners with the sheer number of paths his imagination has found to do so.

The short 1964 keyboard work Rounds—originally written for harpsichord, but later arranged for piano—is a particularly spectacular endeavor in time travel. Its actual materials are very similar to those that would be used a year or so later in the piano Sequenza (IV); Berio plays a game of run-and-tag with chords and solo lines, often divided into bursts of activity by long-held notes or chords. Like the early Sequenzas, it was also originally written in proportional notation, to allow the performer more rhythmic freedom, and perhaps to highlight the mobile sensibility of the work, its manner of internally rearranging its components and simultaneously covering the same ground—movement without motion, so to speak.

This periodic pausing over chords which, if not quite cadences, are still resting points of a sort—like an Alexander Calder mobile, the figures revolve and reconfigure with each variable breeze or gust, and settle until the next one. A strangely humble evocation of the infinite materializes, something like the "multiplicity of perspectives" essential to Berio's form of modernism: this fluid tendency to self-transform is unending, the four-minute work is only a modest fragment of some more enduring music.

But Berio embeds this invocation into the score's execution to a far greater degree: the work's second of three pages is actually the first page physically turned upside-down. It's quite a feat, worked out with the sophisticated intensity of a Bach, but whipped off with the facile flair of a Mozart (Rounds seems to nod to both composers, each having written their own right side-up/upside-down canons). When the first section of Rounds is played again, Berio asks the pianist to execute the music at a slightly faster tempo—by most standards a pretty weird direction. But by then it's clear that Berio's less concerned about the "manipulation of the material" than about manipulating the mind that perceives the material—he's courting and coaxing the ear as much as the music, and his genius resides in part in finding an utterly new way to literally "move" the listener.

© All Music Guide