"The poet, I said, either is nature or he will seek her. The former is the naïve, the latter the sentimental poet."—Friedrich Schiller

The music of Luciano Berio is anything but sentimental. There are no cheap appeals to feeling or sleeve-displays of heart. If anything, Berio seems to have an aversion to the intimacy of confession, admitting that "private motivations and colorations in music generally leave me cold..." The naïve utopia of expressive immediacy has no part in Berio's cosmology, which is nourished by perpetual mediation, dialogue upon dialogue: everything is open and interrelated, plugged into too many pathways and processes to speak the uninterrupted "I."

But if he's not sentimental, he is "sentimentalist," at least in Schiller's sense: Berio's music may not claim nature itself, but it seeks it, always from a point of slight remove, a gap in which a tremendous imagination generates itself. Hence when Berio calls a piece Naturale, he's already speaking at a distance from the word itself, as if—even though it means "naturally" in his own Italian—he were uttering it in a foreign tongue, or in quotations. Naturale is however a particularly fascinating example of Berio's sentimentalism, in that all its materials are directly taken from music's natural "equivalent," folk song. The work's forces seem themselves to represent musical nature in tiers. The solo viola which bears the work's main weight takes its material from Sicilian songs—works songs, love songs, street cries, and lullabies. All are adapted to the instrument with scrupulous detail and innumerable adjustments, the sentimentalist's subtle marks of authorship on an otherwise anonymous, collective surface. This "naturalized" arbiter is flanked by two different musical layers moving in opposite directions: on the one hand the ghostly, alienated sound-world of percussion, a tam-tam and marimba, which hover shadow-like around the viola's music—they offer the cool gaze of the modern (or post-modern) composer, spying his material from afar. And, on the other hand, we hear a totally unmediated music—excerpts from Berio's own field recordings of the Sicilian abbagnate-singer Celano in Palermo. These sounds come into the piece totally "uncooked" by artifice and technique, cultural bombs over the fence.

Together these three levels of music form a quite shocking hybrid, one of Berio's more motley creations. But their scrupulously engineered estrangement from each other engenders its own rich consequence—an extraordinarily original kind of tension occasioned by competing temperatures, between the self-possessed warmth of the viola, the percussion's chill, and the sheer heat of Celano's wild songs. To use the title of one of Berio's earlier works, these tiers are each "points on the curve to find," the curve being that of a parabola which eases infinitely towards the axis of the natural, without any intention of intersection. Berio himself admitted this inextricable knot of idealism and fatalism, perhaps the best mark of a Schillerian sentimentalist, when he spoke of a "utopian dream...I know...cannot be realized: I would like to create a unity between folk music and our music..."

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.