"Shall I tell you what my theatrical ideal is? Well, it's to take two simple and banal forms of behavior...and put them on stage in such a way that they transform one another and produce by morphogenesis a third form of behavior: we don't know what this is because we've never seen it before..."—Berio

At some level, good artistic work does what good religion does: it builds on a basic creative impulse. It affords a moment of apparition, or transubstantiation—the revelation of some mystery or making-into-body of some spirit—which fail all accounts but that of the miraculous, at least for a moment. Luciano Berio, for instance, is hardly a religious composer; but he's long been preoccupied by the art of engendering impossible objects, and from the early '70s on has developed a whole genre of piece which make an almost ritualistic spectacle of virtuosic self-generation. Works like Bewegung, Still, and Eindrücke all proceed with a ceremonial rigor, and through an incantational process produce their immediate future from their immediate past. All instrumental works of an interior intensity, they operate with the convicted power of magic spells and the assuredness of some imaginary chemical reaction. If "morphogenesis" is Berio's theatrical ideal, these concert-pieces are the consummate blueprint, Berio's prelude-to-the-ideal-theater.

In this tradition of Berio-works, "Points on the Curve to Find..." is perhaps the most demonic, in the literal sense: some febrile spirit's got hold of these forces (a solo piano and 22 instruments), and is rattling them into an almost impossible mode of action. The 11-minute score is not a little like some vortex in its construction, or perhaps something like a black hole: its tremendous and unflagging force and speed swallow material at such a rate that it releases a kind of shockwave-energy. Specifically, the piano is the engine, and with unremittingly fertility it continually regenerates a cycle of ten distinct pitches, hovering on two of them at a time in quick oscillation; with each of these hoverings, it seems to transmit those tones to single members of the ensemble, who elaborate and extend those tones. The piano repeats its cycle, adding a tone to the end and shaving one off the beginning, and the ensemble accrues its pitches into rapidly shifting harmonies. The game of auto-genesis which ensues carries a paradoxical fusion of anarchy and control about it: the music feels as if it's spinning on an axis about to snap, but somehow it stays wedded to its phantom vault, inexhaustibly pulling something from nothing.

What's perhaps most fascinating about "Points...," however, is how its tunnel vision and precipitous timewards plunge manages, by the end, to generate a sense of infinite expanse. The quality of "what is there" in this music uncannily suggests, even more so, "what is not there." And as the title itself suggests, this music materializes in the imagination an image of some great circle, of which all this feverish activity is but an arc, some modest fragment of a vast circular periphery.

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