One of Luciano Berio's most fruitful sources of inspiration was his long collaboration with soprano Cathy Berberian (1925 - 83), who was the composer's wife as well as a primary exponent of his work throughout the 1950s. Although Berio and Berberian divorced in the mid-1960s, their musical collaboration continued into the 1970s.

Sequenza III (1966) is a piece very much of its era, paralleling other experiments in vocal music and textual meaning such as Cage's Aria (1958) and Ligeti's Aventures (1966). Inspired by Berberian's extraordinary vocal prowess, Berio set out in Sequenza III to create a catalog of vocal gestures that encompassed the gamut of effects and techniques. Sequenza III variously requires the performer to mutter under the breath, laugh, and sing in the conventional manner. The "text" consists of vocatives of little semantic value by Markus Kutter; meaning instead emerges via the soprano's evocation of particular expressive formulas: surprise, frustration, humor.

Sequenza III was premiered in a 1966 broadcast from Radio Bremen.

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