"Intimately, as if speaking..." is the performance direction to Les mots. This notion of the speaking instrument is omnipresent in Luciano Berio's output. He seems to find in the gap between voice and vocalizing mechanism pathos enough to fuel his entire aesthetic; works like his massive Coro even imagine radical new ways to pair the two forces, coupling each member of a 40-person orchestra with one singer in a 40-person choir. On the other hand, works like Requies derive a tremendous emotional power from keeping the voice tantalizingly out of reach, jutting beneath the surface of a purely instrumental music that painstakingly imitates that voice.

The small solo cello work Les mots sont allés provides an eloquent musical epigraph for this side of Berio's temperament. Its title literally means "The words are gone...," and with his tongue perhaps tucked in his cheek, Berio instructs the performer to make up for this mysteriously missing text by playing "as if speaking." That absent verse might be tied up with the work's dedication: it was one of a number of solo cello pieces written in 1979 for new music conductor, patron, and saint Paul Sacher, and like many other works from the set, actually takes the letters of Sacher's name and maps them to the pitches they denote in German (E flat, A, C, B, E natural). Interestingly, this technique reached its height before the twentieth century in the works of Robert Schumann, a kindred spirit of Berio's in his indefatigable effort to make instruments speak.

So, following a constructive principle frequent in Berio's music, the entire material for Les mots comes from this opening Sacher motto; the ensuing piece becomes less a linear progression or development than a kind of elegantly revolving mobile in sound, gradually revealing its complete physiognomy through subtle, air-blown shifts in its individual modules. Already after the first statement of the pitches, Berio begins to displace tones up or down an octave, and subsequently he begins to fiddle with the articulation, phrasing, and speed; the effect, after such a speech-like invitation in the first bar, is not unlike the quickening distortion of a recognizable image through digital manipulation. This "image" is sent finally through a gauntlet of gunning repetitions on single notes, after which the opening lyricism returns, now collapsed on itself into double-stop dyads. In the last bars, the return of the opening Sacher theme is voiced in its original configuration, only to pause cryptically on its opening tritone, now played as a single unit. Among other things, Les mots sont allés is a humble example of Berio's expressive slingshot technique, whereby the normal, even quotidian, is tested in its elasticity, pulled this way and that to the point of unrecognizability only to snap back into its natural nook just as it was beginning to seduce the listener with new images.

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