"...with Mozart and Schubert...the pre-established forms of [poetry] coincided with music in a miraculous fashion...music and poetry spoke the same language..."—Berio

Along with their sheer spectacle and originality of language, Luciano Berio's massive collection of Sequenzas for solo instruments offer a trope on an otherwise hardly noticeable distinction: rather than music being "sent through" the instrument—the oboe or guitar receiving a bundle of Berio's notes and negotiating their precarious passage through tube or fingerboard—the instrument is itself sent through the music. Berio somehow manages to suggest that the score, wild and manifold as it is, is nonetheless more permanent than the instrument that executes it; the instrument is in turn an elastic, mutating text. In essence, the Sequenzas are as much about their instruments as on their instruments.

Works such as the small 1983 score to Lied suggest that this is Berio's main method with solo works in general. Dedicated to clarinetist Eduardo de Benedetti (who premiered it in Genoa that year), the piece is in many ways a miniature version of the massive clarinet Sequenza IXa from three years earlier. Like that work, it feels less built or composed than woven or plaited together. Likewise, it also makes the clarinet into a stage on which to perform its own collective memory; though, while the Sequenza was vividly evocative (of Brahms as of Klezmer and perhaps even the ancient shofar), Lied is more of a sketch, its physiognomy more abstract. And through its title, surely a nod to the nineteenth-century tradition of German art song, Berio also seems to suggest that Lied is an endeavor in finding language where there are no words, in inhabiting that brief and "miraculous" union between music and poetry whichBerio finds in Schubert's lieder.

In its construction, Lied is a game of melodic expansions and contractions, of traversing and re-traversing identical passages in perpetually new and subtle re-figurations. It has two generators of material, two nuclei: the first is the more standard lyric impulse, the slow unfolding breath; the second is a contrasting staccato declamatory motif. The music language is not tonal, atonal, or serial; in its subtle game of repetition and non-repetition, it makes one indifferent to those distinctions. Pitches don't seem to arise from nowhere, or from a pre-established scheme (like nineteenth-century tonal harmony, or from Schoenbergian dodecaphony). Instead, they seem to come from the linguistic impulses latent in the instrument, its inimitable proximity to the breath that makes it sound, and to the words the mouth might pronounce were it not blowing into a reed.

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