"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."—Archilochus

It's pretty hard to figure out whether Luciano Berio is a fox or a hedgehog. On the one hand, Berio is completely nourished by an aesthetic of "many things": his polyvalence and multiplicity of his imaginations are matched only by a Faustian desire to embrace a massive reservoir of techniques, traditions, styles, and mediums. But, simultaneously, he seems so consistent in this impulse that it almost becomes his one trick—the "one big thing" of perpetually juxtaposing: intellectual and sensual worlds which create brilliant explosions when fused.

In a work like Berio's relatively early score for flute and 14 instruments, Serenata I (1957), the composer plays out quite a taut game between his fox and hedgehog. On the one hand, the work is one of Berio's formative essays in serialism: it was composed less than a year after Berio began attending the Darmstadt summer courses (serialism's fertile crescent), and was dedicated to Stockhausen and premiered by Boulez. But on the other hand, the piece is a concertante work—an old-fashioned no-no in the serial world of the '50s; what's more, the solo flute at the work's center has some positively ebullient music to play, full of arabesques and coloratura-flourishes.

In many ways the serial experience was the ultimate overturning of a metaphor—the metaphor of voice, and with it breath and melos—which had governed Western music since the Greeks. To the consummate Western ideal of line and sequence, serial techniques offered a flip side: music as an architectural space, a set of dimensions in flux, or hard objects in perpetual reconfiguration; at its height, serialism tended to view the musical work as tableau, or map, or labyrinth, its perimeters and insides taken in as a whole by the ear's eye.

To a large degree these very aspects were what Berio found so attractive about serial techniques: his impulse to think the whole, to perpetually transform and "revolve" his material, to superimpose layer upon layer of sonic "information," and especially to employ all manner of performance direction with great care. And indeed, Serenata I is on the first level a fine serial score: it is meticulously detailed, thought through with lucid pointillism and parameters, kept in unremitting transformation—quintessential fox-music. But Berio pops this balloon by layering on this music another discourse, much closer to a kind of wordless operatic scena, with the flute as lyrico-dramatic protagonist: the vocal metaphor is breathed back in.

Perhaps the most striking feat of a work like Serenata I is Berio's ability to deconstruct the fence separating the fox from the hedgehog. He manages to both exploit the rewards of serialism—which thought of itself as the fox of musical techniques par excellence—and show its obsessive, hedgehog-like limitations. And Berio reveals these limitations by inviting into the score that very force—the beaming lyric line, the voice which composes an "I"—which strict serialism would otherwise strive to keep out.

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