The 1960s were full of bad news: the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the KKK church bombing in Alabama; riots touched off by racial tension in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit; the deaths of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. There were also glimmers of hope: Camelot; the “I Have a Dream” speech; peace, love, and harmony in the hippie movement. The late 1960s however, were less balanced. When John Lennon, in 1967, wrote “I read the news today, oh boy,” he had no idea how appropriate his words would be for the next few years.
The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis supporting sanitation workers who had gone on strike. While he was on his hotel balcony, a single shot from a sniper’s bullet severed his spinal cord. More than one hundred cities erupted into violence, looting, and arson. King’s dream had become, in the words of poet Langston Hughes, “a dream deferred.”
The world was shocked at the assassination of one of the greatest advocates of nonviolent social change and the winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Musicians have been inspired to comment in song, so much so that there is now a 189-page catalog of works composed to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Italian-born composer Luciano Berio had been living and teaching in the United States for most of the decade when King was assassinated. Berio’s homage to King was a work for mezzo-soprano and five instruments, entitled “O King.” This composition reflected his own earlier tape music techniques of cutting apart text and putting it back together in unusual ways, methods also reminiscent of the tape music of Steve Reich. In “O King,” the only text is the word “O” and Martin Luther King’s name. Berio has the soprano start with just the vowels of King’s name, gradually add the consonants, and only toward the end combine them into words that we can recognize. Berio also created a version for orchestra and eight voices. The ending of that version takes great advantage of the eight voices, as all the syllables of the title are pronounced simultaneously to end the piece.
Shortly after completion of “O King,” Berio incorporated it into a larger work he was composing for Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The work, Sinfonia for Eight Voices and Orchestra, was originally four movements in length but was expanded to five a year later. It is now one of his best-known works. The eight voices are, of necessity, amplified. The orchestration requires a full complement of orchestral winds and strings, a wide variety of percussion instruments, even saxophones, piano, electric organ, and an electric keyboard with a harpsichord sound. If that weren’t enough, there is a third violin section required, and Berio provides a floor plan and instructions for microphone usage to ensure that balance is correct— timbre is important in Berio’s Sinfonia.
Berio, in his own notes, explains that Sinfonia is not to be compared to traditional symphonic form, but rather he is interested in the “etymological sense of ‘sounding together’ of eight voices and instruments or, in a larger sense, of ‘sounding together’ of different things, situations and meanings.” Although the work as a whole is fascinating, the third movement, in particular, warrants closer inspection, as it seems to encapsulate the entire history of twentieth- century music up to that point in time.
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LISTENING EXAMPLE 12: SINFONIA, MVT. III,
“IN RUHIG FLIESSENDER BEWEGUNG” (1968)—LUCIANO BERIO
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In his notes for Sinfonia, Berio calls the third movement “perhaps the most ‘experimental’ music I have ever written” and explains that he considers it “a tribute” to the early twentieth-century composer Gustav Mahler, whose music “seems to bear the weight of the entire history of music of the last two centuries.” Berio uses the third movement (Scherzo) of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) as a framework for a series of fragments and quotes of both music and text. As Berio describes it, the Mahler both frames and generates music of other composers, “Bach to Schoenberg, from Brahms to Strauss, from Beethoven to Stravinsky, from Berg to Webern, to Boulez, to Pousseur, to myself and others.” Other composers quoted include Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, and Stockhausen. Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and his Symphony No. 2 will, at times, “sound together.” Sometimes quotes are overlaid on top of Mahler’s Scherzo, at other points the quotes are obscured by the Scherzo. At still other points, the Mahler seems to disappear altogether, even though it is still running in the background, like “a river flowing through a constantly changing landscape, sometimes going underground and emerging in another altogether different place.” The title of Berio’s movement, “In ruhig fliessender bewegung” (in calm flowing motion) comes from the tempo marking of the Scherzo, and Berio specifies that his movement should be in the tempo of Mahler’s movement. In keeping with the “flowing” character of Berio’s movement and the idea of the river flowing through the piece, many of the musical and textual quotes relate to water.
In addition to the framework of the Mahler Scherzo and the orchestral references to other music of the twentieth century and earlier, the texts used also bear mentioning. Most of the texts that Berio selected are from the 1953 novel The Unnamable by the Irish-born avant-garde author, Samuel Beckett. Beckett is best known for his 1952 play Waiting for Godot, and shortly after the premiere of Sinfonia, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michael Hicks, in his study of the relationship between the text and the music in this movement of Berio’s Sinfonia, calls it a “book turned into music.” Like Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony, Beckett’s novel addresses issues of the artist exploring his own mortality. The Scherzo is based on an earlier work of Mahler, which in turn quotes pre-existing folk music. Beckett’s main character is an artist unable to find his own identity and forced to express himself only by quoting others. It is appropriate, then, that Sinfonia is replete with musical and textual quotations.
In addition to Beckett’s novel, Berio quotes conversations with some of his friends and family members, students at Harvard, and even graffiti he saw during the French riots in Paris earlier that year. In a humorous touch, near the end of the movement, Berio has the first tenor, who is acting as a narrator, introduce the other vocalists and thank the conductor by name. The relationship of the text to the music is complex and fascinating. The depth of the relationships is so intricate that an entire book has been dedicated to the subject: Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. Adding to the complexity of the text is the fact that three different languages are used: French, German, and English. Assembling all these textual and musical quotes is a lot like the layers and fragments of a tape composition, a process with which Berio was already quite familiar. With Mahler’s tonal composition as the framework, though, the end result is surprisingly tonal and not hugely dissonant. Berio makes sure that the sounds he overlays “sound good together” and are not just a series of random dissonances.
The performance on the recording included on your USAD Music CD is Berio himself, conducting the New York Philharmonic at the premiere. The vocalists are the members of the Swingle Singers, a group formed and directed by Ward Swingle, who sings second tenor in the group. The recording we will hear on the USAD CD will consist of the first five minutes of this approximately twelve-minute movement and is remarkable not only as a composition, but also as a performance. The recording won Berio and the Swingle Singers the 1969 Grammy award for Best Choral Performance, Classical.
Berio’s Sinfonia, with its homage to Martin Luther King Jr. in the second movement, and its summary of twentieth- century music in the third, is one of the most significant classical compositions in the 1960s, if not in the entire second half of the century.
WHO KILLED THE KENNEDYS?
When incumbent President Lyndon Johnson declared his intention not to pursue re-election, this left a vacancy for a new leader in the Democratic Party. With the memory of the late John F. Kennedy fresh in voters’ minds, it was not a surprise that Robert Kennedy was soon at the top of the list to become President in 1969. Many Americans imagined a new Camelot, a rebirth of the hope that had been associated with the presidency of Robert’s older brother. It was not to be. On June 5, 1968, a Jordanian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, upset by Kennedy’s stance on Israel, assassinated the candidate. America was once again plunged into sorrow and self-doubt by an assassin’s bullet.
Musicians responded with increasing political engagement. The Rascals, whose previous hits had been love songs, had a number one hit with “People Got to Be Free,” their response to the King and Kennedy assassinations. Dion, probably best known for his 1961 hit, “Runaround Sue,” sang “Abraham, Martin, and John.” At first the song sounds like it is about Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., but a fourth verse asks “Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby? Can you tell me where he’s gone? I thought I saw him walkin’, Up over the hill, With Abraham, Martin, and John.”
Although it can hardly be called a tribute, the Rolling Stones mention the assassinations of the Kennedys in their 1968 recording, “Sympathy for the Devil.” With some of the most intellectual lyrics used by the Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” tells the story of the Devil in first person. The Devil tells about all the havoc he has wreaked, from the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, to the Russian Revolution, World War II, and shouts “Who killed the Kennedys?” He answers his own question, explaining that, “after all, it was you and me.” “Sympathy for the Devil” was a timely song for troubled, turbulent times.