Luciano Berio
Sinfonia

In that long and weary conversation I will have forever, where I ask myself if I belong more to academic or pop music, I find the “modernist” stuff I studied and loved so much at Uni acts as a grateful gap between the different discourses…where I find myself having been too concerned with enjoying luscious tunes and arrangements or looking for a little more depth – I am not alone in this and being boomeranged in my head from one to the other suits me, despite growing maturing realisations that binary is no way forward. I sang a Stockhausen song cycle with Paul, he lent me a CD of Stimmung – I remembered well those avant-garde bits of Beatlemusic I had loved and tried to emulate as a teenager (microphone out of the window on fireworks night) and somehow in my first year at University I found myself in a avant-garde vocal ensemble. I set some choice bits of Macbeth (with varying success, although it led me to a still-held interest in sign-language), and then a few of us were asked to be the singers in a University performance of Sinfonia. Roger Marsh gave us all access to the enormous, huge A2 score and a CD.

The University department had a listening room, and one day in March I went with the CD and the score to put the headphones on and try to work out what I would be singing. I was the second alto out of eight singers and only just getting to grips with new methods of notation demanded by this scary music I was finding; Cage, Maxwell Davies, Marsh himself…I was going through big personal changes at the time anyway and this piece underlined how far I was coming and changing and learning…

The third movement always the most glorious, family members didn’t understand or appreciate it, friends at the time didn’t get it either, but the singers were all hideously involved and full of it – I have memories of Roger Marsh leading vocal rehearsal with the eight of us and managing to perform each of the parts. The mixture of singing, speech, bizarre noises and grunts…frightening snippets of texts (somewhere in the waiting you never realised you were waiting all alone)…and that amazing part where the strings play col legno, the singers all whisper a solfeggio part…the sea-sick feeling of it – the most tuneful of all your Romantic fudge suddenly clashing with parts of Beckett, the 1968 Parisian student slogans, Levi Strauss (who I still haven’t read but keep encountering the book in question, le Crut et le cruit in other texts…I tried The Unnameable – or at least a part of it in France, cribbed over Dan’s shoulder – he was reading that while I was finishing Finnegan’s Wake – if this noise would stop there would be nothing more to say).

The first movement is unsettling, the second attempting a stretch of calm…the words “Martin Luther King” stretched out almost unbearably across bars and bars and voices and voices (they don’t know who they are either – somewhere I have a recording of this, me singing, pointing, laughing and weeping along with Sarah, Kerry, Rachel, Paul, Hugo, Steve and…I fail to remember the other bass singer’s voice…but somewhere in the noise I scream out “Say it again – LOUDER!”) – the fourth, weakly, the fifth, long and unsettling piano solo…scribed in my memory for its impossible time signatures…Roger Marsh (again) led a composition module I took part in, and for a never-performed song-cycle I wrote I remember him instructing the drummer that the rhythms I wanted were something feel rather than intellectualise – funny that this seemed the only way through this piece…to intellectualise Sinfonia is a deeply troubling experience (all of this can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger or lower the price of bread can’t erase solitude or dull the tread outside my door, but yes it’s true, there’s no need to laugh, to point…if tomorrow we hear “another piece” made the tulips grow in my garden or altered the flow of ocean currents, we must believe it’s true) – it seems that, maybe to people outside the cocoon of academic music, it must seem overly-intellectualised, in itself, part of itself. Perhaps it is the emotional connection with such music that makes it possible is the more difficult to grasp – it is a strange emotional connection based as it is, initially, in mechanics. How do you become emotionally attached to a series of signals? And yet we do – although the ice-pick-nature of classical music has long held me in place, it is an emotional reaction nonetheless. Architecture = frozen music etc.

The fifth movement, I remember now, is made of elements, memories and ghosts of the other movements. Kate Bush does a similar thing on (maybe) my favourite song of hers ever…although it’s not a song…the part of Hounds of Love which constitutes a heavily-sedated tour of the album thus far and yet to come. The ending of the third movement has always frightened me of being a memory from an early nightmare…I remember stories of long-legged, hairy monsters, long arms, walking across a desert landscape towards a camp-fire where our heroes or protagonists are settling down for what they think will be a quiet night. My nightmares and fears have always focused around the concurrence of a natural, elemental disaster and the mistaken belief of a quiet night safe from such harm.