Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio OMRI (24 October 1925 – 27 May 2003) was an Italian composer noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia and his series of virtuosic solo pieces titled Sequenza), and for his pioneering work in electronic music. His early work was influenced by Igor Stravinsky and experiments with serial and electronic techniques, while his later works explore indeterminacy and the use of spoken texts as the basic material for composition.

Berio was born in Oneglia (now part of Imperia), on the Ligurian coast of Italy on 24 October 1925. He was taught piano by his father and grandfather, who were both organists. During World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day, he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked and spent three months in a military hospital.

After the war, unable to continue studying the piano because of his injured hand, he instead focused on composition. He studied at the Milan Conservatory, counterpoint with Giulio Cesare Paribeni and from 1948 composition with Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He was exposed to the music of Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School. In 1947, he had the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano. Berio made a living at this time by conducting at small opera houses and accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian who studied for a scholarship; they married in 1950, shortly after graduating; they divorced in 1964. Berio wrote a number of pieces that exploited her distinctive voice.

In 1951, Berio went to the United States to study with Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood, from whom he gained an interest in serialism. From 1954 he attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. He became interested in electronic music. He worked for the broadcaster RAI in Milan from 1953 to 1960, where he co-founded, with Bruno Maderna, the Studio di fonologia musicale in 1955, which became one of the most important studios for electronic music in Europe. He invited a number of significant composers to work there, among them Henri Pousseur and John Cage. He produced an electronic music periodical, Incontri Musicali, from 1956 to 1960 which was connected to a concert series of the same name.

In 1960 Berio returned to Tanglewood, this time as Composer in Residence, and in 1962, on an invitation from Darius Milhaud, took a teaching post at Mills College in Oakland, California. From 1960 to 1962, Berio also taught at the Dartington International Summer School. He became a resident of the United States in 1963. In 1965, he began to teach at the Juilliard School, and there he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to performances of contemporary music. In 1966, he married the noted philosopher of science Susan Oyama. They divorced in 1972. His students included Louis Andriessen, Noah Creshevsky, Steven Gellman, Dina Koston, Steve Reich, Luca Francesconi, Giulio Castagnoli, Flavio Emilio Scogna, William Schimmel and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead.

All this time, Berio had been steadily composing and building a reputation, winning the Prix Italia in 1966 for Laborintus II, a work for voices, instruments and tape with text by Edoardo Sanguineti that was commissioned by the French Television to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's birth. His reputation was strengthened when his Sinfonia was premiered in 1968. In 1972, Berio returned to Italy. From 1974 to 1980, he was the director of the electro-acoustic division of IRCAM in Paris. He married the musicologist Talia Pecker in 1977.

In 1987, he opened Tempo Reale, a centre for musical research and production based in Florence. In 1988, he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London. The following year, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. The same year, he became Distinguished Composer in Residence at Harvard University, remaining there until 2000. In 1993–94, he gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, later published as Remembering the Future. In 2000, he became Presidente and Sovrintendente at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Berio was active as a conductor and continued to compose to the end of his life.

Berio and Cathy Berberian had a daughter, he and Susan Oyama had a son and a daughter, and he and Talia Pecker had two sons.