Chemins IV (author's note)

Chemins IV
on Sequenza VII
for oboe and eleven strings (1975)

The best way to analyse and comment on a musical work is to write another one using materials from the original work: a creative exploration of a composition is at the same time an analysis, a commentary and an extension of the original. The most profitable commentary on a symphony or an opera has always been another symphony or another opera. This is why my Chemins, where I quote, translate, expand and transcribe my Sequenzas for solo instrument, are also the Sequenzas’ best analyses. They are a series of specific commentaries which include, almost intact, the object and subject of the commentary. The Chemins are not the displacement of an objet trouvé into a different context or the orchestral “dressing up” of a solo piece (the original Sequenza), but rather a commentary organically tied to it and generated by it.
Why this insistence on elaborating and transforming again the same material? It is, maybe, a tribute to the belief that a thing done is never finished. Even the “completed” work is the ritual and the commentary of something which preceded it, of something which will follow it, as a question that does not provoke an answer but a commentary, and another question...

Chemins IV, for oboe and eleven strings, can be listened to as a commentary to my Sequenza VII for oboe (1969), a commentary that amplifies and develops certain harmonic aspects of the original Sequenza. The Sequenza becomes in fact the generator of new instrumental lines, which in turn make explicit its latent polyphony around a pivot - an ever-present B - that puts into perspective all the subsequent harmonic transformations. Like a reverberating chamber, the development of Chemins IV mirrors and shatters the elements of Sequenza VII, sometimes receiving their anticipated echo in such a way that for the listener the oboe part seems generated by the eleven strings.

Luciano Berio

Note d'autore: informazioni generali | Author's note: general info