A few words for a woman to sing:

the extended vocal repertoire of Cathy Berberian

A paper presented at the University of Newcastle, 2004

© Janet K Halfyard (2004)

The history of music has traditionally been the history of composers: this was only natural in a world without recording technology, where what was preserved of music was the composer’s score rather than the performance, but even in the era of recording, while popular music is forming itself into a history of performers, art music is only slowly beginning to interest itself in performances as sites of investigation as interesting to music as the study of compositions. Given our historical fixation on composers and scores, there is always a danger that we will lose sight of the creative contributions made to compositional processes by performers. Cathy Berberian’s reputation is inextricably linked to and somewhat overshadowed by that of Luciano Berio. What I will be presenting today is a brief overview of Berberian’s biography and repertoire, a discussion of her work with Berio in the studio di fonologia, an examination of her solo repertoire in the concert hall and in recordings, and finally a look at her own compositions, and in particular her famous contribution to the repertoire, Stripsody. Much of what I’ll be discussing will be looking at processes of collaboration in the work she did with other composers, and the fascinating thing about Stripsody is that it was also a collaboration in which the other contributor has been overshadowed by Berberian even more comprehensively that Berberian herself has been overshadowed by Berio.

Career Overview

Cathy Berberian was an American mezzo soprano of Armenian extraction, born in Massachussetts in 1928, who is probably best known for being Luciano Berio’s first wife and the avant-garde vocalist of choice of the post World War II generation, in much the same way that David Tudor was their avant-garde pianist of choice. It would be an exaggeration to say that Berberian invented extended vocal technique, but she was profoundly influential in making it part of the compositional vocabulary of European and American composers from 1958 onwards. There are some precedents of extended technique before this: the idea of vocalism in extremis is associated particularly with female singers in 19^th century opera; Schoenberg’s female reciter in Pierrot Lunaire is one of the first examples of a vocal performer who does not actually sing in 20^th century Western music, contemporary to the Italian Futurists experiments with sound poetry; and Boulez’s le visage nuptial is probably the earliest extended vocal piece of the post war period, completed in 1947. The vocal performers in this are again all female, both soloists and chorus; and the chorus uses speech, crying, whispering and spoken glissandi. However, after 1958, extended vocal technique became strongly associated with Berberian as the performer of a repertoire created around her particular talents.

Berberian met Berio in 1950, when she was in her early twenties. She had previously studied at the universities of Columbia and New York, taking courses in mime, writing and opera, and she also studied Spanish and Indian Classical dance. She sang a repertoire of folk songs with an Armenian dance group in New York, before moving to Italy to study singing at the Milan Conservatorio. Berio, also in his early twenties and a student at the Conservatorio, was earning at least part of his living as an accompanist, which is how they met, and they married a few months later.

Berio starting composing for and with her practically from the moment they met. Their first work was a collaboration, Opus Number Zoo (1950-51), with music by Berio and a text by Berberian. El mar la mar and the Quattro Canzoni Populari followed in 1952, and then one of the best known of Berio’s early works, Chamber Music in 1953, a setting of poems by James Joyce. These are in no way extended vocal repertoire: Opus Number Zoo is for a reciter rather than a singer, but Chamber Music, while clearly modern in its use of a serial note row, is quite conventional in terms of vocal technique and production.

Berberian took a break from singing after the first performance of Chamber Music in 1953, following the birth of their daughter Christina, but she resumed her career in 1957, both in terms of her work as a singer and simultaneously her collaboration with Berio. Her career as a singer of Monteverdi and as a concert singer ran in parallel with her work with composers including Berio, Busotti, Cage, Henze, Maderna, Pousseur, and even Stravinsky and William Walton, for almost 30 years, before her death in 1983, when she was still only in her mid 50s.

Berberian’s voice

The least well known aspect of Berberian’s career these days is the work she did with any composer other than Berio, and any repertoire she sang outside the 20^th century avant-garde, but her repertoire was actually very broad. She made several recordings of works by Monteverdi, including L’Orfeo with Nicholas Harnencourt, but although she sang in many of the world’s major opera houses, she saw herself much more as a concert singer than an opera singer, describing her voice as being “chamber-sized”. Her recital programmes typically included works by Debussy and Satie, songs by Villa Lobos and Offenbach, by Purcell and Monteverdi.. Alongside this she also included her repertoire of Armenian songs and also Stravinsky’s Russian folksong arrangements, and folk and popular music was also represented in her repertoire by various sets of arrangements by Berio: the collection of Folk Songs made in 1964, three songs by Kurt Weill, and three Beatles songs as tongue in cheek art music pastiches.

One thing that comes out very clearly from everything written about her, by her, and the recordings of her performances is that she was a very good actress with a great sense of comic timing, a willingness to poke fun at herself and the whole business of singing –a highlight of many of her recitals was a rendition of “Nymphs and Shepherds” in her impression of Florence Foster Jenkins, the wealthy American socialite who financed her own astonishingly bad performing and recording career in the early 20^th century.

It is perhaps this general lack of inhibition in Berberian’s character that brought about her unparalleled career as the darling of the Darmstadt set. She was quite fearless as a singer: speaking as a singer myself, I am very familiar with standard singer’s paranoia about doing anything which might damage the voice. You have to sing ‘properly’ or you risk doing something dreadful and irrevocable to your larynx. The problem is that ‘properly’ tends to be translated as ‘in one particular way’ with the result that many classical singers operate with a fairly restricted timbral palette, and in terms of classical practice, they are expected to do so. The standard concert repertoire of 18^th and 19^th century arias, lieder and chansons is a very specialized repertoire, that demands a very specialized approach.

One of the significantly different aspects of Berberian as a singer—particularly as a singer in 1958 when hardly any extended vocal repertoire existed—was the extent to which she specialized in not specializing. It would have been very easy for her, like most singers, to settle into a particular repertoire, a particular way of singing and performing, but perhaps it is her refusal to do this which Berio was referring to when he said, in one of his interviews with Rossana Dalmonte that “anyone worth calling a virtuoso these days has to be a musician capable of moving within a broad historical perspective and of resolving the tension between the creativity of yesterday and today. My own Sequenzas are always written with this sort of interpreter in mind, whose virtuosity is, above all, a virtuosity of knowledge. (I’ve got no interest in, or patience for, those who ‘specialize’ in contemporary music).”

Berberian used her voice in a way that I’m sure many singer teachers were and still would be quite horrified by: she wasn’t scared of using her full chest voice, both in her lower register and quite high up, if she felt the repertoire demanded it. The range of vocal colours she uses, often created by how she shifts between and blends elements of her chest and head voice, leaves her voice sometimes almost unrecognisable as the same singer. (Compare, for example, her deep, chest-voiced performance of Stravinsky’s “Chanson de l’ours” from the Three Russian Folk Songs with her versions of Weill’s Song of Sexual Slavery and Berio’s arrangement of the Azerbaijan Love Song from the Folk Songs.)

It was exactly this kind of vocal variety that Berio explored when he variously wrote and arranged the Folk Songs for her in 1964. These songs started out as Three Popular Songs in 1946, before they met, three anonymous folk songs from Genoa and Sicily that Berio recomposed and arranged. In 1952, he added Avendo gran disio, his setting of a text by the thirteenth century Italian poet, Jacopo da Lentini, dedicated to Berberian and stylistically reflecting their mutual love of Monteverdi, and as a result the three popular songs became four popular songs. Berberian frequently performed Avendo gran disio as an independent number after 1964, which is when Berio took La donna ideale and Ballo and incorporated them into the Folk Songs, all of which are arrangements – or transcriptions, to use Berio’s preferred word – of existing songs to greater or lesser extents.

However, Berberian’s influence in the collection is clear. Loosin yelav is an Armenian song that Berberian introduced him to; the Azerbijan love song was one that she found on a Russian 78 and learnt phonetically. The two American songs reflect the American side of her background and two of the French ones come from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, again repertoire that Berberian was already familiar with. In the context of a quite different piece, Sequenza III, Berio said that he wrote the piece not just for her, but about her; and this is a recurrent idea in the music written for Berberian, not just by Berio but by others, that the compositions draw on Cathy Berberian herself, as a person and personality with a cultural and musical history of her own. Almost all the songs included in Berio’s Folk Songs have clear cultural, musical and personal connections to Berberian herself as an American Armenian singer whose repertoire included classical and traditional material.

The Studio di Fonologia

However, the place that Berberian’s avant-garde career really began was nowhere near the concert hall, but in the Milan based Studio di Fonologia.

The importance of Berio and Berberian’s experiments in the studio cannot be under-estimated in the development of extended vocal technique as a genre, and in fact, studio experimentation has an important role in the development of extended techniques in general, vocal and instrumental.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the expansion of composition into electronic media transformed the composer’s ability to write timbrally. In pre-twentieth century composition, timbre, which can only be notated or indicated in fairly limited ways in conventional notation has not had the same flexibility or structural importance from a compositional point of view. However, when composers started working in the first electroacoustic studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it became rapidly apparent that timbre was perhaps the single most malleable and exciting area for sonic exploration.

It is apparent from the work of several early electroacoustic composers that the new compositional interest in timbre in the studio preceded a new compositional interest in timbre in acoustic instrumental and vocal writing. John Cage was clearly ahead of his time - his first prepared piano pieces date from 1938 - but for composers including Berio, Stockhausen and Ligeti, the use of extended techniques in their compositions, particularly with regard to the voice, is directly preceded by their first studio compositions.

It is perhaps also significant that some of the most famous early pieces of electroacoustic music use the voice as a primary sound source, as if trying to reintroduce the human into this apparently performerless musical medium. These include Schaeffer and Henry’s collaboration Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50), Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge (1956), Berio’s Thema: omaggio a Joyce (1958) and Visage (1961), Maderna’s Dimensioni II (1960), Nono’s La Fabbrica Illuminata (1964) and Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966); while Ligeti’s Artikulation (1958) is a purely electronic piece that nonetheless seeks to imitate vocal gestures.

There are two principal pieces that Berberian made in the studio with Berio, Thema (1958) and Visage (1961), although she also worked with the other composers working and visiting there, who included Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Franco Donatoni and Luigi Nono. Berio has described Berberian’s voice (by which one hopes he actually meant Berberian as a creative artist in her own right as well) as being almost a second studio di fonolgia from him, allowing him to explore all the noises and incidental yet fundamentally characterizing aspects of everyday vocal behaviour that are conventionally eliminated from the classical singing voice. Berio was not the only one to see Berberian herself almost as a piece of wonderful equipment for the studio boys to experiment with. Marino Zuccheri, the principal technician of the Studio has said that from 1957, the studio entered a golden period, and one aspect of that was “the presence of Cathy Berberian and her voice which had become the ‘tenth oscillator’ of the studio,” the studio having recently acquired nine oscillators.

This is one of the areas where the performer as creative artist potentially gets written out of history. Underlying much of the writing for and representation of women in opera and early twentieth century music theatre is the Western cultural identification of woman with nature and man with spirit. This identification has particular significance for the vocabulary of electroacoustic music and its uses of the female voice. The female is located in the body, in physical reality and her voice represents this reality, concretely audible, a tangible presence in the intangible realm of musical sound. The male presence, spiritual, is therefore not represented in concrete form but in the abstraction of the creative process, with which the composer as author is identified. Yet there is a profound irony here. Undoubtedly, the named composers have rights to these compositions as their intellectual and creative property, but in electroacoustic composition the female vocalist is viewed as ‘material’ and in acoustic works she is potentially ‘just the performer’. Neither identification necessarily acknowledges the actively creative contribution that a performer may make to a composition. Certainly, in the case of Berberian’s association with Berio and her work on the tape compositions, she is not a neutral presence. Her reading of the James Joyce text for Thema is a performance, an interpretation; and out of the vocal colours and nuances that she brings to that reading, Berio built his composition which is itself a response to her reading, as much as it is a response to Joyce’s text.

This is even more apparent in Visage where David Osmond Smith reports that Berio dispensed with texts altogether and asked Berberian to improvise a series of monologues each based on a repertoire of vocal gestures and phonetic material suggested by a given linguistic model (mainly Italian, in fact) but without using any specific words from that language. The result is a piece that is clearly built around Berberian’s improvisations.

Berio did not provide a text: the strings of phonemes, the gradual build up into language - these are all her improvisations in response to Berio’s general directions; and his piece is a response in turn to her improvisation. Revealingly, one of the often repeated ‘facts’ about Visage is that there is only real word in the entire piece, the word parole, words. I strongly suspect that Berio only had this one word he asked Berberian to use in the piece, and from that has grown the myth that every other vocal sound in the piece is a nonsense syllable – a myth easily dispelled by listening to the piece where a variety of words, including verita, truth, and caro, darling, are clearly discernable in Berberian’s improvised language but are not ‘officially’ there because they come from the vocalist rather than the composer. But this is an entirely electroacoustic work: there is no live performer, only the tape: and everything on that tape is the text regardless of whether it originated with the Berio or Berberian. The vocalist’s contribution, in this case, does not appear to be simply ‘material’ but an essential part of what might more accurately be viewed as a collaboration, even though it has never been acknowledged as usch: or rather, it has, but the acknowledged collaborator is Umberto Eco. Hannah Bosma has noted this and a variety of other examples of the complex relationship between electroacoustic composer and female vocalist in the context of the latter’s dual role as the traditional body-identified singer and also contributor and collaborator in the male-identified creative process.[i]

Berberian, in her work in the studio, has usually been relegated to the position of an oscillator, a machine that is programmed in the correct way to produce the required sound, but this is a drastic oversimplification of her role in the creation of these works in particular where her voice and her imagination, her creativity in improvisations, are an essential part of the compositional process.

Berberian’s solo repertoire

The origin of Berberian’s distinctive repertoire, therefore, starts in 1958 in Milan with the creation of two pieces, Cage’s Aria and Berio and Umberto Eco’s Thema: Omaggio a Joyce. David Osmond Smith, in his critical biography of Berio, reports that the origins of Aria stem from the fact that Cage was staying in Milan, working at the Studio di Fonologia, and frequently ate with Berio and Berberian; entertained by her “domestic vocal clowning, he decided to write something for her.” Aria, like other works for her, is tailored to Berberian’s own background and personality. It is written in five languages from cut up fragments of text, originally provided by Berberian, in French, English, Italian, Russian and Armenian – again, interestingly, no German here or in the Folk Songs, and apart from spoof arias in her Edinburgh recital “A la recherche de la Musique Perdue” in the 1970s, there’s little indication that Berberian ever sang in German, not even the Kurt Weill songs which she recorded in French and English. Aria, therefore, uses the five languages that she was accustomed to singing in her recitals.

The score of Aria sets a number of precedents for Berberian’s extended vocal repertoire, although it is also unique in several important ways, not least the amount of freedom composed into the score: the European scores tend to be much more overtly prescriptive. Aria has three notated parameters: relative duration, relative pitch and timbre. Each page has a duration of approximately 10 seconds, so the more space a particular notational figure takes up, the longer it lasts in relation to other figures on the page. Pitch is dictated in terms of contour: the higher on the page, the higher the note. Timbre is the most specific element of the score in terms of where the timbral changes happen. There are ten different colours and line textures used altogether, and the score is very precise about which words are used with which timbre and the sequence of changes from one timbre to the next – but it does not stipulate what those timbres should be. The performer is asked to come up with their own catalogue of ten timbres, one assigned to each colour, and use them as the score demands. Berberian the actress had a great facility for singing and speaking in different styles, for producing very different vocal colours and textures, adopting different vocal personalities, and that is what Cage’s Aria exploits. It also taps into her sense of humour: the vocal personalities she adopts include singing in the style of Marlene Dietrich and a baby alongside a contralto, a coloratura soprano, a folk voice and an oriental one. There are also black squares dotted throughout the score that are to be interpreted as some kind of sonic gesture, at the performer’s discretion. Berberian’s versions included a scream (having seen a mouse), a hoot of disdain, exclamations of both disgust and anger, laughter, and barking like a dog.

In the same way that multiple languages recur in her pieces as a reflection of her own musical practice, this idea of a piece based around multiple vocal personalities is one which also recurs in the pieces written for Berberian. We find it again in Pousseur’s Phonemes pour Cathy (1966), which also asks her to use five distinct vocal characters, although what these are is specified in the score rather than left open to the performer’s own interpretation: however, one suspects at the very least that Pousseur specified them on the basis of already knowing what Berberian was capable of. The idea of multiple vocal personalities is also present in Berio’s most famous work for her, Sequenza III.

Sequenza III is a piece that, like me, is very nearly forty years old. Composed in 1966, Berio wrote it for Cathy Berberian shortly after they separated, and it is, if you like, a highly peculiar love song. If you’re trying to stay on good terms with your ex-wife, then writing her one of the outstanding, groundbreaking and, as it turns out, enduring pieces of experimental music produced in the mid twentieth century is certainly one of going about it: but as one explores the content of the piece, one discovers that this is very far from being a romantic vision of the female performer. In fact, Sequenza III is typical of much extended vocal repertoire in the extent to which its narrative and modes of expression concern ideas of madness, stress and the apparent fragmenting of the performer’s personality. In Alternative Voices (1984), Istvan Anhalt has made his own categorization of the types of narratives and character’s in extended vocal repertoire, all of whom he reads as being victims in some sense, whether victims of political, religious or racial persecution, or victims on a more personal and social level, and he argues Sequenza III as a portrait of various forms of madness, psychosis and schizophrenia.

Whilst it is not difficult to disagree with his interpretation (and Joke Dame does this very eruditely in her essay on this piece), the fact remains that the expressive directions in the piece are numerous and fast changing, and these can at times create a sense of a multiple personality. The text is, once again, fragmented but, where Aria leaves words and phrases intact, the Sequenza breaks the text down to its component phonemes and only gradually and occasionally allows them to emerge as complete words or phrases. Berio’s comment that Berberian’s voice was like a second studio for him is reflected in the extent that he, just like Cage, treats the text as if it were a piece of tape that he can cut and splice and rearrange with infinite repetitions and at different speeds. However, where Cage’s piece is a musical joke based on Berberian clowning around imitating the cut and splice world of tape composition, Berio’s piece is a far more intense and serious composition.

On some levels, the material of Sequenza III is not obviously ground-breaking, and is rooted in the way that Berberian herself vocalized. In the same way that Visage and Maderna’s Dimensioni II make great use of vocal characterisers, so too the Sequenza builds these sounds into the way the piece is written with gasping, sighing and laughing forming part of the musical language. The other obviously Berberian-inspired aspects of the piece is the aforemenioned sense of multiple personalities created by switches in how the material is expressively characterized: it’s made explicit in the score that these rapid shifts should happen, although the piece is utterly reliant on the performer’s ability to express these changes sufficiently. Again, as with both the Cage and Pousseur pieces, the material can be divided into roughly five character types, which might be loosely described as anxious, tense, hyperactive, dreamy, and serene (an extended vocal-version of the seven dwarves, perhaps).

A – ‘tense’	B – ‘anxious’	C – ‘hyperactive’	D – ‘dreamy’	E – ‘serene’
tense	relieved	witty	distant	noble
urgent	bewildered	giddy	dreamy	joyful
nervous	whining	ecstatic	impassive	serene
intense	whimpering	excited	wistful	tender
apprehensive	anxious	coy	languorous	calm
	gasping		faintly
	desperate

Istvan Anhalt has described Berberian as “the close collaborator (one is tempted to say co-creator)” of this piece, and it has clearly been written around what she could do as an actress and vocalist in realizing the emotional and narrative dimensions of what is still one of the toughest vocal compositions of the 20^th century. This is reflected in Berio’s comment that “there have been a number of sad occasions, when Cathy was not performing, on which I have been tempted to transcribe this work for two or three voices.” (Berio, 1985, 96). However, it is fascinating that given the importance that Anhalt attributes Berberian in both the realization and, by implication, the creation of the piece, in his 14 page essay on Sequenza III he mentions her only once, in a single short sentence on the final page, and he relegates any mention of her performance to a foot note, unlike Dame who places Berberian much more centrally in her reading of the text.

Of her own performance of it, Berio clearly considered her the definitive performer, although this does not necessarily give us a definitive performance: she performed it many times, and the recordings she made of it differ enormously. Her first recording (Berio, 1991) was made in the studio in 1967 and you can hear the evidence of editing, of cutting and pasting together different takes – it’s subtle, but you can hear the edit breaks clearly in several places. The result is a very precise version of the piece, whereas the 1969 recording (Berberian, 1999) is far less accurate but rather more dramatic.

There are some extreme differences between these two versions, not least in the timings. The 1969 version, recorded live, has cut the opening murmur, almost undoubtedly because it was masked by the audience’s applause as Berberian walked onstage, and the recording therefore starts in the second measure of the first page of the score. In terms of the score indications, the piece is around nine minutes long, and the 1967 comes in at a very accurate 8’50. The 1969 version is almost two minutes shorter than this, and even when the missing ten seconds are discounted, twenty seconds have still been shaved off the opening 1’10. In comparison to the earlier recording, the live version is break-neck.

The first recording is a studio recording: it is controlled, under the direction of the composer, almost definitely being done from the printed score, and Berio himself was able to cut and splice together the versions of the individual phrases he wanted: this is his definitive performance. However, he saw her performing the piece live on many occasions, and never changed his mind that she was the best performer of the piece: in part, I imagine, because (as Joke Dame discusses) this was the precise voice, the particular vocal timbre, the particular physical sound that he wrote it for. No one else will ever sound quite like Berberian, and so in a sense, no one else can ever really hope to do the piece quite as Berio intended.

Berberian’s Compositions

The last part of Berberian’s repertoire that I’d like to address, albeit briefly, is her own compositional work. It’s rather interesting that despite having established herself as a singer, she doesn’t appear in the Grove Dictionary of Opera, but she does appear in various dictionaries of composers, and all the main articles on her in Grove and the Oxford Companion mention her composition alongside her singing. She didn’t actual think of herself as a composer at all – she described her compositions as gimmicks rather than real pieces. They include the extraordinarily odd piece, Morsicathy, which is simultaneously about her, morse code and mosiquitos, written for piano and since, her death, technically unperformable. The would-be performer is instructed to send a coupon from the back of the score to her – her address and telephone number in Milan is printed on it – and she will send back a message. The letters of this message are then to be translated into morse code, according to a key printed in the score, and this is then used to generate a rhythmic structure, dots being semiquavers and dashes being quavers, with punctuation providing rests and fermatas. This is then all played as quickly as possible by the right hand, which is the mosquito. The left hand reacts to the annoying presence of the mosquito, hitting the keys of the piano at random in an attempt to swat it. During the pauses, the mosquito leaves the keyboard and rests somewhere – either the wood of the piano, or the knee, nose of neck of the pianist, and the left hand must again attempt to swat it, just as it returns to the keyboard, producing a percussive thwack. At the end of the piece, the left hand squashes the right hand, producing a dramatic cluster chord, and the right hand falls limply away. I’m not sure if it’s ever been performed, and I haven’t yet discovered who it was written for, but you can perhaps see why she referred to it a as gimmick, although it may well have been for Bruno Canino, her regular accompanist.

Her best known piece, however, is Stripsody, which has been widely performed and recorded – there are at least three recordings by Berberian herself, and even Jessye Norman has performed and recorded it. The graphic score, with graphics by Roberto Zamarin is published by Peters Edition, and the graphics make specific what is already implicit in the various articulations, which is that this is a piece using the gestures and characters of comic strips and cartoons: there are references to some specific characters, such as Superman and Tarzan, to specific genres such as Westerns, Gangsters and Romance and implied references to things such as Tom and Jerry and the Peanuts comic strip. Again, writing for herself, Berberian gives full rein to her abilities as an actress and her ability to adopted highly characterized voices in order to bring the gangster and the love lorne teenager to life, and as with other things written for her, she write her own musical history into this piece: the two extracts that the teenager hears on the radio are from Berberian’s own repertoire, Avendo gran disio and She’s got a ticket to ride.

The score is set up using three different notational conventions. There is the main score, written on a three line stave to indicate high, middle and low registers of the voice. These are continuous, almost stream of consciousness series of gestures following a roughly alphabetical plan, starting with the Aaagh of Tarzan and ending with the zzz of sleep and a buzzing fly. The second type of convention is roughly the same in terms of the three line stave but abandons the alphabetical ordering, and encloses all the material of a particular section between double barlines, separating it out from the main score as a self-contained scene. In this form, we find the specific genre episodes, such as the cat and dog fight, the gangster scene and the western. The third category might be described as inserts, in the Stockhausian sense of quite separate material placed within the otherwise continuous score. These abandon the three line stave, always appear on an entire, separate page and replace the gestures and characterizers of comic strips with coherent sentences: You stupid kite, get down out of that tree; my name is Freda and I have naturally curly hair: do you like girls with naturally curly hair? Good grief; and Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it’s superman. In fact, there’s fourth quotation in the original recording that doesn’t appear in the score: I can’t take any more.

There is therefore a logic to why material appears in three different ways, accounting for three different types of material: comic strip gestures, comic strip genres and direct quotations. It also reflects how Berberian thought about the different types of material she was using, particularly as this score was not written in the conventional way: it was not, in fact, written out by her but is a transcription of piece she had already developed and performed in 1966. What is less well known is that Berberian’s score is the 2^nd printed verison of Stripsody, the first having been published in 1966 by an Italian artist, Eugenio Carmi, with the first recording of Berberian’s performance attached. Umberto Eco’s introduction to the score describes it as “a book to be looked at, a book to be read, a book to recite and a book to be listened to. He also describes how Stripsody was written:

“Berberian was looking for a text for one of her musical performances, and thought of developing a kind of sound world using only the onomatopoeic inventions of the comic strips. Gradually the idea grew that this musical action had no need of music; thus, while Cathy began to sing these sounds, Carmi went on to write the score. The two aspects of the work were born together, and Cathy’s voice contributed more than one graphic suggestion while Carmi’s imagination produced more than one vocal solution.”

Eco studiously avoids referring to Berberian as a composer, and manages to perpetuate the old Western association of the female and her body-identified voie and the male with his spirit-identified imagination. It is peculiar that there is no mention whatsoever of Carmi in Berberian’s score, as the spellings of the words appear to be his and the appearance of the words on the page of the Berberian score often closely resembles Carmi’s graphics; and the body of the score, following the alphabetical route from A to Z precisely mirrors that construction of Carmi’s text. The material in the genre episodes and inserts are largely absent from Carmi’s version: they are something unique to how Berberian was working, bringing her own knowledge of comic strips into the piece. However, one of the inserts, the one present in the original recording but missing from Berberian’s score and later recordings, does in fact appear in Carmi’s, on the back cover; and when she performed it, she had several 6 foot high blow ups of pages from Carmi’s score as her backdrop.

However, in conclusion, returning to my original point, ours is a history of composers, and the whole idea of collaborative practice is something that sits uncomfortably with our latent Romantic ideology of the work of art as the expression of the creator’s inner reality, their soul. In this view, musical composition is seen as being, by necessity, a solitary act of purely personal creativity that looses its integrity if it is not absolutely “truthful”: and truth, in this context, corresponds to the direct expression of the individual. Collaboration, therefore, is distrusted on the grounds that this cannot be the composer’s true voice if it has been diluted and confused by the voices of others. Berberian the composer ironically appears to fall into exactly the same pattern as other composers of not acknowledging the contribution of another artist to her own work. Berberian the singer suffers from that same lack of acknowledgement in the extent that her contributions to works such as Sequenza III and Berio’s tapes pieces were not officially recognized, and regardless of whether she wanted to be acknowledged, she played an active and formative role in defining the nature of the extended vocal repertoire, with ideas of an expanded palette of vocal timbres, the adoption of different voices and characters as part of the internal narrative of pieces, and the importance of humour hand in hand with some of the more disturbing images of madness created by her vocalizations.

Bibliography

Anhalt, Istvan, (1984). Alternative voices: essays on contemporary vocal and choral composition. London, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Dame, Joke, (1998). “Voices Within the Voice: Geno-text and Pheno-text in Berio's Sequenza III” in Adam Krims (ed.), Music/ideology : resisting the aesthetic. London: Routledge, 233-246.

Osmond-Smith, David, (1991). Berio. Oxford, New York: OUP (2004)

——— “The Tenth Oscillator: the work of Cathy Berberian, 1958-1966.” Tempo 58, 2-13.

Scaldafferi, Nicola, (2000). “Bronze by Gold, by Berio and Eco: a journey through the Sirensong” in Veniero Rizzardi and Angela Ida de Benedictis (eds) Nuovo Musica alla Radio: esperienze allo studio di fonologia della RAI di Milano 1954-1959. Milan: CIDIM, 100-159.

Vila, Marie Christine, (2003). Cathy Berberian, Cant’atrice. Paris: Fayard.

Recordings

Berberian, Cathy, (1974) Cathy Berberian at the Edinburgh Festival. Cathy Berberian, Bruno Canino. RCA LRL1-5007

——— (1988) MagnifiCathy Cathy Berberian, Bruno Canino. Wergo, WER 60054-50

——— (1999) Nel labirinto della voce Cathy Berberian, Bruno Canino. Aura AUR146-2ADD

Berio, Luciano (1991) Circles/ Sequenza I/ SequenzaIII/ Sequenza V Aurele Nicolet, Cathy Berberian, Vinko Globokar. Wergo WER60212

——— (1995) Recital I for Cathy/ Folk Songs/ Three songs by Kurt Weill. Cathy Berberian, conducted by Luciano Berio. BMG 09026 62540 2

Maderna, Bruno (1994) Musica Elettronica/Electronic Music. Cathy Berberian, Renato Rivolta. Stradivarius STR 33349