BEFORE NIGHT COMES: narrative and gesture in Berio’s Sequenza III (1966)

©Janet K Halfyard (2002)

Please note: in order not infringe copyright; you will need a copy of the score to fully appreciate the examples in the text below. References are given to the nearest second of the piece as shown in the score.

One of the major problems confronting anyone undertaking an analysis of a piece such as Sequenza III is that it defies conventional languages of musical discussion. It is unaccompanied and for the most part unpitched, and the rhythmic notation is graphic and proportional rather than exact. Finding a language with which to analyse (and thereby better understand) extended vocal technique is one of the most significant challenges of the genre.

Equally, the very nature of the piece and its score present a significant challenge to the performer wishing both to grasp the mechanics of the required vocal techniques and to present a coherent performance: the technical difficulty of the piece is such that one may find itself sacrificed in the interests of the other. My study of Sequenza III represents one possible manner of examining the essentially gestural nature of this composition from mutually informed perspectives of analysis and performance.

The text of Sequenza III is simultaneously the most obvious point at which to start a discussion and the most obscure part of the piece. Markus Kutter’s modular poem reads thus:

give me a few words for a woman

to sing a truth allowing us

to build a house without worrying before night comes

When David Osmond Smith (1991, p65) says of these words that “Berio treats them simply as a quarry for phonetic materials,” the impetus behind the quarrying is somewhat underestimated, as there is nothing either simple or random about the use of the various phonemes and phrases which this statement implies. Generally, pieces of this kind are held to be dramatically non-specific: pure virtuosity removed from the constraints of time, place, character and narrative. However, in Sequenza III, this is true only up to a point, as is true of some of the other Sequenzas – Sequenza V for trombone, for example, has a quite specific narrative attached to it.

Initially, the text is heard as phonemes - to, co, for, us, be. Gradually, words and then complete phrases emerge. The first identifiable word is sing, closely followed by to me, few and words, which between them describe the motivation of the piece: the woman’s solitary and reflexive task of singing the few, appropriate words. Complete phrases from the text emerge principally in the sung passages and in the course of the piece the text is given in this largely complete if disjointed sung form:

60” a woman

1’50 give me a few words for a woman

3’50 to sing

4’20 a truth

6’10 to build a

6’20 a few words before

6’35 to sing before night

8’15 allowing before night comes

8’35 to sing

The most significant clue to the nature of the text treatment and its narrative function is the phrase which is entirely absent from this list and, in fact, from the piece, namely “without worrying.” With this phrase removed, the text becomes:

give me a few words for a woman

to sing a truth allowing us

to build a house

all of which is perfectly untroubling, or would be were it not for the implications of the final phrase: “before night comes.” In these three words a limit is set on the amount of time the woman has in which to complete her task, i.e. to sing the few words which will “build the house”, the protection and shelter from that impending night, and with the direction to do it without worrying removed, there is a greater urgency and anxiety implicit in the task.

The final phrase to emerge is, unsurprisingly, the limiting factor, the coming of night represented by the phrase before night comes being also the point at which the piece must end. In context, the phrase before night comes is the key to the dramatic meaning of Sequenza III, the source of the panic which drives it forward to its conclusion.

Gesture

A possible approach to clarify the gestural language of the piece is to turn to a preexistent grammar of gestural analysis, namely Rudolf Laban’s “efforts”, which he developed in the analysis of movement. This ultimately led to his system of notation, but it can be applied to vocal production with only a small leap of the imagination. In fact, metaphors of space, movement and physical gesture are frequently used by singing teachers when attempting to communicate with students, the voice being an invisible instrument, concealed within the body, and therefore often needing metaphors to substitute for visual demonstration.

Traditional notation is designed to be most exact when dealing with pitch and rhythm; here, Berio uses a notation which does not intend to encourage improvisation but which often does not explicitly notate pitch and rhythm. It has a strong superficial resemblance to standard forms, but here the character of the gestures is defined by timbre, expression and ideas that can be related directly to Laban’s analysis of gestural shape, namely the force, direction and speed of gestures.

Laban’s eight efforts are described as thrust, dab, slash, flick, press, wring, glide and float, each described in terms of force or weight (firm or gentle); its relationship with space, whether its trajectory is predictable and direct or unpredictable and flexible; and its relationship with time, whether its duration is brief or prolonged, resulting in gestures that are either sudden or sustained. For the purposes of this study, they can be divided into four pairs, and where one is the stronger development of the other:

Thrust firm, sudden, direct

Dab gentle, sudden, direct

Press firm, sustained, direct

Glide gentle, sustained, direct

Slash firm, sudden, flexible

Flick gentle, sudden, flexible

Wring firm, sustained, flexible

Float gentle, sustained, flexible

However, when attempting to apply this to Berio’s vocal gestures, it became immediately apparent that single efforts did not always provide obvious descriptors, because two forces were contributing to the production of each vocal sound to varying degrees. On the one hand, there is the larynx, the main sound source; on the other, there are the filters (mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, palates and pharynx) which form the articulatory mechanism.

The larynx itself can sing or speak in a variety of pitch registers and dynamics. The articulators have sustained states (such as vowel shapes, nasal and fricative consonants); and percussive states. It is perfectly possible that the voice will be engaged in one form of gesture, while the articulators perform another.

In the opening “tense muttering” of the piece, the voice is engaged in what is basically a float: a gentle sustained vocalization where the pitch is constantly, flexibly changing. The articulation, however, is dabbing: each phoneme being uttered is a single, sudden, direct hit. The voice is sustained and flexible; the articulation is fast, sudden, and direct. This potentially creates something of a dilemma – a gesture is a gesture, albeit one that might be made up of several parts, but the presence of two different forces contributing to the gesture apparently muddies the waters about which type of gesture this figure might be. However, this sense of there being opposition and even conflict between articulation and pure vocalism is in fact a characteristic of the piece on several levels. In any one figure, either the articulation or the voice tends to be dominant, and that effort is the one which characterizes and defines the gesture in terms of the corresponding Effort.

The following is a summary of how the efforts correspond to the material in Sequenza III.

Thrust and dab

The thrust gesture is sudden and strong. The glottal of a (the large note head bisected vertically by a line seen, for example at 30”) reinforces the vocal thrust as t does the plosive of to (15”) and the g of gi (55”). The thrust is seen without any aid from the voice in the click figure (e.g. 20”), just as the voice loses any definite articulation in the cough (2’25) and the closed mouth thrust (16”). All of them except the click require a quite literal thrust from the diaphragm.

The weak counterpart is the dab, one of the predominant gestures in the piece as a whole. A dab is a smaller, lighter gesture, the thrust with the diaphragm taken out, and in this piece usually occurs in strings, where the thrust is isolated. In terms of articulation, the dabs are short, unemphasised phonemes as seen at the very start of the piece and the various phoneme strings (e.g. 1’00). The same idea applies vocally - a run of individual small gestures as in a laugh with open or closed mouth (1’30 and 1’40).

Press and glide

Where the previous pair of gestures are sudden, these two are sustained, and therefore much slower. Their relationship with thrust and dab, therefore, is that they are slowed down, elongated versions of otherwise similar gestures. In terms of pitch, they tend to be stationary. Because they are sustained, they tend to occur more as sung gestures rather than articulated ones, whereas thrust and dab tend to occur much more with articulation being the defining characteristic of the gesture. The glide is often associated with the distant and dreamy figure (20”), and also the sighs (1’43). The press can be seen in the similar but more dramatic gesture (6’15)

These four gestures are all classified as direct: they move from A to B, from start to finish without deviation from a single pitch trajectory, which may be all on one pitch, or a simple slide upwards or downwards. The moment the destination of the pitch becomes unpredictable, through the use of non-stepwise leaps, the classification changes to flexible.

Slash and flick

These have a clear relationship with thrust and dab, but instead of being a single sudden gesture that does not move from the point it started, the slash and flick are single sudden gestures that measure the distant between two points. This translates generally as changes in pitch, the main flick gesture being an appoggiatura effect (1’04) while the slash is typified by a gasp (5’03). The slash, like the thrust, is a much stronger movement than the ornamental flick.

Wring and float

The key word discerning glide from float is continuity. The glide is directional, either stationary or sliding (gliding) stepwise, the float is erratic, flexible, capable of being pushed in any direction, like a feather in an air current. It is primarily a vocal gesture that develops out of the flick (the flick being sudden, this being a sustained development of a similar idea (2’54-3’05).

The wring is the most difficult of Laban’s efforts to map on to the vocal gestures in this piece. If we look in the piece for gestures which are basically like the float, but weightier, more aggressive, where we find them tends to be where the articulation changes to involves elements of friction. So, we have the erratic vocal line, which conforms to a vocal version of the wring, but the defining element of the wring is when this is combined with tremolos and rolled consonants (e.g. 4’29-4’36). The wring is the least used gesture in this piece which is very much a consequence of Berio’s gestural vocabulary in this piece rather than the lack of wring gestures that are possible vocally: Maxwell Davies’ 8 songs for a mad king makes plenty of use of wring-type gestures, with the use of varying and therefore flexible multiphonics within sustained, firm gestures.

One of the clearest things analysis reveals is the relationships between types of gesture. The rolled r and l and dental tremolo are all versions of the same basic wring gesture. The cough, click and vocal stabs are all versions of the same basic thrust gesture. These are gestural groups where the members are distinguished by different timbral colourings, a relationship reinforced by the fact that they are often found in groups. Having an awareness that these are same basic gesture, differently coloured, makes the piece seem less like random vocal acrobatics and certainly gives it more coherence from the performer’s point of view.

The other thing the gestures reveal that in turn reveal the coherence of the composition is the manner in which individual gestures develop through the course of the piece. One of the clearest is a figure usually associated with the direction “urgent” (first seen at 15”), which recurs throughout the piece, a series of ascending dabs surrounded by varying numbers and types of thrust, and variously inverted, expanded and contracted. It is always associated with the direction “urgent” expect on the few occasions where it occurs during or at the end of what are primarily sung sections: and the transition of this gesture from signifying urgency to something lighter and more positive plays an important role in the narrative of the piece and the sense of resolution when the task is completed.

This process of development can also be seen with other gestures, such as the vowel flicks, which develop from appoggiaturas to more expansive floating melismas in the central section before reducing back to the simple appoggiatura flicks of the opening.

Something else which becomes apparent is that the differences and the tensions between gestures of the voice and the articulation are significant in terms of the piece’s narrative. The sections where the articulation dominates focus on ideas of language and of the desire to reach out and communicate in concrete, linguistic terms, driven forward by the need to complete the task (to build the house of words) before night comes; and the voice, therefore, represents music, communication in more abstract and emotional terms, and seems to be somehow inward looking, reflective, apparently far less bothered about the urgency of the task. Even more specifically, the articulation appears to correspond to the ideas of panic, inspired no doubt by the seemingly impossible task of making sense out of the deconstructed phonemes it is having to deal with; and the voice corresponds to ideas of calm, ironically finding it far easier to communicate the complete words and phrases of the text as sung expressions than the articulation manages in speech.

The expressive directions in the piece are numerous and fast changing, but can be divided into roughly five character types, where A and B are dominated by articulation-based gestures and C, D and E tend to be primarily sung gestures.

A	B	C	D	E
tense	bewildered	witty	distant	noble
urgent	whimpering	giddy	dreamy	joyful
nervous	whining	ecstatic	impassive	Serene
intense	anxious	coy	wistful	tender
	gasping	excited	languorous

Perhaps, returning to the original text, it is significant that the instruction is for a few words for a woman to sing: when she sings, she meets with far more success than when she attempts to speak, which perhaps reflects the composer’s point of view, that music is a more effective means of communication than words could ever be on their own

There is an obvious contrast between the opening and the ending of the piece: at the start, the predominant gesture is ‘muttering.’ Here, the articulation is dominant, a stream of dabbing phonemes, but underneath it we have the voice in a continual minimal float. Again, this is where a recognition of the gestural nature of the piece, and the tension between articulation and vocalization becomes apparent. At the close (8’00 to the end), the float underlying the dab from the opening is still present, but the articulation, the dab gestures are almost completely still and are in fact physically superimposed over the vocal gesture, by means of the fingers of the hand tapping the mouth. The “few words” have been uttered and what remains is pure song, pure voice. The first and last clear word is sing. The tension between the two gestural forces appears to have been resolved or rather, music and calm appear to have won out over the panic of language.

In Two Interviews (Berio, 1985, 96), Berio describes Sequenza III as a three part invention - text, gesture and expression. Each element has its own progression through the piece: the text gradually reveals itself; the vocal gestures expand, contract and transform; and the expression maintains a level of frenetic variety until the very last moments when, the task complete, it becomes tranquil, all urgency gone. A generation on, it remains one of the outstanding and continually challenging pieces in the vocal repertory.