Remembering the Future

How one of the foremost experimental composers of the twentieth century approaches his metier.

Music is never confined to a single moment. Compositions play with our expectations of the future; musical notes are recorded on a page to be revived by future performers; and old compositions are remembered, quoted, and reconfigured in new ones. In his 1993-1994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Luciano Berio skillfully explores the whirlpools and eddies of musical time, the intricate interplay between our moment-to-moment experience of music and the idioms, traditions, and histories that form our musical memory.

Remembering the Future is full of insights into Berio's own creative process. Writing these lectures, he says, "led me to formulate thoughts that might otherwise have remained concealed in the folds of my work." Thematically wide-ranging—reflecting on transcription and translation, poetics and analysis, opera and the "open work"—Berio offers a trenchant assessment of both his contemporaries and his forbears, from Boethius to Boulez. Like his friend and sometime collaborator Umberto Eco, he was also a figure of formidable intellect, fluently engaging with Heinrich Schenker, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Carl Dahlhaus, and other critical luminaries.

But Berio wears his learning lightly. The cerebral complexity of these lectures is leavened with irony, humor, and arresting aphorisms. Ultimately, he points us back to the music: "The best possible commentary on a symphony," Berio says, "is another symphony."