Guest scholar Orit Hilewicz, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Indiana Jacobs School of Music, presents "Berio's Compositional Poetics as Performance," an examination of Luciano Berio's Continuo for Orchestra and Ekphrasis (Continuo II).
Abstract
This paper examines Continuo for Orchestra and Ekphrasis (Continuo II), two orchestral compositions by Luciano Berio from 1989–91 and 1996 respectively, that shed a new light on Berio’s compositional poetics as a unique take on the “open work.” The term “open work” (opera aperta) was coined by Berio’s friend Umberto Echo (1962) for literary works and musical compositions that present an especially broad field of interpretive possibilities for readers/performers. I argue that Berio—inspired by George Steiner’s translation theory (1975) and the architect Renzo Piano, with whom he collaborated in the 1990s—assumes both roles of composer and performer and creates multiple fully-composed pieces, which I call “composed performances,” that present different perspectives on the same musical object.
Series Background
THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education held on select Friday afternoons during Autumn Quarter.
Biography
Orit Hilewicz is assistant professor of music theory at the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana University, where she joined in January 2022. In 2017, she completed her PhD at Columbia University and started a tenure-track position at the Eastman School of Music in the University of Rochester. In her research, she is interested in the relationships between musical, visual, and literary arts in contemporary music composition and listening. Her articles, which have been published in Music Theory Online and Perspectives of New Music, among other journals, propose strategies for listening, observing, and analyzing relationships between contemporary music and visual arts. Orit is also interested in music and sound in films and multimedia works and analytical approaches to musical temporality. Her current projects examine issues of agency, repetition, and memory in the music of Caroline Shaw and Morton Feldman, and Luciano Berio’s compositional poetics. She has served as co-editor of the journal Theory and Practice and assistant editor of Perspectives of New Music, and is currently on the editorial board of the Music Theory Spectrum.
Upcoming Events in This Series
Oct. 28: Charles Kronengold (Stanford University):
"The Chaka Khanplex, 1977–1983"
Nov. 18: Sarah Bartolome, (Northwestern University):
"From Idea Incubation to Implementation: The Trauma, Music, and the Breath Initiative"
Dec. 2: James Currie (State University of New York); Melanie Lowe (Vanderbilt University); Frederick Reece (University of Washington):
"Forgery in Musical Composition"