La ricezione di Luigi Dallapiccola nella musica di Luciano Berio: alcune osservazioni analitiche

Like other composers of his generation, Luciano Berio recognized Luigi Dallapiccola as the central figure who brought younger Italian composers in closer contact with the twelve-tone technique. In 1952 he spent six weeks at the Berkshire Music Festival (Tanglewood) to attend composition lessons with Dallapiccola. The two shared a common interest in James Joyce, the writer who had a major impact on both composers and about whom Dallapiccola had already written in 1950, illustrating the “musical” aspects of Joyce’s prose; Berio’s radio documentary Omaggio a Joyce (1958) was one of the outcomes of his reading of Dallapiccola’s text. This article argues that even though Berio distanced himself from the twelve-tone canonic principles typical of Dallapiccola’s music, he took and developed them further, alongside the gestural dimension presents in Dallapiccola’s pieces. Indeed, the analysis of some of Berio’s scores will reveal the presence of procedures, such as rhythmic and Klangfarben-canons on a fixed pitch rather than involving canonic imitation of entire blocks of material, that are very similar to the techniques employed by Dallapiccola.