on Berio’s “Sequenza VII”
- Alex Klein
- Jul 17
- 18 min read
Our business is about seeking beauty. We see in music a companion to humanity since the primordials of civilization. We can argue that music was one of the very first inventions (perhaps ‘the’ very first?) of our species. Music is inseparable from humanity and is present wherever and whenever we humans roam, representing us, even guiding us. In music we seek companionship, ground for our emotions, entertainment, inspiration, and the definition of beauty.
As such, it is perhaps expected that music will be melodious, harmonic, expressive and enchanting to our hearts, so we may fulfill a presence and interaction with it. And…it is. In all its forms. Through all ages and styles. One would have to work very hard to make music a bad idea, because sound itself is already a miracle. My working definition of music is the purposeful manipulation of sound. We take sound and we transform it to our liking and desire. But then, sound is already an achievement in itself. Just the fact that we produce “a” sound, any sound at all, is awe-inspiring. This fact is easily verified when we take into the spotlight the section of our population that is most open to novelty and curiosity: children. Make a sound, any type of sound, with any instrument, with your mouth, or shoe when a toddler passes by. They will turn to look at you, and to the source of that sound. Sound inspires us. Even a rough sound in itself, void of our purposeful transformation, is a wonder.
There exists in the oboe repertory a piece of historical grandeur, a divider, a statement of
change at the same level of novelty as other historical musical landmarks, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Debussy’s first atonal piece “Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune”, Schoenberg’s 12-tone idea, Berlioz’s Fantastique, Beethoven’s 9th and other numerous occasions when history stopped breathing for a moment so we can hear something truly original. This piece is called “Sequenza VII” and it was written by the Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) in 1969.
The Sequenza VII is dedicated to the Swiss oboe superstar Heinz Holliger, and it is still
assumed by many that the piece came to be solely through an interaction between Holliger and Berio (the forum is open for opinions and complements to this position, by the way). I am told a different story. Enter Lothar Faber (1922-1983), left, a phenomenal German virtuoso who had already worked on many new avant-garde compositions with Bruno Maderna and Pierre Boulez. One of Faber's oboe students at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, at that time, was Dr. Patricia Morehead, who in turn went on to become one of my teachers and mentors, to this day. According to Dr. Morehead Faber spent considerable time with Berio experimenting with new sounds and writing for the oboe, eventually resulting in the creation of Sequenza VII. Modernism and avant-garde styles had already challenged our perceptions of music, and music “for oboe” since the 1950s, with the oboe concertos by Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Julien-François Zbinden, among others. The 1960’s however brought an explosion of ideas for how we produce sound, and even defining - if that were possible - what is the meaning of sound. Berio’s Sequenzas, in that advanced realm, were at an altogether higher platform of experimentation. The “Sequenza VII”, for oboe solo, is written for oboe and sound source (a sustained “B” throughout the piece, which could be produced in any number of ways). The composer suggested the source be invisible, perhaps an oscillator, a clarinet, a pre-taped oboe, or something else. In those last two words - “something else” - lies a never ending factory of marvelous ideas for creative oboists.
The sound source
Over the years I have tried numerous approaches on how to produce and sustain that “B”. The simplest of all is to use a tuner. We can play the first and last notes with only one hand and use the other to turn the machine on and then off. I used this strategy when I performed it in the second round of the 1988 Geneva International Competition. The tuner, however, is sustained as it starts, doesn't change nor demonstrate any novelty. As I will explain in the next paragraph, this wasn't exactly what the composer had in mind, even if it brings a level of convenience to the performer.
When I played Sequenza VII for Luciano Berio while studying at the Oberlin Conservatory, oboe student Rebecca Schweigert used an oscillator to produce that B. Berio had us play it a second time but instructed Becky to move around the stage, hide the speakers behind her hand back-and-forth for a "wah-wah" sound, play it under the piano to catch string resonances, walk over to the left, to the right, or up front, but above all "improvise", be creative. In Berio’s direction the B wasn’t just a note to be boringly held continuously (as the words in the score may lead one to believe) but a living part of the musical discourse, unpredictable, ever changing and provocative, as if daring the listener to perceive the different nuances it carried and how it interacts with the solo oboe. That lesson from Berio himself gave me stimulus to be more experimental.
One way to engage the audience is to have them hum the note. That has worked many times but can sometimes lead to laughter and occasional distractions, depending on the place and age of that audience. This short excerpt was from a performance at the Isle of Man in 2005, with the audience humming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i47clzFvQNo
Some of my wildest experiences came when performing the Sequenza with my oboe students, as I eagerly conveyed to them the excitement of creation, of putting together a performance made up from everyone's collaboration. Most of them engaged happily in the affair, while others were a bit spooked at what I was proposing we do. Invariably, these were my most successful and memorable performances of the Sequenza, because they tied me to that day at Oberlin when Berio was ecstatic at the search for new sounds and nuances, both from the oboe and from the oscillator. The pedagogical idea here being that young players need to embrace new music with curiosity and excitement, and never with fear, least of all disdain. New music and new sounds, together with the search for novelty need to be at the creative center of young musicians's education, as well as that of every professional musician, be that with Berio or Bach. At the Domaine Forget Music Festival in Canada we made the rule that the “B” may be performed by any means whatsoever, except with a complete oboe.
As the photos demonstrate, some used only the top joint, or the bell, others borrowed a bassoon bocal, a half-drunk cup of coffee, a water bottle, another one used a vocal scream (yes!) after the fortissimo high G with flatter tonguing on line 10. At the Instrumenta Verano Festival in Mexico the rule was to use only Aztec or Mayan instruments, even if they were just decorative out of someone's grandmother's night stand or tourist souvenirs, just as long as they were able to produce a
sound that approximated to a "B" or be useful in the performance
somehow. It sounded like we brought the entire jungle to the inside of the hall! At the University of Washington in Seattle we placed the 11 oboe students in a semi circle behind the stage, from stage left to stage right, all around, playing in the dark with individual lights over their music stands.
I was alone on stage, and the entire hall was in total darkness. Later on a colleague mentioned to me that it sounded like we had some very expensive sound equipment in use, as the sound of the solo oboe was centralized but the responses and echos of what I was playing were literally coming in from every direction, also counting on the resonance from backstage. My first performance of this piece, however, left some...er..."educational" memories. I was insistent on memorizing it (for reasons I will disclose in my next article for this blog) and decided to try it out at a student recital at Oberlin's Kulas Recital Hall, also in complete darkness, because I wanted the sounds and contrasts to be free of any visual distractions. Of course I was nervous for that first performance, who wouldn't be? As the lights went out also in the backstage area and I quickly walked on stage to get on with it, it so happens that there was a waste basket in front of me, made of metal (!!!), which I kicked so strong it probably flew halfway across the stage, making an unbearable racket as it tumbled through. Thus began my first Berio Sequenza performance. Lesson learned, and I never again walked into a dark stage without making sure there was no debris in my path.
As the composer put it, “the B should give the impression of lending a slight resonance to the solo oboe”. The oboe students, therefore, were invited to be creative, participate in the piece, ride the waves of sound coming from my oboe, improvise, respond to what they heard from the oboe part, and give justice to these words about “giving the oboe resonance”. Of course, we can’t exaggerate these sounds (not even the scream) as the written music itself is the guide for what the musical message should be. Otherwise we risk transforming a sublime work of art into some carnaval of sounds lacking logic or cohesion. The educational intent must be balanced with a responsible and quality performance. The cooperation of all is centered on providing that resonance demanded by the composer, adding to it his own and constant search for interesting sounds. Sequenza VII is wild, valiant, challenging and expressive, but it may not degenerate into a wild party. I will never forget both the seriousness displayed by Berio that day at Oberlin, mixed with the child-like searching for a cool sound. That, for me, was the example to follow. And learn from.
Squeaks and squawks
One of the most prevailing criticisms of Berio’s Sequenza VII is how the otherwise haunting
sound of the oboe is aggressively transformed through 20th-century techniques, adding multiphonics, overblowing, flatter tonguing, extra short notes and “apparent” (focus on that word…”apparent”) lack of a musical line. It is as if someone collected all the oboe moments since the 17th century and through them out the window. And that would be true. And arguably done consciously, on purpose, turning the page on oboe history. There are, indeed, moments which may be referred to as squeaks and squawks throughout the piece, as we artfully perform his many new sounds. The question left open to interpretation is whether these sounds belong in a piece of “music”. Some would even question whether these sounds are "music", or mere noise. That criticism is heard towards just about every piece of music written since the middle of the 20th century, if not some from before. When I was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music and was preparing the Sequenza for my recital debut at the Weill Recital Hall in New York, my teacher Richard Woodhams became alarmed at the sounds I was producing and quickly asked me to stop, gazing fearfully at the door in case some other scared soul would enter the room and question what was that and what was it doing within the hallowed halls of that traditional school. Indeed, the Sequenza is shocking, and it is supposed to be shocking. It was meant to do that. Here is my hope that 30 years into the future the Curtis Institute would now be embracing new music with equal furor as that demonstrated by the courageous Luciano Berio in 1969 when he wrote this Sequenza. In fact, the very reason I spend many words discussing the 20th-century techniques applied to this piece is to always keep this debate alive, because at the end of it I know (or I hope) you too will be convinced that this musical language is fantastic, expressive and enhances the musical dialogue. The idea of "squeaks and squawks" being mere comical, a light hearted comment that enhances our approach to this piece with open arms and never a fear that someone might hear us playing ugly notes.
Luciano Berio wrote this piece in 1969, over half a century ago. When I was playing in the Chicago Symphony I observed, aghast, when members of the public walked out of our performances of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, written a century earlier (plus, forget the piece itself, that was the Chicago Symphony playing with uncanny energy and an unbelievable sound output! Why would anyone want to miss that? Let the dissonances ring, please!). While it is hard to argue with personal taste and openness it is a verifiable fact that we no longer live in a world of fantasy, that our society out there produces….well…squeaks and squawks! Let’s be honest: the melodious, harmonic music we are led to admire - mostly written in the 17th through early 20th centuries - carries with it a level of "falsehood". Of fantasy. Of being somewhere else, be it the Baroque’s depiction of Heaven or the romantics' clinging to that other-worldly fantasy place they love to refer to. Anything but mentioning their disease-ravaged cities. While Beethoven’s and Mozart’s music may be audibly superb we are well aware that infant mortality in those days was not so superb. While the music of Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky brought up feelings of belonging and warmth we are well aware that society in those days swam in poverty and exclusion, not to mention eternal political instability and wars. Music, then, didn’t really reflect society but only a certain aspect of it. Maybe it was considered impolite to depict reality, as dreadful as it was. Or, music reflected the dream of what we wanted society to be, but definitely not the complete reality from the streets. As the 20th century wore on, as we dealt with over 30 years of wartime and political instability our music followed closely, particularly the ones being composed in Europe, a place which remains at the center of Western music and was all but bombed to smithereens during that long war period. Is it only to be expected, therefore, that at any moment our music would bring those sounds to the stage, be it in the aggressive stance of Edgard Varèse, the breakups with tradition like Schoenberg and Boulez, to the squeaks and squawks coming from Berio’s oboe experimentation. The break from the past walked hand-in-hand with the disasters happening outside, the breakups with our societal and political past too. These new sounds therefore reflect today's reality, finally. It is what it is, it is what we came down to. But it is not because they sound aggressive that they shouldn’t be cared for and played with the appropriate and utmost beauty. My point here is that I admire these sounds both for their “apparent” (there’s that word again) ugliness and breaks with tradition as I do for their phenomenal music potential. Music never ceased to be expressive. It just does it differently now.
The irreverential reference to this experimentation as squeaks and squaws, therefore, is incomplete and unwarranted, and here I draw the line. The Sequenza is a superb piece of music, in all its senses. I respectfully disagree with the fellows who in the 21st century walked out of a performance of The Rite of Spring, as I disagree with the notion that “music” must be limited to that which is melodious and harmonic in the 19th century sense of these words just because they evoke in us that feeling of departure to a far far away fantasy land where Johannes and Clara are dancing waltzes. The Sequenza is about reality, today, now.
But what does it mean?
When I played Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza VII” for the composer at that time at Oberlin I prepared it down to a science, carefully measuring the fermatas of different minutage and followed strictly what was on the page. The performance went well and I was eager to receive his stamp of approval or comments on how I could improve on it even more. The score to Berio’s Sequenza VII looks like a computer motherboard. There are no measures in the traditional sense, but instead there are time spaces. There are limited indications of rhythm, and even those a subject to rubatos, leaving performers to decide the distance between notes using visual logic or personal preference. There are numerous indications for multiphonics, flatter-tonguing, double-staccatto, double trills and notes too short to create connections in the traditional sense of phrasing. Therefore, I would have been pardoned for looking at it and performing it in a square, near robotic way, giving justice to the way it “looks” and wrongly assuming that the looks determine what it should sound like. Simply put, in my view at that time as it still is in the vision of many oboists today, Berio’s Sequenza for oboe solo is just about the last place one would look for “musical beauty”, at least in its traditional definition. And my gut feeling is that Berio would have no argument with that sentence.
When Berio came to me after the performance at Oberlin he was at first perplexed. He came up to the stage hurriedly asking: “what was that sound?”. What did I do with my oboe sound?, I thought. “No, no, that sound you made….”. He was curious about how some of my notes sounded when I played a particular notation. At first we couldn’t find it, because I didn’t know what he was referring to, nor did he remember the exact place it happened. But something caught his attention and he wanted to explore it more. Berio was curious like a child, amazed at something new he had just discovered and wanting to see and hear it again. Turns out it was the hissing sound coming from a very covered up fingering for the middle-B (fingerings number 4 and 5), which he probably was not used to hearing from European oboists who play that piece with clearer, direct-sounding reeds. My long-scraped reeds, typical of the Marcel Tabuteau school in vogue in North America and geared towards orchestral playing were not meant for this repertory and thus came out with a bit more fluff in the sound than what he was used to hearing. But he liked it. This is not a testament to the usefulness of Tabuteau-inspired reeds for performing Berio’s music, mind you, as it isn't. What I want to leave clear here is that even 20 years after writing the piece Berio was still hungry for different ways to make sounds on an oboe. There were still sounds he had not heard before. Music experimentation never ended for him. For curiosity's sake, if anyone wants to hear what were these sounds that brought up Berio's interest, they are the soft fermatas at line 2, measure 6 (fingering 4, 6 seconds), and an identical one at line 4, measure 2. They are found at 0:50 and 1:35 respectively in my live recording from Geneva listed at the end of this article. Specially when compared with Holliger's rendering (with European reeds), it appears that my sound carries a muffled, velvety pillow around it. This is very useful for Brahms Symphonies and other orchestral excerpts, but it was a novelty for Berio in the Sequenza.
There was more. Berio was concerned that near the Sequenza’s climax I was taking too much time in the fermatas at the end of the 11th line. But aha! No no! Here I was ready to defend my performance (expletive goes here): I played exactly, precisely what he wrote, dam* it, with fermatas lasting 4 seconds, then 3 seconds, then 5 seconds and so on. I was quite nerdy in how I counted those holds, and quite proud of them too. I was precise. I worked hard on this (and I played it all from memory too). But no, that wasn’t the point. Playing the fermatas is fine, and here comes another formidable musical lesson from Berio. As it turned out the perfectly held fermatas were not what he wanted, or at least he meant something else with them. Berio asked me to ignore the length of the fermatas and just “move the phrase forward”.
Wait. Move….the phrase? You mean…there are “musical phrases”…..in Berio’s Sequenza VII?!?
That concept changed everything for me as I dove back into the score to delineate where those phrases were, how they interacted with each other and what artistic meaning I could bring to them, what shapes they took, and how they all - yes - told a story!
Berio reminded me that “sound” - that moment when vibration takes flight, races through the air and vibrates another human being’s tympanic membrane - is a magical, precious element, and quintessentially human, to the point that even a piece stock full of those squeaks and squawks would be beautiful, expressive, moving and civilized, worthy of all the musical intellect we can bring to it, just as long as we were open to what vthat piece was suggesting. It was not about the held fermatas per se, but a principle where not even the written page could outrank the musical input desired by the composer. There I had it, the living composer and the one who wrote it back in the 1960s, in one person, right in front of me, and it taught me to create a truth that responds to both. The score may have those longer fermatas, and we may play them as written, so long as the more important issue be cared for: a forward musical line.
Of course, these would now have to be “well educated squeaks and squawks” (!) and be part of a grand scheme of connecting notes, motives and phrases not unlike a Bach Partita, if only I can dissect the piece and find where all these points connect.
Performance practice
Sequenza VII, again, does not have bars - the traditional way we mathematically distribute musical notes in a score. Instead, it has time spaces, defined (in seconds) as 3’, 2.7’, 2, 1.8’, 1.5’, 1.3’ and 1’. Of course, we musicians are not used to perform while looking at a stopwatch (terribly inconvenient). We can, however, translate the given information into a time measuring device we are already used to, since 1815: the metronome. In doing so we must keep in mind that these time spaces are flexible, as indicated by the interrupted lines between what would be measures. In order to properly identify exactly how long each ‘measure’ should last, I utilized the following formula:
3’ = 6 beats at 120
2,7’ = 6 beats at 144
2’ = 4 beats at 120
1,8’ = 3 beats at 108
1,5’ = 3 beats at 120
1,3’ = 3 beats at 152
1’ = 2 beats at 120
The metronomic assistance above is not the Berio Sequenza. Berio Sequenza requires us to feel its pulse, and present it without such external aid. However, as a tool for learning, when we practice with these metronomic assistances we begin to feel movement within the piece. Take, for example, the first two measures on the upper left side. The “faster” second measure propels the phrase forward:
TAK………...TAK………..tak….TAoooo….TAK!
The second bar is faster, helping us psh that musical line forward. For that to happen, however, the oboist must feel that movement. A metronome can assist us in understanding the difference between those two bars, but only our own inner feeling can help us drive that pgrase forward.
The same is felt in the third line, beginning with the 32nd notes and leading to what
appears to be a simpler second measure but in fact is a busier one, lending our motives into the mf. Even more pronounced is the beginning of the 7th line, leading all the way to the 3rd measure with its overblown multiphonic, but then it doesn’t stop there, does it? The tension on the phrase continues forward and leads all the way through the 6th line until the 5-second fermata on the beginning of line 8. This line of thinking, of seeing the time spaces not merely as a mathematical disposition of notes (akin to a regular bar with a key signature) but as an engine of expression, is what compels us artists to see the genius behind this work, and how each time space is there for a reason, expecting us to find its meaning and lead to an exciting performance, tying together specific motives and nuances.
Another way to learn the proper, composer-inspired, rhythmic disposition of notes is to study the sister work to Sequenza VII, called “Chemins IV”. Chemins is a separate line of works by Berio, in this case written for oboe and 11 strings and…get this:
it is written in traditional rhythms (!). Chemins IV allows us to sense how the composer originally imagined the placement of notes, and also shows us what happens during those long fermatas, with the strings performing amazing interludes. And, to rescue my jabbed ego on the case of the long fermatas at the climax of the piece later on, Berio wrote significant string action during the time those fermatas were to be held. So they are to be held for those 3, 4 and 5 seconds after all (so there!), provided, of course, that the direction of the phrase is not violated.
I play Sequenza VII in the old version. More recently a supposed “new” edition came out. I
couldn’t find much that was different in it until I noticed that on the 9th line, 7th measure, the soft dynamic was literally scratched off the high-G, permitting the player to continue holding the previous, loud and flatter-tongued high-G, in a stunning coup for an easier time practicing, as the subito soft high-G requires exquisite embouchure and air skills. What a pity.
The effect of the high-G having its carpet pulled out from underneath it is brilliant, and phenomenally performed by Heinz Holliger in his historical live 1976 rendering of it, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npLqXW-Qlg0, more precisely at location 4:19, being careful to remind everyone that microphones eat our dynamics like hungry lions. Holliger ought to be commended for the superb control up there. Furthermore, in Chemins IV the dynamics are very clear on the 4th bar after rehearsal letter “J”. Is seems irrefutable that the composer desired that change of dynamic to occur, and oboists should just practice harder to achieve it rather than taking the easy route out.
This is the YouTube link to my live recording of Berio's "Sequenza VII", from the second round of the 1988 Geneva International Competition, where I was awarded the 1st Prize. It was performed from memory as I usually do with this piece, for reasons I will disclose in the next two articles for this blog: https://youtu.be/ghZXqGsqY9Q
Thank you.
Alex Klein
P.S. This text was written entirely by myself, without assistance or review from any AI source.
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