In 1952, Luciano Berio studied with Luigi Dallapiccola for six weeks at Tanglewood; it was his first experience studying under a composer of serial works. Reacting to his study, he composed a number of works, among them, Chamber Music.
Composed in 1953, Chamber Music is a setting of three poems by James Joyce, an author whose work was a favorite of both Dallapiccola and Berio. Notable in that it is Berio’s first work composed using twelve-tone technique, Chamber Music predates his study of serialism at Darmstadt. The piece is freely serial, and offers a rare chance to see how Berio treated the concepts of twelve-tone organization before his more intense study of serialism. Though there is a cursory analysis of the first movement of Chamber Music in David Osmond-Smith’s Berio, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of the work.
In this thesis, I examine the ways in which Berio alters and transmutes the serial structure of Chamber Music to create ambiguities and associations between row forms – which helps to reflect the “associative epiphanies” and “phantasmagoric entanglement of different forms” that he believes are the hallmarks of Joyce’s work. His treatments of serialism within the work range from the conventional (unaltered row statements that make up parts of the first and third movements), to the unconventional (the dominance of a single note in the second movement, followed by half-step motion that is not immediately identifiable as being based in the row), to a synthesis of the two (large parts of the third movement, which synthesize material from the previous two movements). Whereas Berio claims that Dallapiccola represents Joyce’s literary style using a static formal structure, Berio uses every aspect of his composition as source material to be changed, transformed, and developed. In this way, Berio is able to better represent his view of the nature of Joyce’s writing style.