Luciano Berio - Différences (Audio + Full Score)

Luciano Berio - Différences, for flute, clarinet, viola, cello, harp and magnetic tape (1958-59)
Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology
Conductor - Georg Köhler
Flute - Tomomi Matsuo
Clarinet - Felix Behringer
Harp - Polina Skriabina
Violin - Grigory Maximenko
Cello - Isabel Gehweiler
Différences is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio for flute, clarinet, viola, cello, harp and magnetic tape, dating 1958-59. It was written for the Domaine musical concerts in Paris and first performed in March 1959, conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Différences is one of the first attempts to combine live instruments with electronic music. At the centre of the work, the tape sound takes the place of the performers. They return with various pizzicato entries, creating a homogeneous texture which seeks only an alteration in the expression rather than a disruption in the character of the music.
Berio began the composition for Différences a year before the premiere by recording in Paris the same musicians who were to give the first performance. In the Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan he then transformed these recordings to produce the tape with which the musicians interact during the performance. Berio remarked that "[i]n Différences the original model of the five instruments coexists alongside an image of itself that is continually modified, until the different phases of transformation deliver up a completely altered image that no longer has anything to do with the original" (Berio, Dalmonte & Varga 1985, p. 126).
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[@LynnDavidNewton]

I've loved this piece since it was recorded in the early 60s. I'd been led to understand that Berio withdrew it. How glad I am to hear it once again, and with score no less, which I'd never seen.

[@MarkGrindell]

I spoke to Mr Berio about this piece in 1980 at the Wigmore Hall in London; this was the year before I met my wife; it MAY have been 1981 though. That approximate period anyway. He said that this piece was difficult because he had family coming unexpectedly half way through the composition; he was quite pleased with the result, though he did believe that it could have contained somewhat better transitions between the different layers.
I am amazed that this piece was written and executed at all; it is tremendously ambitious; Berio really succeeds in taking a series of melodic ideas, developing them, and extending them in a way that is kind of "extra dimensional" in that the usual kinds of variation and extension exist, but are placed side by side with a sort of mutagenic transformation of the instruments themselves; he is probably using ring modulators to do this, pushing the tonal relations for each instrument into a further manifold, where there are still further degrees of freedom; the basic melodic structure - the tunes - are still quite intact.
It is very sad that the recording technology doesn't do these ideas as much justice as they might; access to equipment that we would recognize as "multi track" was extremely limited. I suspect that it was recorded in a particular radio studio in Milan who had at that time very advanced equipment; other works were generated and formed there (Mutazoni, and Visage among others). I've got this score and it's very complex; it took some time with computer analysis to provide details of the recorded sounds; I have to say that I did know one or two people at Universal Edition in London ,and though this was some time ago, the story was that the manuscript was very hard to transcribe, with many uncertainties as to which fragments were actually part of the final intended performance version. It wasn't withdrawn; it wasn't published for decades really because of the technical challenges concerned with it's publication. The "definitive version" seems to have been the performance by the Julliard Ensemble that dates back several decades; the scores that they had in that performance appear to have been the ones used by Pierre Boulez to provide the version that we have today (UE31 387).

[@subspeciaeternis]

Luciano Berio finished this piece one year before Stockhausen's Kontakte in 1958-1960.
A true avantguardist composer.

[@9827george]

perfect! This is an important early work of instrumental and electronic sounds.

[@machida5114]

so good...

[@verslaflamme8185]

masterpiece.

[@robkeeleycomposer]

Thank you for downloading this marvellous piece. I wonder where he got his notes from...