Re-evaluating Cathy Berberian in her Centenary year

Catherine Anahid Berberian (July 4, 1925 – March 6, 1983) was an American vocalist and composer born to Armenian parents, but who lived most of her adult life in Italy. She is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking composition Stripsody (1966) - a worked scored and sung like a comic book by engaging onomatopoeic sounds. She is also known as the wife and ‘muse’ (I have never liked that term) of Italian composer Luciano Berio, for whom she worked alongside around the period 1950 to 1964, after which they divorced. More on that later.

Berberian was also a scholar. She was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to study in Italy in 1950, and her important paper, La nuova vocalità nell'opera contemporanea (the new vocaility in contemporary music) written the same year as Stripsody, is an important manifesto on her contributions and perspectives. It opens with the line “What is the New Vocality that appears so threatening to the old guard?” (trans. Francesca Placanica) - a question that still hasn’t been answered today.

Berberian’s career was unusual for a women at the time. In addition to being a virtuosic performer, she was a composer, recital curator and translator (working with Umberto Eco and Woody Allen amongst others). Her later foray away from contemporary and early music (her recording of Monteverdi’s Lettera Amoroso with Niklaus Harnoncourt is breathtaking) led her in other directions. Her baroque-style cover versions of songs by the Beatles - Ticket to Ride arranged by Louis Andriessen are something. She was also doing classical riffs on music theatre - these examples demonstrating just how versatile she was as a performer of and thinker about music and it’s relatationship to contemporary life and culture. Berio’s work Folk Songs (1964) is a wonderful showcase of her ability to move between different characters and vocal inflections. Berio famously asked multiple performers to perform the vocal part in this work if Berberian was not available.

Berberian “only wrote” two works - Stripsody and Morsicat(h)y (1969). the latter a kind of morse code piece for piano. I would argue she is a co-composer of many other works - by Berio and thier common friend John Cage in particular, with whom she worked very closely. Her work with composer Sylvano Bussotti was particularly notable, with the graphically notated opera La Passion selon Sade, premiered in Palermo in 1965, an example of how important her contributions to composers’ works were. As highlighted in the beautiful film of her life, Music Is the Air I Breathe (dir. Carrie de Swaan, 1994), Berberian’s contributions can be evidenced just by watching the footage of her working with these composers. Imagine if the same opportunities would have been available to her as a composer as were made available as a performer of composers works.

Whilst Berberian came to Australia twice (in 1975 and 1980), my introduction to her was by playing in Berio’s Folksongs as a flute player at University, and listening to an LP of Berberian singing this work as part of my preparations. That changed my life - it put me on my path of a focus on the performance of contemporary flute music, that later turned to composing. Thanks Cathy (and Linda Hirst, who was the performer on that occasion in 1980-something).

To celebrate Berberian’s contributions this year, I organised a performance of Stripsody, modifying her score into a digital, animated version that put it in motion, using the Decibel ScorePlayer and Creator software - an excerpt above. It was performed by Jessica Aszodi at Monash University as part of the Monash Animated Notation Ensemble concert in September this year. This animation project was an interesting experiment with the score, understanding how it is tracked and understood by a performer, what sharing it with the audience meant. Her use of ‘sampling’ these comic strip images and sounds in this work pre dates Berio’s famous and oft cited example of something similar in the orchestral work Sinfonia, by three years. I’m not aware of other events here in Melbourne commemorating her significant impact on contemporary singing approaches, or new music scholarship. Such a missed opportunity.

Forget the other 100 year-ers Berio and Boulez this year, they are now the “old guard”. Berberian was the real visionary. And as if she needs any other street cred, she is name checked in the lyrics of the Steely Dan song "Your Gold Teeth"(1973).