101 Words – 076

Listening to our now four-and-a-half month old daughter exploring the possibilities of her voice, I’ve often thought of Luciano Berio’s recorder sequenza Gesti: A piece in which at first uncoordinated changes in layers of independent parameters (air pressure, pitch, articulation etc.) gradually come together to produce sounds that during the course of the composition more and more resemble that which we know as “music”. Here’s a film from the sixties documenting a performance by a young Frans Brüggen (for whom the piece was written) preceded by a short interview. And for contrast a recent performance by Sarah Jeffery.