Item 7.293 - A-Ronne

1 audio reel (33 min.) : 7.5 ips, 1/2 track, 2 channel

A2020-05

Digitized copy of audio reel available by request. Contact the Music Library.

Summer 1975 Walter Hall
Aronne tape transfer by Dennis Patrick for EMS library
This version with actors seems to be unique. Not sure if ever published.

Accompanying notes and related information provided by Dennis Patrick:
A-Ronne
A musical documentary based on a poem
by Edoardo Sanguineti

music by Luciano Berio

Letter from Sanguineti to Berio

Dear Sir:
a few words of comment on the text:
1) it is shorter than ordered (exactly half the maximum hypothesized); I hope this doesn't disturb you: it is a text (in compliance with your request) that can be repeated in any and every way; the order 1, 2, 3 should, in fact, be systematically violated and done violence to except in certain circumstances (for instance, at the beginning and the end of the reading), where it should instead be rattled off in an orderly manner.
2) the text I am offering you is the "material" to be transformed: my own text I can deduct from the score at the end, where I will find the real order of the composition, with all of the combinations you can manage to contrive.
3) the basic idea, as you can see, is very simple: BEGINNING-MIDDLE-END. It may be useful to mention the basic sources, although most of them are easily recognizable: the beginning of the Gospel according to John (in Latin, Greek, German: Luther's translation and changes made by Goethe, in Faust); a verse from Eliot; a verse from Dante; the first words of the Manifesto; some words from an essay by Barthes on Bataille; some words of my own, few (principally the last three: ette, conne, ronne: the three letters with which the alphabet ended in ancient times, after the "z", giving rise to the saying, now forgotten, "from a to ronne", instead of "from a to z".
4) the text; I believe, complies with your requirements for all possible plurality of intonation, having only two aims: to mark the pure temporal transition (beginning-middle-end), sliding the three moments one into another; bringing about "psychological" metamorphosis through the treatment and the intonation; questioning, at the maximum level of abstraction, the maximum of corporeity (as on the phonic level, so on the conceptual level); it satisfies, I hope, the sixteen conditions set by you in the past; plus one, that it is both musically singable and speakable. I would like to state that I am always at your complete disposal, and hope to visit you in the near future. If I may suggest a title, I believe it would be lovely to use (as it is also the title I have allowed myself to use as the heading for the text) A-Ronne.

E.S. (1974)

The subject of A-Ronne is the elementary vocalization of a text and its transformation into something equally elementary, perhaps, but hard to describe. It is not, in fact, a musical composition in the sense usually given that term - although the procedures through which it develops are frequently "musical" (use of inflection and intonation, elaboration of alliterations and transitions between sound and noise, occasional use of melody, polyphony and elementary heterophony). The musical sense of A-Ronne is primordial, that is, common to all experience, from the spoken language of everyday to the theatre, where changes in expression implicate and document changes in significance. For this reason I prefer to call this work a documentary on a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, just as we speak of a documentary on a painting or on a foreign country. Sanguineti's poetry, subjected to various readings, is not treated as a text to be put too music but rather as a text to be analyzed, and as a generator of local situations and different expressions. Lastly, A-Ronne is also something of a representative madrigal, the "theatre for the ear" of the late 16th Century in Italy, and something of a naif painting (vocal), where the broad canvas of situations, extensive as it is, can always be linked to the elementary, to recognizable feelings and states of mind: meetings between friends, discussions in the public square, words spoken in the confessional, the barracks, the bedroom, and so on. Sanguineti's poem - which, in A-Ronne, is repeated twenty times or so, reocurring in circular manner - presents three themes: in the first part, the theme of the Beginning, in the second part the theme of the Middle and in the third that of the End. It is rigorously constructed on quotations from various languages, ranging from the Gospel according to John (in Latin, Greek and German: Luther's translation and changes made by Goethe, in Faust) through a verse by Eliot, a verse by Dante, to the first words of the Communist Manifesto; from an essay by Barthes on Bataille to the last three words, the three signs (ette, conne, ronne) with which the alphabet ended after the "Z" in ancient times, giving rise to the now-forgotten saying, "from A to Ronne" in place of "from A to Z". This poem of Sanguineti's is thus, in addition to everything else, a highly articulated and discontinuous sequence of idiomatic expressions. And this is why musical idiomatic expressions appear so frequently in A-Ronne. The occasional sung episodes do not, in fact, have any musical significance of their own. They are moments among the many - and perhaps the simplest - in the liturgy of vocal gestures. Only the brief conclusive episode, based on a series of very elementary harmonic "alliterations", has a musical autonomy of its own. Accordingly, the musical sense of A-Ronne is not to be found in the sung episodes but in the relationship established between a written text and a "grammar" of vocal behavior, between a poem that always remains faithful to its words and a vocal articulation that continuously shifts and changes their meaning. What happens in fact is that the two dimensions (that of written text and that of vocal behavior) interact in ways that are always different, producing meanings that are always new. This is exactly like what happens in vocal music in general as well as in everyday language, where the relationship between the two dimensions (grammar and sound) is basically responsible for the infinite possibilities of human discourse and song.

Luciano Berio

A - RONNE
by Edoardo Sanguineti
I.
a: ah: ha: hamm: anfang:
in: in principio: nel mio
principio:
am anfang: in my beginning:
ach: in principio erat
das wort: en arkè en:
verbum: am anfang war: in principio
erat: der sinn: caro nel mio principio: o logos: è la mia
carne:
am anfang war: in principio: die kraft:
die tat:
nel mio principio:

II.
nel mezzo: in medio:
nel mio mezzo: où commence?: nel mio corpo:
où commence le corps humain?
nel mezzo: nel mezzo del cammino: nel mezzo
della mia carne:
car la bouche est le commencement:
nel mio principio
è la mia bocca: parce quìil a opposition: paradigme:
la bouche:
l'anus:
in my beginning: aleph: is my end:
ein gespenst geht um:

III.
l'uomo ha un centro: qui est la sexe:
en meso en: le
phallus:
nel mio centro è il mio corpo:
nel mio principio è la mia parola: nel mio
centro è la mia bocca: nalle mia fine: am ende:
in my end: run: in my
beginning:
l'âme du mort sort par le pied:
par l'anus: nella mia fine
wae das wort:
in my end is my music:
ette, conne, ronne: