Composition
''Coro'' was written at a time when, according to Berio, "the blood in the streets of Italy came out", partly due to the Years of Lead. Berio, a composer committed to social issues, often expressed his views and described the composition's central theme to be "the acute awareness of things at a tragic moment. On this line, he referred to ''Coro'' as being a tribute toStructure
''Coro'' is divided into 31 untitled movements of varying duration and takes around an hour to perform. Following is a full breakdown of the movements, with their duration as specified by Berio in the original score.Text
The distinction between individual and mass music is also made clear in the use of two different kinds of text. On the one hand, Berio turned to folk poetry in various languages for the solo episodes. These folk utterances are often translated from a wide range of languages and dealt with very different topics, from love and death to the oneness between man and nature. All of these songs are authorless. For example, the initial episode in which a soprano is gradually joined by four other sopranos and five contraltos is based on an American Indian text, "Today is mine". On the other hand, Berio used a different textual source for mass episodes, which is taken from a work by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Here, the process is reversed: whereas in the previous episodes the poetry from different peoples are assigned to individual singers, in the case of Neruda, his poetry is here sung by all forty singers in the massive tuttis which are the pillars of this piece. Only a few fragments are taken from the poet's three-volume '' Residencia en la tierra'' (1933–1947). The most recurring cry in the piece, "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" ("Come and see the blood in the streets"), is taken from the final verses of one of the poems included in this collection, entitled ''Explico algunas cosas'' ("A few things explained"). This cry appears many times throughout the piece as a refrain without any context whatsoever. Since ''Coro'' tends to be something different especially for singers because they are soloists most of the time (given the fact that the large number of voices often calls for a choir and not solo performers), it is generally psychologically new and often challenging. Probably to make things simpler, Berio decided to use a wide range of texts in very different —and, often, little-known— languages; however, most of the texts in African, Iranian, and American languages are generally translated into German. Berio only used five different languages: French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German.Scoring and on-stage distribution
''Coro'' is scored for forty voices and forty instruments, namely, a chorus of 10 sopranos, 10 altos, 10 tenors and 10 basses, four flutes (flutes three and four doubling piccolos), an oboe, an English horn, a piccolo clarinet in E-flat, two clarinets in B-flat, a bass clarinet in B-flat, an alto saxophone, a tenor saxophone, two bassoons, a contrabassoon, three trumpets in F, four French horns in C, three trombones, a bass tuba, a tenor tuba, an electric organ, a piano, a large percussion section played by two percussionists consisting in five cowbells, six tom-toms, ten tam-tams, a snare drum, a set of chimes, a pair of castanets, two guiro, two set of sleigh bells, maracas, two pairs of zills, a ratchet, three woodblocks, two bongos, a bass drum, a tambourine and a glockenspiel and, finally, three violins, four violas, four violoncelli, and three double basses. Although the work is largely based on folk material, Berio used no direct quotations or transformations of actual folk songs, aside from movement 6, where he used a Croatian melody, and movement 16, where he quoted a melody from his own '' Cries of London''. Berio used, in addition to this folk element, a wide range of musical avant-garde techniques. He divided the piece into 31 "self-contained and often contrasting episodes" and made clear that the same piece of text is used in several different parts of the piece with different music, whereas the same musical model can also occur several times with different texts. To the end of enhancing acoustical and visual interactions among voices and instruments, he envisaged a very specific placing of the singers and instruments on the stage, with a singer each sitting next to an instrumentalist of roughly comparable timbre and range, forming a semicircle. According to Berio, the harmonic level is perhaps the most important one, since it is the work's base but is at the same time its environment and its slowly changing landscape. This was not the first time Berio decided to place instrumentalists together with singers: he also did this in his ''Reception
Both Berio and renowned conductor Lorin Maazel have stated that one of the main challenges in ''Coro'' is the balance in sounds and, more specifically, in voices, arguing that "it sounds better in a hall". Because of this, both conductors were very critical of recordings, claiming that the rewarding experience of listening to the freshness of sounds is often destroyed, and no sense of distribution can be made when listening to a recorded version of the piece.References
{{Portal bar, Classical music Compositions by Luciano Berio Vocal musical compositions 1976 compositions Music dedicated to family or friends