Milan: at the threshold

On 21 February 1957, the young German music critic Fred Prieberg set off to Milan to visit Italy's first electronic music studio, the Studio di Fonologia, nested within the Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) headquarters on corso Sempione. The resulting essay, entitled ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’ (‘Electronic Music in Milan’, 1958), is one of the earliest accounts of the studio to have been written by an outsider.Footnote ¹ In it, Prieberg describes the output of the studio's two founders, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, from the year of its foundation, 1955, until 1958.

From the point of view of the studio's nominal focus on phonology (and thus on aspects of the human voice), this is an obscure period. No extensive work on the human voice had been carried out there by the time Prieberg visited. Berio's Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), the first major composition from the studio to use a sampled human voice, was then just being sketched (Prieberg mentions it at the end of his essay). Prieberg therefore interprets the word ‘Fonologia’ in the studio's title as signalling not a concentration on voice, but a string of early sound experiments unconnected with musical purposes.Footnote ² Two years later, the studio's composers would produce the extended experiments with recorded voice (more precisely, Cathy Berberian's voice) that ushered the institution's name into anglophone musicology. Among these experiments the most famous is surely Berio's Visage (1961).Footnote ³

Yet Prieberg's account is striking in that it gives careful thought to another issue that is rarely considered in recent musicological accounts of the studio: the nature of its belonging to Milan. Prieberg begins the essay by recalling at length his train journey towards the city:

Such descriptive detours are highly unusual for Prieberg. Indeed, this account of the urban landscape is a strange moment in his rich output of essays on electronic studios. ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’ forms part of a collection of studies of electronic experiments in cities as disparate as Tokyo, New York, Warsaw and Paris; none of the essays – apart from the one on Milan – is introduced with a description. Prieberg's evocation of the city, then, is hardly a rhetorical flourish, but rather something of an allegory, a means towards a political commentary that rises closer to the surface as the description develops. Is Milan, Prieberg wonders, really part of Italy? Is it not rather a freak occurrence on the plains beneath the Alps?

Prieberg's geopolitics of Milan was hardly a new idea in 1957. He is here combining an inherited German Romantic perspective on Goethe's ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’ with the long-standing local rhetoric of Milan's precarious belonging – as an Austrian-dominated city with high ambitions to compete with Paris and London in the European cultural circuit – to the Italian nation-state. Milan's showy urban modernity, a token of its constant attempt to emancipate itself as a central European urban centre, clashes here with the symbolic, near-Arcadian imagery of Italy fashioned during the French Enlightenment and German post-Enlightenment. The clash between modernity and pre-modernity, and between the northern city and the central European literary discourse about Italy, is laced with a complex politics. The Italian literature scholar Roberto Dainotto recently – and boldly – argued that southern Europe, and Italy especially, served as a means of maintaining symbolic ties, and yet also substantially warding off the south-eastern Mediterranean, understood as at once the point of origin of modernity and an embarrassing pre-modernity that needed to be overcome. For Dainotto, it was Montesquieu who crystallized the thought that ‘as colonies of the Oriental world of Islam, the civilizations of Spain and Italy did not constitute an integral part of Europe but were its negative south’.Footnote ⁵ Goethe's lemon blossom and Prieberg's ‘tanned’ peasant uphold this order of things: Italy is defined as a place both aesthetically exquisite and incapable of truly belonging to Europe's modern core.

With this symbolic network in mind, we might note that the peasant evoked by Prieberg is overladen with sonic signifiers – notably the first ones we encounter in what is, after all, an essay on a musical institution. These signifiers are both related to voice: the bird, most obviously, but also the shawm, which Prieberg describes in terms of the peasant's exhalations.Footnote ⁶ Even the landscape around Milan is complicit in this imagery, for the Alps are described as a set of teeth in a mouth whose cavity can only be the Po flatlands that lie beneath the mountain, the plain which Milan was built to dominate. Curiously, Prieberg refrains from describing any sound outright; it is almost as if the medium of the written letter had discreetly stopped short of approaching its limit – a carnal orality made of breath, of teeth, of animal sound. We, the readers, are provided neither with birdsong nor with a mention of the shawm's reedy snarl, but are rather left suspended between the anticipated sonority of the apparition and its literary rendition. The peasant may have been summoned to reassure Prieberg (and us with him) that Milan is truly an Italian city (at least by the diktats of German Romanticism), but he does not quite deliver; he is silent, still, as immaterial as a ghost. And it is now that the studio finally makes an appearance. Prieberg continues:

Offered up as a cinematic jump cut from the peasant musician, the image of the studio shares some essential cues with that of the apparition we just left: white, evoked in relation to the peasant's bird, coats the building's outer walls; the juxtaposition of the peasant with the caged songbird he carries resonates with the juxtaposition of the houses on corso Sempione with the white headquarters of the RAI building; there is even a symmetry between the mesh of the birdcage and the steely web of the radio tower. More than a jump cut, Prieberg's turn to the studio is a slow dissolve, something close to a ghostly superimposition: these two figures – the peasant with his sonic paraphernalia; the host institution of Milan's electronic avant-garde – point us towards a cluster of unresolved tensions between sound, voice, city, national identity and European geopolitics.

My article delves into the historical connections between city, voice and the Studio di Fonologia's early years, providing an intellectual and political foundation to the better-known abstract work on the recorded voice of the early 1960s. I argue that the peculiarity of the Italian electronic avant-garde in the 1950s resided not only in its combination of electronic and sampled sound materials and in its attention to the voice, but also in the way the focus on voice reflected concrete anxieties and hopes with regard to the political uses of language in Milan's changing cityscape, intellectual history and media presence. In order to do this, I will centre my argument in the two compositions that – perhaps not coincidentally – frame the output covered in Prieberg's essay. Although vastly different from one another, these two compositions use speech and voice to portray urban public spaces. The first is Berio and Maderna's ‘radio portrait’ of the city of Milan, entitled Ritratto di città; the second – a more abstracted take on the sonority of urban spaces – is Berio's Thema, a composition based on James Joyce's famous literary rendition of the busy Ormond Hotel in early twentieth-century Dublin in Ulysses.

Prieberg's long-winded introduction is replete with images that belonged to a thick symbolic network in mid-century Milan. The reason for the RAI headquarters’ odd physiognomy against the surrounding cityscape is that it was built at the point at which, along the boulevard-like corso Sempione and past the ancient walls, the city would have slowly begun to taper towards its north-western edge. One has to wonder whether Prieberg could have known that corso Sempione – and its continuation, viale Certosa – was an urban artery with near mythic associations in the minds of twentieth-century Milanese. After the opening of the new city cemetery (the Cimitero Maggiore) in 1895, along the city's north-western periphery, corso Sempione had become a crucial part of the route that most poignantly joins the city to its outside – the journey of the dead.Footnote ⁸ By 1906, this route had been inscribed into the urban transport system: the city authorities created a tram route that crossed the city diagonally from the south-eastern city gate (Porta Romana) to the Cimitero Maggiore in order to transport coffins from crowded minor local cemeteries to the new one; locals had nicknamed the tram ‘La gioconda’ (‘the joyous one’).Footnote ⁹ He was more likely to know that it was in the north-western periphery of Milan – the districts of Bovisa and Quarto Oggiaro, a stone's throw from cemetery and charterhouse – that the early flows of migration from the southern rural provinces were accommodated in what became the city's first industrial slums. The hurried construction of barracks and mass housing estates for workers in Quarto Oggiaro began in 1954, yielding by the early 1960s the towering housing estates that would become emblematic both of the city's industrial power and of the ghostly existence of its burgeoning and impoverished labour force, huddled around – in grim irony – the gathering place of the city's dead.Footnote ¹⁰

In Prieberg's enigmatic description, the flash-like appearances of both the peasant and the radio headquarters seem to mark the Studio di Fonologia's emergence at something of a geopolitical threshold, a state of belonging and non-belonging. This threshold is the uneasy place of Milan's aggressive urban modernity within the Italian state, manifested at street level as the city's shifting relationship to its outside: the rural outskirts disappearing, as throngs of migrant workers crowd the city's periphery. These rural, often southern workers arriving in the city were largely dialect-speaking and alienated from their Milanese surroundings geographically, linguistically and even – thanks to pervasive discriminatory attitudes against southerners – racially. They were the carriers of the accursed south from which Milan was – particularly after the Second World War – trying to unmoor itself.

Within this network, Prieberg's simultaneous evocation and negation of voice – the breath, the shawm, the caged bird – takes on political significance as the aural marker of the city's edge, the threshold between what is city and what is not; what is modern and what is not; what is northern and what is not. Voice becomes the ‘present absence’ (to follow Derrida) signalling the northern city's existence as a geopolitical threshold, its liminal status as a reluctant, hyper-modern part of the European South, caught between voice and reason, between urbanity and subalpine flatland, an industrial powerhouse powered by the labour of the very southern peasants it wishes to leave behind. Dismiss as it might the studio's reference to phonology (the science of joining phonè to logos, voice to language/reason), Prieberg's description raises a fundamental unanswered question.Footnote ¹¹ In mid-century Italy, what has phonology to do with Milan's modelling of urban modernity, and why – in the political economy of this particular city – does it join together avant-garde music and state-owned radio?

The Milanese voice in Ritratto di città

In order to shed light on the significance of voice in the project of the Studio di Fonologia, we can now address the first of our case studies, Ritratto di città, a radio documentary created by Berio and Maderna in 1954, the year before the official opening of the studio, and thus long before phonology was announced as a titular research area.Footnote ¹²Ritratto is the first piece discussed by Prieberg in his survey of the studio's output, and was in all likelihood also the first piece he was shown by Berio at the studio. Indeed, although Ritratto was never broadcast or released commercially, some scholars have considered it to be the studio's opera prima. It consists of a narrative text written by Roberto Leydi – soon to become one of the country's leading ethnomusicologists – and musical commentary composed by Berio and Maderna. Leydi's text describes contemporary Milan over the course of an entire day. Berio and Maderna provide a musical commentary of synthetic sounds, pre-recorded street noise (mainly of trams and bells) and collages of speech fragments. The documentary has a key place in the history of the studio, included as it was in Berio and Maderna's pitch to RAI executives for an electronic music studio. Despite the obvious care that went into its craft, then, Ritratto had no claim to the supposed self-sufficiency of high art, but instead embodied the overlap of the emerging project of the Studio di Fonologia with the aesthetic and linguistic concerns of state-owned radio in Milan. This relationship to place is apparent in the very title and subject matter of the piece. Ritratto was both the first and the last piece either composer would dedicate to the city that hosted their electronic experiments.

One of the immediately striking aspects of Ritratto's representation of Milan is the extent to which – despite its utilitarian raison d'être as part of a sales pitch – it rejects the trope of the electrified modern metropolis. Rather than exalt the city's bustle, the text of Ritratto lingers at the city's temporal and spatial thresholds: the hush that descends at the turning point of night and dawn; the evanescent ceiling cast by fog; the potato fields that lie beyond the city's edge. Rather than mark its urban traits, the author and the composers bring the city into sight and hearing through the phenomena that render it blurry and indistinct. In this respect, Ritratto departs from celebrations of the synergy between technological advance, urbanization and music that had had such a rich history in Milan since at least the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³ The most famous incarnation of such celebratory modernity was of course Milanese Futurism. Luigi Russolo, author of the most famous futurist manifesto for music, ‘The Art of Noises’, had in fact composed his own Risveglio di città (1913), a piece whose only remaining written trace consists of its first page: a set of staggered entries for orchestra and Futurist noise-making machines, the intonarumori. Indeed, the title of Ritratto di città is probably a variation on this precedent, one that, significantly, replaces the word ‘risveglio’ (awakening) with the seemingly more static and reflexive ‘ritratto’ (portrait, representation).Footnote ¹⁴

Ritratto is 29′ 33″ long, and consists of a male narrating voice (performed by two alternating speakers, Nando Gazzolo and Ottavio Fanfani) interpolated with – and very rarely underscored by – musical inserts ranging in duration from just a few seconds to nearly three minutes. The sound materials that make up Ritratto are raw, often coarsely thrown together via the very basic apparatus available to the composers at the time. It consists – aside from the narrating voices – of three brief collages of recorded speech (attributed to Berio), some lengthier interludes using only synthesized sound (the materials for which were loaned to Maderna by the Phonetics Institute in Bonn) and simple manipulations (mostly speeded-up playback) of a prepared piano. The arch of the documentary is gentle – it follows the unfolding of the day and night without ever reaching an apex. An opening section (duration: 4′ 30″) on night-time and silence is followed by an evocation of the start of the working day and the cold fog typical of Milan (6′ 8″). The documentary then skips ahead to the sombre end of the working day, tapers off into an early-evening visit to a ghostly housing estate, and then to Milan's duomo, its organs and worshippers (8′ 40″). The subsequent section – devoted to nightlife – is significantly shorter (2′ 27″) and followed by a lengthy section on the ghosts that haunt the city's central station and its canals (6′ 20″), which closes by re-evoking the advent of silence at the turning point of night and day.

The opening of Ritratto – and indeed the narrative arch of the whole documentary – could be seen as an inversion of Risveglio's opening. Whereas in Risveglio the initial silence is but the ground upon which staggered entries of intonarumori and orchestral instruments quickly crowd (a performance of the bustle of the awakening cityscape), in Ritratto silence is not only the ground but also a key poetic figure. The first moments of Ritratto thus consist of a narrator reciting:

Leydi's text drew specifically on authors such as Alfonso Gatto and Delio Tessa who, in the 1930s, wrote about Milan as a ghostly, sensorially elusive place.Footnote ¹⁶ Gatto and Tessa, two writers of strong anti-Fascist leanings, were writing in an anti-positivistic vein precisely as a response to contemporary noisy celebrations of urban progress. Ritratto is intriguing because it brings this literary tradition – via musical commentary and narrators – into both the aural and the oral realms. The subject of an extended opening meditation, silence is here defined as an atmosphere of tense expectation that pervades the city at the turning point from night to day: an atmosphere that is thick, almost tactile, and also sonorous. As the narrator speaks of the imminence of silence, bells appear on the soundtrack, and the final word of the opening paragraph – ‘silenzio’ – is followed by a short electronic interlude. Silence is not as an acoustic reality determined by the lack of sound, but as a mode of perception: an act of hearkening.

The association of the idea of silence with listening was very much a landmark of avant-garde musical thinking in the mid-1950s. Six years prior to Ritratto, Pierre Schaeffer had worked out a new aesthetic programme for electronic music – the famous musique concrète, constituted by edited sequences of sampled sounds heard away from their context and source. Recording technology – the sampling of sounds divorced from their origins – was understood by Schaeffer to encourage listening for intrinsic sonic properties. By 1966 he would famously theorize this mode through phenomenological terminology.Footnote ¹⁷ Following Edmund Husserl, he coined the term ‘reduced listening’, a mode in which visual and aural contexts are bracketed away (in the same way as the Husserlian epoché). In aural terms, the epoché was obtained by the composer actively silencing – via editing – any trace of the location and context of the sample. Silence was also crucial – albeit in a radically opposite fashion – to John Cage, who maintained that silence was not an absence of sonic stimuli but a renewed attention to the inescapable sonority of one's surroundings. Both Schaeffer and Cage – the latter notably for his 4′ 33″ (1952) – would have been familiar figures in the Darmstadt avant-garde that Berio and Maderna inhabited in the early 1950s.Footnote ¹⁸

It is in relation to these emerging modalities of listening – to which I shall return in the next section – that Ritratto most prominently displays its relation to the modernism of its day. And yet the silence mentioned in Ritratto does not quite perform either of these modalities of listening. Silence in the documentary involves neither abstracted sonorous objects nor rediscovered sonorous surroundings. The format of the radio documentary allows the focus to remain firmly on the voice of the narrator, who, by reciting Leydi's text, performs something of a naming ritual, defining and explaining the meaning of Milan's ‘silence’ over the course of several minutes. The incantatory role of the speaking voice becomes especially apparent at the climax (and conclusion) of the opening section:

Leydi's text describes silence not as the dwindling of noises commonly associated with the city (the buses, trams and cars of Prieberg's description), but as tied to the absence of the human voice. And yet as the focus narrows down to voice and its absence, the narrator's low, forlorn speech is set into high relief by an electronic drone; the narrator's utterances grow more prominent, more emphatic, as he lingers on the description of the last traces of human speech. The linguistic ritual surrounding the word silence – its repeated naming – ends with a peculiar twist: a voice growing more prominent as it declares the extinction of all human utterances.

The end of the section on silence – five minutes, a quarter of the way into the documentary – introduces a key aspect of the poetics of Ritratto: the foregrounding not just of the narrator's voice, but also of the way this interacts with the frequent descriptions of the human voice within the recited text. As mentioned previously, Ritratto's text is – rather unusually – spoken by two alternating narrators. Their timbre and delivery are audibly different: Gazzolo's voice is a resonant baritone, his prose carefully paced, slightly breathy, his tone almost plaintive; Fanfani speaks at a faster pace, matched by clipped delivery and a nasal timbre. Gazzolo recites most of the text (including the opening section on silence); Fanfani appears only twice, for the rare segments that describe the city's activities. The division of speaking labour has the unusual effect of turning the speaker's voice – typically a diaphanous carrier of narration – into a more noticeable material entity.Footnote ²⁰

Fanfani's first segment seals the end of the section on silence, which ends with an insert of tram and percussion sounds interpolated with a vocal collage of ‘commuters’, a mixed-gender group somnolently uttering the phrase ‘un'altra giornata’ (‘another day’) in a slow, fugal stretto. The collage, announcing the start of the city's daily activities, presents us with voices whose dull delivery clashes with the night-time wails whose hushing the narrator has just described. The opening of Fanfani's ensuing segment (‘secretly awaited noise, deep animal breath … empty ambition prepares […] the feverish clamour of the new day’Footnote ²¹) and his near martial efficiency in delivering the text mark the end of the threshold state of night, silence and mysterious voices; we, the listeners, are led back into the daytime.

Yet Fanfani's segment turns quickly back onto matters of the human voice. This swerve in subject matter is a moment of self-conscious rhetoric – the listener is now presented with the prospect of a turning point, the ultimate discovery of the Milanese voice: ‘Ma al primo rompere del sole attraverso lo sbieco delle strade, al primo dissolversi impaurito della nebbia, sulle grida dei cani e sui gemiti dei gatti riemerge la voce dell'uomo’ (‘But as the first rays of sun fall askew on the streets, as the fog begins fearfully to melt away, the voice of man rises again above the howling of dogs and the moaning of cats’).Footnote ²² The ‘voice of man’ possesses a power to break silence – one piercing the screen of fog and darkness that veils the city. However, the provenance of this reassuring, indigenous urban voice is temporarily withheld from the listener. All we know is that this voice must be different from those we have heard thus far – those of the two narrators and the chorus of commuters. Indeed, whereas all previous vocal utterances are obviously scripted, a triumph of good enunciation, the Milanese ‘voice of man’ in Ritratto might be unscripted, resonant and attached to locale – inflected with Milanese dialect; perhaps even a singing voice.

However, what follows the anticipation of the rise of the ‘voice of man’ is instead an insert, a collage of fragments in Italian bureaucratic jargon: ‘Vostro gentile riscontro … ’; ‘Il ragionier Rossi … ’; ‘Estratto conto, quietanza … ’; ‘47.5255’; ‘Entrate’; ‘Libretto’; ‘Riferendoci alla vostra del … ’ (‘Your courteous reply … ’; ‘Accountant Rossi’; ‘Bank statement, receipt’; ‘47.5255’; ‘Entries’; ‘Cheque book’; ‘With reference to yours of … ’).Footnote ²³ The mythical voice of man turns out to be nothing more than fragments of accountants’ and bank clerks’ voices. Reported writing, not speech, produces our much-anticipated human utterance. The extent to which this is a trumping of the expectations raised by the narrator lies in a combination of factors. Not only is this the voice of someone reading out loud, rather than speaking, but the text being read is hardly in a traditionally expressive lexicon. The voices of the accountants are not sampled from city streets, either, or even from an office. Instead, the sharpness of the recording and pronunciation suggests a studio recording. Lastly, although the speech of these characters does not betray the diction of a trained actor, it is unrealistically accent-free and devoid of intonation. It is as if the speech had been processed so as to shed any phonological link to the material context of its utterance.

This refusal to attach voice to place produces a ghostly human presence, and yet the commentary – now back to Gazzolo's resonant baritone – insists in presenting this insert as a true incarnation of the city. ‘In [the accountant's] dull eyes […]’, we are informed, ‘one can then read with surprise the true story of the people of Milan.’Footnote ²⁴ We are thus confronted with a peculiar paradox regarding Milanese voices: the renunciation of orality and inflection is not – as Enlightenment theories of the origin of language famously maintained – the result of the impact of modernization on an original mother tongue. Voice does not lose its resonance because of lost ties to the site of its origin; on the contrary, a speaking voice's ruptured appearance – its dullness, lack of resonance and inflection and obvious literary tarnish – inescapably ties it to its place of origin, an origin that consists of rupture. It is the seemingly disembodied nature of the bank clerk's voice that concretely anchors it in Milanese ground.

We can interpret this shift from the original presence of a pre-modern, pre-urban voice to the idea of rupture, tarnish or ghostliness as the very origin of voice at a higher symbolic and political voltage. Remember that Ritratto was created by an ethnomusicologist and two composers bent on proving – to a room full of executives – just how radiophonic musical production could be mobilized towards Milan's bid to become the beacon of Italy's post-war modernization. One of the ways in which Ritratto was deliberately of its time was, as we have seen, its refusal to frame itself as a paean to the city's violent bustle; but another gesture that is key to Ritratto is its rejection of nineteenth-century literary tropes of Italian vocality. These tropes were the aural equivalent of Goethe's lemon blossom and even Prieberg's quaint barefoot peasant. From Rousseau's praise of Italy as the land of an original voice that was both music and language to Mme de Staël's pronouncement that Italy was a country whose language was too sonically pretty really to evolve into high literature, voice had been both the natural resource of Italy and the aural marker of the country's failure to access an enlightened modernity.Footnote ²⁵

As we shall see, Berio was more than familiar with Rousseau's account of the origin of language, if not with de Staël's writings, and it is unlikely that a scholar such as Leydi – highly aware of the discourse surrounding Italian vocal production – was unaware of either text. Ritratto deftly subverts this Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment discourse about presences and origins of the Italian voice by putting forward the Milanese voice not as a discoloured copy of an original orality, but as the product of an original rupture, a ‘present absence’ that has, in fact, been there from the very beginning. The turn towards Derridian terminology is here deliberate: in 1967, Jacques Derrida would perform a deconstruction of Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues in order to advance a similar argument against the understanding of writing – and of the articulation of voice into speech – as a rupturing of an original ‘voice’.Footnote ²⁶ Yet, some 13 years earlier, the same folding of writing, orality, presence and absence was being worked out on the far less elevated intellectual ground of an RAI sales pitch. It would, of course, be excessive to say that Ritratto's authors were actively rehearsing a philosophy of voice. Although it may seem that Ritratto was imagined and woven into fairly rarefied symbolic networks (concerning the representations of Milan, or of the Italianate voice), it is key to remember that these networks held political and even pragmatic significance in view of the emerging aesthetic and linguistic parameters of the early days of Italian state radio.

More than Rome, Milan at mid-century was the fulcrum of the Italian media, and particularly of radio. Part of the political project of the new state radio was to fashion a language for broadcasting that was both cleansed of associations with the Fascist regime and intelligible to as wide a sector of the national population as possible. This project was, in the case of Italy, hampered by extreme linguistic fragmentation: local dialect, rather than the Italian language, was often prevalent among inhabitants of the peninsula in the early 1950s.Footnote ²⁷ This factor, combined with widespread illiteracy, made it impossible for Italy to partake of what Walter J. Ong termed ‘second orality’ (the renewed hearkening to speech in the era of electrified media): the Italian language was, to a large extent, an idiom spoken by the urban middle classes.Footnote ²⁸ The radio speech inherited from the Fascist regime was pompous and overwrought, a tongue that sounded irreducibly foreign to the majority of its listeners. Yet local dialect (common in regional radio stations) was banned from state radio not only because of intelligibility, but because, as Tullio De Mauro noted in 1962, dialects had political connotations: they signalled an impoverished rurality that the urbanized state-owned radio did not wish to represent.Footnote ²⁹ By the mid-1950s, Milan's multiplying factories attracted mass immigration, leading to the shaping of the city's periphery that Prieberg observed on his train journey. Remnants of dialect, the signs of rural poverty scattered around the peninsula, were folded into the rising northern metropolis in the form of the cheap labour necessary for its expansion. It is within this context that Milan now found itself at the centre of a political project of the highest order: the city was to be the site of both the production and the dissemination of an oral tradition for the national language.Footnote ³⁰

Sets of rules for the composition of radiophonic texts were written by radio journalists and famous writers alike: Carlo Emilio Gadda published an instruction manual (Norme per la redazione di un testo radiofonico) one year prior to Ritratto, in 1953, encouraging simple syntax and the avoidance of both specialized lexicons and colloquialisms;Footnote ³¹ and the journalist Riccardo Bacchelli published a similar set of rules, L'oratoria della radio, in 1952.Footnote ³² Of course, the adaptation of the Italian language to the radio had begun some 30 years previously at the EIAR, the Fascist regime's radio station that was finally dismantled in 1946.Footnote ³³ Under scrutiny in the new state radio was not only grammar, but also timbre and delivery. The historian Ada Ferrari writes of radio journalists being subjected to ‘draconian rules: a rigid protocol imposed a radiophonic diction halfway between perfect pronunciation and common speech’.Footnote ³⁴ The injunction seems far too vague (where, exactly, was the mid-point between colloquial speech and pristine diction?) to be the subject of a rigorous rule. Behind it lies the search for something Roland Barthes would describe as ‘the grain of the voice’, the audible, warm trace of the fleshy organs of speech. More specifically, what is at play is a particular characteristic of Barthes's grain: its inextricable kinship with the mother tongue. Barthes famously found grain exclusively in bodies ‘speaking [their] mother tongue’.Footnote ³⁵ And yet his opening example of a ‘grainy’ voice is a Russian church bass, despite the fact that Barthes did not speak Russian. The affect of the materiality of the mother tongue can, he seems to assume, be picked up even when we are linguistic outsiders, a presence effect that lends familiarity to that which is linguistically other in relation to us. I would argue that we find in the directives for Milanese radiophonic voices an ante litteram, pragmatic and ideological version of Barthes's contradictory linguistic credo – the search for a certain affect to be grafted onto a language proposed, rather than acquired, as a nationwide practice.Footnote ³⁶ At stake was nothing less than the projection of the flesh of a speaking body that would represent, and eventually speak to, the ideal citizen of Italy's first republic.

It is within this political domain that Ritratto's odd staging of the voice – the narrators’ voices, the definition of silence, the elusive and ultimately disappointing ‘voice of mankind’ – makes most sense. Italy would, of course, reach a more homogeneous linguistic identity (thanks to the diffusion of radio and especially television) as early as a decade after Ritratto. Yet this work marks the emergence of the ideology of a common tongue, the unique way in which the enactment of what was then a linguistic abstraction becomes nothing less than a landmark of Milan, a voice deeply rooted in its terrain. One of the most powerful literary renditions of this paradox had come only two years prior to Ritratto. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who came to be one of the foremost novelists, film directors and cultural critics of post-war Italy, worked on literary renditions of dialect – and bemoaned dialect's progressive disappearance in favour of a homogeneous common tongue – all his life. In an essay of 1952 devoted to dialect poetry produced in Rome and Milan, Pasolini remarked how a prominent author of Milanese dialect poetry seemed to be possessed by a language he did not quite control:

Leydi, Berio, Maderna and Pasolini make of the flawed utterances of their imagined Milanese nothing less than a defining trait. What Berio and Maderna staged with the strangely barren voices in Ritratto, then, was a link by way of contortion, an impossible bind between embeddedness within locale, on the one hand, and linguistic abstraction, on the other. By the diktats of state radio, to speak of Milan while in Milan was to speak in a voice cleansed of regional signifiers, a tongue that was nobody's mother tongue. And yet the same voice also had to be charged with a grafted grain – a reminder of abstract speech's provenance from a particular body, from an urban ground concretely determined by lack of inflection. The phonologically stripped word amounts to the ghostly remainder of a state-wide spoken tongue naturalized as a Milanese orality, a site of production represented as a linguistic site of origin. It is to this vocal and linguistic order of things that Ritratto ultimately belongs.

It is perhaps not surprising that in much scholarly discourse on the Studio di Fonologia up until the late 1990s – starting with Prieberg himself – Ritratto has been cited as the studio's opera prima. This position has been debunked by recent work, which has rightly pointed out Ritratto's coarse assemblage, its pre-dating of the studio's official opening and its functional raison d’être as evidence sufficient to cleave it from the studio's successive work on the voice.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, it would be incorrect to bundle Ritratto into the same category – that of self-sufficient art composition – as later work on the voice carried out at the Studio di Fonologia. However, precisely because it is was never intended to be approached as an autonomous aesthetic object, Ritratto speaks with great precision about the conditions of possibility for the Studio di Fonologia as a linguistic, aesthetic and political project. To be sure, Berio and Maderna's linguistic and aesthetic parameters shifted, predictably, towards an embracing of the non-semantic aspects of human speech once they started working on bona fide electronic compositions based on sampled human voices. As I mentioned earlier, however, Ritratto would also be their last piece overtly to feature the site of its production, Milan. Thema is centred on a particular place – the Ormond Hotel's bustling lunch hours in 1904 Dublin – that in every way seems distant from 1950s Milan. Subsequent works like Invenzione su una voce (1960) and Visage (1961) would not be centred in a place or a time. But the ghost of logos – an anxiety about the conditions of possibility of linguistic exchange – continued stubbornly to haunt the production of the studio. As I will argue in the rest of this article, this same twisted structure, this same bind between linguistic abstraction and commitment to locale, would feature in the studio's mission statement and, eventually, in the first successful electronic composition for voice produced at the studio – Berio's Thema.

‘Musical phonology’ in Milan

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale della RAI opened its doors in the RAI headquarters on Milan's corso Sempione in June 1955. The name of the studio – which unusually juxtaposes a linguistic discipline with music – has been attributed to one of its head engineers, Gino Castelnuovo; whether or not Castelnuovo was responsible for this, by 1956 the complexities of the term ‘phonology’ had worked their way into the studio's aesthetic programme.Footnote ³⁹ The writer and literary critic Umberto Eco, who worked as a writer for RAI TV in the 1950s (and began frequenting the studio assiduously when collaborating with Berio on Thema in 1957), tells of the presence of key texts on ‘phonology’ on the studio's bookshelf:

It seems unlikely, however, that Eco got a chance to raid the studio's library before he began working with Berio in 1957, leaving us to wonder how long Saussure and Trubetzkoy (whose Principles of Phonology of 1939 is probably the text to which Eco is referring) had been on the shelf before his arrival – and who, exactly, had read them.

If we backtrack to 1956, for instance, we can hear the ghost of Saussure in the official mission statement for the studio, penned by none other than Berio himself. The statement mentions ‘un'attività di ricerca tuttora in preparazione, riguardante la memoria e la qualità di uno stimolo sonoro […] i rapporti tra audizione e fonazione, con speciale interesse alla voce cantata’ (‘research activities that are in preparation, concerning memory and the quality of sonic stimulus […] the relationships between audition and phonation, with a special focus on the singing voice’).Footnote ⁴¹ The words ‘audition’ and ‘phonation’ – terms straight out of Saussure's Cours – hint at Berio's familiarity with structural linguistics. Yet more striking is the peculiar reading of Saussurean linguistics Berio performs here. Phonation, for Saussure, was an understanding of voice as a performance of a linguistic signifier, and nothing more; inflection, accent and other aspects of the specific vocal utterance have no causal impact on signification. The fact that Saussure famously did not make parole a cohesive and systematic part of his study of language has long been critiqued – by scholars of the voice such as Mladen Dolar – as a dismissal, or, as Dolar puts it, even as a symbolic murder of the voice's sonorous dimension.Footnote ⁴² For Saussure – so the story goes – phonè had to be flattened into a diaphanous carrier of logos to become the subject of a systematic theory of language.

Recent work by scholars such as Patrice Maniglier has begun to bring back to our eyes and ears the complexity of Saussure's understanding of parole not as a brute datum to the senses with no inherent linguistic valence, but as an order of linguistic phenomena that could not be reduced to mere causality, hinting at modes of conceptual relations far beyond both causality and dichotomy. It seems, in other words, that the Cours had already anticipated some of the very critiques to which it would be subjected by post-structuralist thinkers of the 1960s.Footnote ⁴³ But such evaluations of Saussure were certainly not part of the intellectual discourse surrounding Berio's early days at the studio – years in which, in fact, post-structuralist critiques of Saussure were beginning in France. This is to say that Berio's juxtaposition of ‘phonation’ – intended as a voice fully subservient to the signifier – with singing and music is a striking and (for the times) unorthodox interpretation. In order to make sense of this clash between structural linguistics and an interest in melos, we need to remember that for Berio ‘phonation’ went hand in hand with an attention to listening – that is to say, ‘audition’ as well as the qualities of ‘sonic stimuli’ independent of semantics. There is, then, a phenomenological slant to Berio's linguistics, but one that does not – as is the case with Schaeffer's phenomenology – toss logos out of the equation. A sung text is a phonation that does not relay transparent signifiers – intelligible words – but an indefinable something else, something that is neither a melody beyond words nor functional speech, a moment of suspension between phonè and logos. Phonology, then, might be taken here not as the default disappearance of voice into sign, but rather the study of the process by which the sounds of words – sung, inflected with accent or intonation – are produced, heard, parsed and eventually brought to signify.

Yet it is important to remember that these terms, and particularly the term ‘phonology’, could be manipulated so freely by Berio only because their meaning was, at least in the texts Berio was using, itself unstable. Maniglier points out that for Saussure, phonology was ‘the study of the mechanism of our [speech] organs’,Footnote ⁴⁴ a discipline concerned with the most carnal aspect of language production. It is striking that Saussure should give this nearly physiological definition to a word, ‘phonology’, which unlike ‘phonetics’ has logos built into it. Nowadays, our understanding of phonetics versus phonology relies on the Prague linguists, and is a reversal of Saussure's definition. The difference between the two terms had most famously been discussed by Trubetzkoy in his Principles of Phonology, the very text that – in Eco's account – flanked Saussure's Cours on the studio's bookshelf. For Trubetzkoy, whereas phonetics concerns itself with cataloguing phonemes, mere physiological attributes of the voice, phonology approaches phonemes in their functional relation to a particular language.Footnote ⁴⁵ So to which phonology – Saussure's or Trubetzkoy's – did Berio adhere? I would argue that his writings and, most of all, his compositions, show that he in fact conceived of phonology as the passage-work between the voice as a sonorous and physiological phenomenon and the inescapable linguistic life it is afforded as an auditory phenomenon. Music serves as the means to stretch this gap between phonè and logos into a phenomenological encounter. Words misshapen by singing, misheard, misspoken, their meaning lost and reappropriated, are reclaimed from the limbo of structural linguistics and afforded a new life not as mere sound, but precisely in their quality of being stretched towards, and yet already beyond, semantics. This is a musical phenomenology that is always twisted back towards logos, inflected by a desire to align the sound of words with semantic – and indeed political – intelligibility.

The studio's insistence on the linguistic discipline of ‘phonology’ has often been understood to have borrowed from its German predecessor, the Institut für Phonetik und Kommunikationsforschung at Bonn University. During the early 1950s, the Bonn Institut was led by composers such as Robert Beyer, Herbert Eimert and Werner Meyer-Eppler, and it conducted in-depth research into speech-writing and speech-synthesis techniques, providing impetus for the more famous electronic music studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Maderna had close relations with the Bonn Institut, to which he turned for one of his earliest electronic experiments, and whose materials he borrowed in order to compose the soundtrack to Ritratto di città. Yet the peculiarity of Italian anxieties about voice at mid-century lies in the minor but crucial shift between the two institutions’ titles: the change from the ‘phonetics’ of Bonn to the ‘phonology’ of Milan, with the cipher of logos built into it and yet strangely receding.Footnote ⁴⁶

Given the concern with the distribution and acquisition of language typical of Milan and of Milan's RAI at mid-century, Berio's reimagining of phonation is hardly an idle aesthetic concern. His evocation of phonology leads us into intellectual lineage and epistemic genealogy of the studio's attention to the aurality of speaking and singing. Let us return to Berio's mission statement quoted above. Immediately after evoking Saussure, Berio writes that the focus on the singing voice ‘si collega in parte con altri oggetti di ricerca riguardanti la musica popolare lo studio della quale, in questi ultimi tempi, ha subito un radicale rinnovamento sia nei concetti che nei metodi’ (‘is connected in part to other research goals concerning folk music, the study of which has, in recent times, undergone a radical renewal both on a conceptual and a methodological level’).Footnote ⁴⁷ The éminence grise behind this statement is none other than Alan Lomax, whose field recordings of Italian traditional songs date back to the years 1954–5; Lomax's demonstration of the use of portable electronic technology for the purposes of building an archive of oral traditions had been seminal for the emergence, in those same years, of Italian ethnomusicology as an academic discipline.Footnote ⁴⁸

Lomax had a direct relation with the Studio di Fonologia: in 1954, he had corresponded with Berio regarding experiments with the sonograph – a device that converted sound into phonetic notation. The written classification of sounds into phonemes – away from semantics – carried out via the sonograph was indicative of Lomax's analytical method with regard to field recordings, a method he would make public in 1959 as his now renowned ‘cantometrics’. Although we cannot here delve into a review of Lomax's work, it is worth mentioning a key detail. Cantometrics – a complex set of parameters for the sketching of relations between the contours of individual and collective singing and the political ordering of the society to which that singing belonged – famously renounced semantics and language as a core concern in favour of a physiological attention to voice. Lomax's interest in speech-writing technology was aligned far more with Trubetzkoy's ‘phonetics’ than with ‘phonology’; yet beyond that, it would also become the means of formulating vocality's unmediated relationship to the body politic at large, without the middleman of language. The systematic analysis of speech and song as mere sound – which was a necessary part of cantometrics – was also an aspect of the sometimes colonizing flavour of Lomax's ‘samplings’.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is, on the one hand, not surprising that Berio should have been interested in Lomax's research: the technologically mediated reduction of speech to sound would become an integral aspect of his poetics by the time he started working on Thema in 1957. Yet, on the other hand, Lomax's preliminary methodological renunciation of language as a parameter differs fundamentally from Berio's unwavering interest in the transformation of sounds into signifiers: for him, sounds were to be heard in a tense state of potentiality towards intelligible language – logos, again, as the ultimate (but not necessarily immediate) destination of phonological attention. The comparison between Lomax and the Studio di Fonologia's project – and their differing, but somehow complementary relationship with language – can also be understood in terms of engagement with locale. Lomax could work on the voice as he did because of exclusive interest in rural milieux with relatively homogeneous speaking practices; the studio's interest in language implied, as I have argued, a focus, aurally and politically, on the city. The apparent dichotomy between the two – and even the implied distinction that sets up the country as the historical predecessor of the city – has long been shown to mask a deep entwinement.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Raymond Williams's famous analysis of this issue, the country is presented as the originary myth that grounds the city, which is its ideological offspring and a way of masking the flows of labour that connect the two. Williams writes of English commentary upon English urbanization and rurality, but to apply the analysis to Lomax and Berio means bringing in a further element of geopolitics. Lomax, an envoy from the wealthiest state among post-war Western powers, saw Italy as the south of Europe, a rural periphery of urbanized central Europe; the cosmopolitan Milanese avant-garde both internalized this view – which dates back to the French Enlightenment – and fought against it by making their symbolic milieu intensely urban.Footnote ⁵¹

In the intellectual communities of post-war Milan, the relationship between speech and politics had been brought to the fore by the work of one of the most important intellectual influences on the Italian post-war, Antonio Gramsci – which drew on his training as a linguist. The founder of the Italian Communist Party (1921) as well as the author of a monumental political history of the Italian peninsula, Gramsci had died in prison in 1937. His Prison Diaries were published posthumously by the Turin editor Einaudi in 1948, and in them he famously drew a direct connection between Italy's lack of a nationally spoken language and its political failures, including, of course, Fascism. Gramsci's impact on Italian anxieties regarding language lay with his critique of Italian politics, which hinged on the question of intelligibility, a critique that included a brief but striking condemnation of one of the most celebrated exports of nineteenth-century Italy – bel canto opera:

Gramsci's attack encapsulates his concern with language: in Risorgimento opera the versified Italian of nineteenth-century librettos – unintelligible to most inhabitants of mid-nineteenth-century Italy – was invested, via the incisiveness of melos, with a memorable meaning devoid of semantics. Yet what is at stake in his statement here is not so much a general condemnation of music as a political semiotics of the singing voice. For Gramsci, the urban bourgeoisie used music as a way of effacing – rather than overcoming – the linguistic gap between their literacy and the dialectal oral cultures of those beneath them. The ‘words set to music’ in opera are despicable to him because they are the vulgarization of landmarks of bourgeois ideology: subject-against-society dynamics, heightening of individual sentiment, pieties regarding the poor. Yet they are not absorbed through readership, or even through language, but through the affect of vocal melody, an affect that commands attention and memory beyond logos. It is this masking of the literate and linguistic through the aural and non-linguistic that grieves Gramsci. Gramsci identifies in the operatic voice the ineffable affect of a literate bourgeois ideology working its way into the aural life of working and rural classes.

Coming of age as left-wing artists in the early 1950s, both Berio and Maderna were exposed, directly or indirectly, to Gramsci's linguistic, historical and economic analyses of Italy. Maderna, who had joined the Partito Comunista Italiano in 1952, had set one of Gramsci's prison letters as part of a 12-note cantata in 1953. It is not difficult to hear after-echoes of Gramsci's disdain for bel canto opera in Berio's initial pleas for an Italian electronic music studio, such as his review of a concert of tape music held at MoMA in 1953. Roused by American electronic experiments to the need for a homegrown Italian electronic compositional school, he complained: ‘Nessuno dei giovani musicisti italiani ha fino ad ora potuto “consumare” con serietà, in patria, esperienze elettroniche di sorta. Tenori e mandolini sono evidentemente i privilegi che, al momento, si preferiscono ancora riscattare’ (‘Up until now, none of the young Italian musicians has been able genuinely to take advantage of electronic innovations in their home country. It seems that tenors and mandolins remain, even today, the main assets we like to bank on’).Footnote ⁵³ Berio identifies the stunted artistic development of Italy with an iconic timbre – the tenor and mandolin combination, the standard instrumentation of nineteenth-century Neapolitan love songs and serenades. A literary and amply exported packaging of local oral musical tradition, Neapolitan song stands here for a version of Italian folklore that complies with – and is therefore marketable to – those who view the peninsula as a quaint southern periphery to the more literate and politically effective central European states. In other words, centuries-old anxieties about the geopolitics of Italy within Europe echo in Berio's remark: Mussolini had famously used the image of tenors and mandolins to express his dismay at Italy's reputation for military – and more broadly political – inefficacy.Footnote ⁵⁴ We can easily reach back to long before Fascism; as I explained above, the political implications of this image of Italian vocality had been established in French and German literary discourse nearly two centuries prior to Mussolini. The extraordinary flexibility and persistence of this discourse was such that it could be evoked to express anxiety and frustrated desire towards a vast and seemingly incompatible range of ‘modernities’: from military might and totalitarianism to electronic music to – if we were to read the same quotation in a Gramscian strain – the possibility of linguistic education and enduring democratic governance.Footnote ⁵⁵

With regard to the studio's ideological set-up, however, what is most striking is how, thanks to the impact that Gramsci's magnification of the value of dialectal subaltern cultures had on Italian anthropology and ethnomusicology in the 1950s, Berio's disdain for tenors and mandolins now had a positive counterpart: the field recording. Like many of his contemporaries, Berio nurtured a belief in the ability of recording technology to bypass writing and yield sonic events in their essence. ‘The symbols of electronic music’, Berio wrote in 1956, ‘are sounds themselves, in their objective physical reality.’Footnote ⁵⁶ As mentioned in the previous section, Berio was familiar with the composer whose work most famously incarnated this particular conceit: Schaeffer. Indeed, Berio's interest in the modes of perception of the voice might suggest – beyond Saussurean linguistics, Lomax's sonographs and burgeoning Gramscian concerns with intelligibility across classes – also a debt to a dominant Milanese intellectual practice of the mid-century, namely a peculiar appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, particularly the work of Antonio Banfi.

Banfi, professor of philosophy at the University of Milan since 1932 and the main conduit for the translation and diffusion of Husserl's writings in Italy, was one of the most important intellectuals of 1950s Milan. Not only a philosopher, Banfi was also the senate representative of Lombardy in the Italian parliament between 1948 and 1958, and – like many Italian intellectuals at mid-century – a committed Marxist. He took phenomenology to be a mode of discovering, within one's very surroundings, within the space of the city itself, new forms of philosophical knowledge worked out – as Husserl would have had it – from the perceptual encounter with things.Footnote ⁵⁷ Banfi's work was well known at the RAI. The director of the RAI's Third Programme, the musicologist Luigi Rognoni, was a student of Banfi and a close ally of Berio and Maderna's project; another important affiliate of the studio, the philosopher Enzo Paci, was also among Banfi's students; even some journalists at the RAI were known to attend Banfi's classes at the university.Footnote ⁵⁸

The fact that Banfi's classes spawned two of the studio's most prominent intellectual allies is a key detail, as is the fact that voice and language featured prominently in their work; it was Rognoni who, in 1962, would suggest to Maderna that one of his last pieces for the studio (Le rire) should be titled after the ever enigmatic act of laughter.Footnote ⁵⁹ Paci, who had become professor of theoretical philosophy in Milan in 1957, was not a musicologist, but his work on the intersection of linguistics and phenomenology was very influential for literary and musical avant-gardes of the 1960s: in 1951 he had founded the literary journal Aut, aut, to which he would contribute, between 1963 and 1974, a regular column entitled ‘Il senso delle parole’ (‘The Sense of Words’).Footnote ⁶⁰ Perhaps most poignantly for our purposes, it was also Paci who, in 1957 (the year of his settling in Milan), would thus describe, in one of his personal notebooks, a sleepless night in the city:

Paci appears to experience here something akin to a phenomenological reduction – a defamiliarization of known objects and events that in traditional Husserlian phenomenology is an intentional act of perception. Yet for Paci, the moment of defamiliarization originates as much in the urban surroundings as it does in the philosopher's will. That is, phenomenological reduction is intentionality not only applied to the city, that is, but performed spontaneously at the meeting point between urban landscape and the observer's senses. Note that the vocal connotation is here especially strong. More than the houses, the darkness, the screeching trucks, it is the unintelligible cry of the drunkard that prompts the turn from description to philosophical reflection. The anxiety of mapping the inarticulate vocal sound into signification becomes proper to Paci's condition as a thinker: he celebrates the fresh encounter with the material surface of things, but also wonders about ‘the solution’ that these inchoate vocal sounds demand of the philosopher hearkening to the city.

Many of the elements of Paci's journal entry are the same as those of Ritratto – the linguistics of the urban voice, and the advent of silence as an atmosphere of tense potentiality related to the human voice in particular. There is, however, a noticeable difference between the ghostly voice of mankind of Ritratto and Paci's drunkard, a difference best understood in terms of the role of logos. The dull voice of the Milanese accountant in Ritratto is made diaphanous by the ideological demand for the spread of a common spoken tongue, while the drunkard's voice is completely opaque, lifted from semantics. Still, the return of phonè is here a productive moment, a state of potentiality pointing towards a new, better language announced as a messianic event. Paci attends to this phenomenon knowing that it – like the mysterious houses and urban streetscape around him – has to, and will, eventually reveal its meaning. Rather than being the concrete property of the Milanese voice (as in Ritratto), logos here is the dutiful but obscure destination of the philosopher's hearing of urban space. By 1981, Berio would quote Paci as a ‘compagno di strada’ (‘fellow traveller’) in relation to the Studio di Fonologia's experiments, and Paci would eventually publish an essay on the phenomenology of contemporary music in the studio's academic journal, Incontri musicali, in 1960.Footnote ⁶² Yet already in 1957 – well before Paci took up an active interest in contemporary music – we can find, beyond the common denominator of music, a deeper link between the studio's credo and Paci's intimate reflections on the linguistic phenomenology of the city. The drunkard's cry that haunts Paci could be taken as the key to Berio's half-turn away from the linguistic functionality of phonology – the gap between phonè and logos reconceived as an existential condition proper to the city.

Thema and the placeless space of speech

The cry of the drunkard described by Paci resonates with Berio's work at the studio: both belong to a common network that joins the northern Italian city with anxieties about the linguistics of the voice. Consider Berio's Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), his first extended composition at the Studio di Fonologia to use the voice as its sole material, and one of his most celebrated works. It consists of 6′ 13″ of elaborate manipulations (fragmentation, filtering, superimposition, varied playback speeds) of a two-minute recording of Berberian declaiming a passage from Joyce's Ulysses.Footnote ⁶³Thema can be considered the first composition to bear the weight of the studio's phonological research – an exploration of the threshold between intelligible speech and non-signifying vocal utterance.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet what marks Thema's kinship to Paci's intimate Milanese phenomenological diary is, above all, the heightened attention to the space surrounding the speaking voice.

This is a characteristic detectable as early as Thema's opening two seconds: we hear four or five voices (it is hard to determine) in the alto to soprano range, all speaking softly, each pronouncing a single word, though the word uttered appears to be slightly different in each voice. We appear to be hearing a group of people all speaking at once: but the vocal range is too narrow, the dynamics too hushed – the words too phonetically alike for any single word or individual voice to emerge. It is as if we were hearing a single voice distorted by an overly reverberant space, a word enshrouded by the halo of its own sound. This is hardly field-recorded babble: the recording is clean of ambient noise, and the stacked words align into a clear rhythmic attack – a quick short–short–long figuration, almost martial. The effect is that of an interpolation to be registered, but not understood, across space. In other words, it is a spectacular, staged mishearing of an utterance released into a common, reverberant space shared by a remote speaker and us, the listeners.

The opening of Thema presents us with a much more material treatment of the voice than we heard in the diaphanous ‘voice of mankind’ offered up in Ritratto. We hear, that is, speech in which semantics are masked and the vocal delivery is highlighted. In the case of the opening of Thema, this ‘masking’ of semantics and subsequent attention to the voice's material qualities is effected through the crafting of an imaginary acoustic environment, a resonance chamber whose echo blurs articulation. This procedure is the result of a patented compositional device which Berio terms a ‘word chord’. In ‘Poesia e musica: Un'esperienza’, an exegetic essay on Thema published in Incontri musicali in 1959, Berio describes this device in detail, thus revealing an intensely spatial conception of the sounds of speech themselves:

By ordering and stacking words with similar formants (the technical term for the points of resonance of the vocal apparatus mentioned above), Berio conceived of words themselves as articulations of the body's inner resonance chambers. This is a carnal conception of the voice in space, then, but one that remains tied to articulate speech.Footnote ⁶⁶ Formants are mostly a property of vowels – sounds, that is, in which the throat and mouth resonate without the stopping of glottis, teeth or tongue – and so for Berio to have retained the consonants that connect the vowels within words was a particular aesthetic decision. He retained the contour of speech instead of working with isolated phonemes, thus delineating, even through such sophisticated electronic manipulation, a potentiality for logos.

The simultaneous attention to speech and to a mercurial acoustic space is a key conceptual and compositional aspect of Thema. It was, for instance, not only the first composition from the Studio di Fonologia systematically to explore the voice, but also the first to be conceived in four-track spatialization.Footnote ⁶⁷ Besides compositional matters, the primary literature produced by Berio and Eco on Thema also treats the concept of space – and the space of spoken utterances – as an important trait of the composition. In the opening of the essay ‘Poesia e musica’, Berio writes:

Yet for all this focus on matters of resonant spaces, Thema is not a composition about an identifiable place, a locale with semiotic and linguistic connotations. Unlike Ritratto, for instance, it makes no reference to Milan, or indeed to anywhere else. It is based on snippets of recorded speech that are from studio recordings rather than from live recordings; moreover, it makes exclusive use of speech in a foreign language (English) and of a literary excerpt by an author (Joyce) whose experimental use of English notoriously verges on the nonsensical. If Thema is a piece that explores the spatial aspects of vocal utterances, then it does so in a space that is oddly placeless – and, what is more, geopolitically indeterminate.

The contradiction of combining a sensuous rendition of the spatial qualities of listening with a highly abstracted approach to place can be better understood in relationship to the studio and to Milan. Examined from the vantage point of the studio's linguistic and anthropological ambitions of 1956 (ambitions that were very much grounded in Milan), Thema constitutes a steep departure, a strong move towards abstraction. One might even say that Thema – relying as it does on prestigious literature in a foreign language – was crafted with a high-brow, international audience in mind. And entice them it did: Thema went on to have a successful musical life of its own – first as a concert piece, then as part of several LP collections and, by the 1990s, on CD. It is included in anthologies of electronic music to this day and has been accorded a rich analytical bibliography.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet Thema is also part of a thick legitimizing discourse tied to the radiophonic medium and to the Studio di Fonologia. It was originally meant to be part of a lengthy Italian-language radio documentary on the phenomenon of onomatopoeia and its relation to electronic composition for voice. The documentary – a collaboration between Berio and Eco – was written and recorded but, like Ritratto, never broadcast.Footnote ⁷⁰Thema was also – unlike its equally celebrated sibling compositions from this period, such as Maderna's Dimensioni II / Invenzione su una voce (1960) and Berio's Visage – the subject of an essay published by Berio himself (in 1958 for Incontri musicali). In other words, to become the highly regarded aesthetic object it is today, Thema had to shed a husk: it had to lose the traces of its function within the legitimizing discourse of Milan's electroacoustic laboratory.

This hybrid relationship to the site of production is the source of a tension that transverses the structural aspects of the composition, as well as the piece's historiography within the institution of the studio. We find elements of this tension in the piece's relationship to literature. If the use of Joyce's text signals a departure from the interest in local oral cultures and the linguistics of speech, it is also remarkable that the specific passage chosen for Thema concerns the aural experience of a particular site – the author's own home city, and specifically Dublin's Ormond Hotel at dinner time.Footnote ⁷¹ The pub's bustle is depicted as heard and mused upon by the novel's protagonist, Leopold Bloom. The excerpt, found at the beginning of the eleventh chapter of Ulysses, exemplifies the Joycean flow of consciousness – albeit a consciousness that is filtered almost exclusively through the sense of hearing.Footnote ⁷² This literary conceit yields a text so saturated with onomatopoeic language and juxtaposed, grammatically loose fragments that it is almost incomprehensible to the reader:

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons,

As Joyce's chapter unfolds, all the words jumbled together in the opening two pages are found again as part of a more coherent narrative structure revolving around Bloom's visit to the Ormond Hotel. Bronze and Gold, for instance, turn out to refer to the two barmaids of the Ormond Hotel, thus nicknamed by Bloom because of their complexions. The ‘hoofirons, / Steely ringing’ refer to a passing carriage overheard from the window of the pub, while ‘imperthnthn thnthnthn’ is the mocking retort of a patron who has just been called ‘impertinent’ by one of the barmaids – and so on. By the end of the chapter, the opening two pages become intelligible not as abstract experimentation with language, but as a rendition of Bloom's hearing of the Ormond Hotel, recorded in detail through a linguistic device that captures not only snippets of intelligible speech, but the unconscious sense-making perceived through the din of inanimate objects: cutlery, glasses, coins.Footnote ⁷⁴

Joyce's language is, in other words, a transcription device, lending linguistic status to all aspects of audible human experience. Such extended linguistic power is purchased at the cost of its comprehensibility. It is therefore striking that Berio adapted Joyce's transcription technique for the voice, lending the same extensive, all-notating power – and the same tendency towards the nonsensical – not to writing, but to the act of speaking. Berberian strikingly described the piece thus:

Striking here is the comparison Berberian makes between Joyce's chapter and a sound recording – a field recording. We are reminded of Berio's professed interest in oral cultures and field recordings, and his belief in recording technology as a mode of capturing sonic events; an interest that has by now undergone radical mutation. For if Joyce's chapter is to be taken as a recording, it is a recording whose technological cognate is not the needle and wax cylinder, but the capacity for inscribing aural experience into a linguistic form: a fantastically enhanced ear phono-autograph whose mechanism is not only connected to the bones of the ear, but also extended to the capacity to hear language. Indeed, the evocation of recording technology in relation to Joyce's linguistic representation of the aurality of a public space gets at what the media historian Lisa Gitelman identified as the linguistic and textual undercurrent of Edison's phonograph – and its relationship to the complex practice of shorthand transcription. According to Gitelman, the fundamental tension uncovered by the retrieval of the linguistic and textual aspects of Edison's invention is the tortuous, non-linear path between ‘the legible representation of aural experience and some more perfect, legible reproduction of that same thing’.Footnote ⁷⁶ We could think of the relationship between Joyce's text and Berio's work upon it as a revised version of this path, one in which the storing of the illegible, rather than of the legible, is the goal of transcriptive work. The focus on the negative aspect of transcription – on the sounds that defy linguistic encoding – has the effect of rendering the medium (the transcribing body, but also the recording apparatus) thick, cumbersome, an obstacle to transparent reproduction that lands us squarely back in the realm of representation.

It is also important to note that the category at the heart of Berberian's description is not noise, but something closer to language. Not by coincidence, ‘noise’ is a term she mentions only once, and then immediately qualifies as being mediated through onomatopoeia – a concept I shall take up shortly. At stake here are rather the illegible and the unintelligible; categories that, while they include phenomena that are linguistically opaque, also imply an inoculated tendency – however frustrated – towards logos. In order to elucidate the singularity of this take on noise, we might bring this idea to bear upon one of the most powerful ideologies of mid-century electroacoustic music – Schaeffer's ‘reduced listening’. In terms strikingly akin to Schaeffer's own, Berberian muses on recording technology's ability to yield sounds ‘isolated from their context’, so that one may listen to them ‘as they are’. Yet her idea of Joyce as a field recording reveals a fundamental shift in the understanding of this supposedly impartial mode of listening. The truth to be uncovered by ‘reduced listening’ is not, that is, a generic attention to one's own hearing, but a tendency towards the linguistic – what Hans Georg Gadamer coined ‘linguisticality’ – that is present in all human listening and thus in all sonic phenomena as heard by humans.Footnote ⁷⁷

Within the coordinates sketched by Berberian, music becomes the reading, the decoding of the groove left by this linguistic transcription. Not, then, a recording of the space of the Ormond Hotel, but the vocal remediation of something already notated through language, an enactment perhaps of the very moment in which a sound is heard as language. Here we should pay close attention to Berberian's initial emphasis on ‘onomatopoeia’. Although mentioned only in passing in Berio's ‘Poesia e musica’, ‘onomatopoeia’ was the key concept behind the original documentary accompanying Thema. Indeed the documentary's full subtitle is Documenti sulla qualità onomatopeica del linguaggio poetico (Documentation of the Onomatopoeic Quality of Poetic Language). The significance of this term – and of the unorthodox interpretation Berio and Eco gave to it – is key to the role of listening to space in Thema, and is worth retracing quickly. The documentary proper begins – after the announcement of the title – with the following words:

Onomatopoeia – the making of signifiers by way of imitation of the signified's sound – is here brought forth as a moment of linguistic origin, a moment that signals a clean break with the Saussurean undertones of the studio's mission statement. The notion of a sonic and material connection between the linguistic sign and that which it signifies was alien to Saussure, who saw vocal utterances as the (mere) performance of an arbitrary linguistic sign and never in terms of the forces behind the creation and acquisition of new words.Footnote ⁷⁹

The concept of onomatopoeia in Thema is far more than a gesture, but the backbone of a lengthy argument that leads us far beyond Saussure and his discontents. For Berio and Eco, onomatopoeia does not primarily have to do with the proper moment of naming things, but is rather a vast, open-ended process of imitation that endows all kinds of sound with a primal linguistic charge. The examples presented by Berio for onomatopoeia start with ‘anthropological’ case studies such as the kinship between an unspecified African tonal language and a particular style of African drumming, and the similarities of Native American song to birdsong; but eventually we are led to the city in one odd sleight of hand: ‘Il canto degli uccelli nella voce degli indiani diviene ora il rumore delle nuove macchine. Istinto irrefrenabile dell'onomatopea’ (‘The birdsong echoed by the voice of the Indians now becomes the noise of the new machines. The irrepressible instinct of onomatopoeia’).Footnote ⁸⁰ We are then promptly provided with a brief clip of a mechanical noise of unspecified origin vaguely resembling the contour of the previously heard birdsong. But there is something decidedly awkward about this transition: whereas all examples thus far implied a rather conscious imitation of animal or human vocal sounds, we are now presented with a case of imitation involving a sound decidedly inanimate – the sounds produced by the rhythmical workings of a mechanical contraption, pointing us towards the technological apparatus of an urban environment. The documentary text also seems to be attributing imitative intent to the noises produced by a mechanism whose primary function is neither sonic nor musical; if the machine's sounds are an example of onomatopoeia, who is performing the imitation? Unless we assume an odd lapse into animism – with onomatopoeia becoming a case of things talking – the turn implied here is from speaking to listening. Onomatopoeia, that is, has become not so much a way of producing new words, but a mode of listening in which patterns (even linguistic patterns) are discerned – by ear – in all surrounding sounds regardless of their source.

The double movement – towards a notion of onomatopoeia as listening, and towards the city – can be explained in terms of Berio's and Eco's particular literary interests, which at this time verged not only on Joyce, but also on an Italian thinker who was crucial to Joyce – Giambattista Vico. In his New Science (1733) – a text very dear to Joyce, and also to Eco, who would write at length about both Vico and Joyce in Opera aperta (1962) – Vico famously staged onomatopoeia as the moment in which primitive humans answered thunderclap by imitating its sound, a moment in which ‘hearing’ a natural phenomenon as linguistic communication became the condition for the ensuing imitative sound:

Within the network of Eco, Berio and their common attention to Joyce, this passage was especially well thumbed. Joyce himself would take up this particular moment of the New Science in the beginning of Finnegan's Wake – in which the thunder is ‘named’ as the ludicrously onomatopoeic ‘bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronnt-uonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk’, and this same passage was in turn repeatedly evoked by Eco in Opera aperta.Footnote ⁸² What is important here, however, is that in Vico's New Science, the process of onomatopoeia was a concept closely tied to the very origin of civilization, the passage from nature to culture. Onomatopoeia is bound with the origin of a space in which one is being talked at, addressed – a shared, public space created at the moment in which all sounds are heard as tending towards novel words: phonè spirited towards logos.

Onomatopoeia, then, is the means to a journey that leads all the way back to one of the most famous ‘places’ of Western philosophy: the mythical site and time of the origin of language. Indeed, if Thema incarnates a place, a particular kind of site, it is precisely this primal scene of the origin of language, a place that shares traits not only with Vico's onomatopoeia, but also with other accounts of the origin of language, such as Rousseau's. We can, for instance, hear echoes of Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues behind Berio's wish for a future listening praxis whose true purpose

Here, then, is a mythical time and place where linguistic failure does not exist, but only an infinite potentiality for signification; a place where – to paraphrase Rousseau – ‘there is no music but melody and no melody but the varied sounds of speech’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is the place not of music, but, as Jacqueline Waeber puts it, of music, the excess and lack of semantics that separates modern-day music from language, while fusing them both into the same projected shadow.Footnote ⁸⁵

And yet the imagination of such a time and place – of such a primal language – is itself a historical product, one with strong geopolitical connotations. For Rousseau, writing in late eighteenth-century monarchical France, it was famously Italy, and Italian opera, which provided the modern cure for the longing for this primal ‘elsewhere’.Footnote ⁸⁶ For Berio, an Italian composer all too aware of his country's high operatic cachet, but also of this cachet's implicit relationship to Italy's position as a southern (and chronic) latecomer to a constellation of Western governments which had a longer tradition of democracy, the retrieval of this ‘music’, a lost moment of potentiality, was a means of bringing a hierarchy of Western (and central) European powers back to a level ground in which no language had more claim to reason than others. For him, this ‘elsewhere’ became experimental literature written in the English language. The symbolic role of English-language modernism is, paradoxically, one of the last traces of Milanese linguistic anxieties we can find in Thema. English – the language of the allied powers of the Second World War – enjoyed special political prestige in the first decade after the war as an international lingua franca that shadowed the formation of a state-wide common language in Italy. Italy's state radio – which had been under the aegis of the pro-American Christian Democrat party since the early 1950s – was itself responsible for the inexorable spread of the English language, which was prolifically sent across the airwaves in the shape of anglophone pop music.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet even within elite literary circles, English literature enjoyed much prestige; for example, the literary magazine Il Verri, founded in Milan in 1956, privileged English-language poetry and literature above all other foreign literature.Footnote ⁸⁸ Eco, Berberian and Leydi passed many an evening together at Berio and Berberian's home both listening to new music and examining modernist literary works.Footnote ⁸⁹ We might gain much insight into the atmosphere that yielded Thema if we stop to imagine precisely this fireside scene and the kind of listening experience it might have involved. Joyce's Ulysses – whose official Italian translation would be published by Mondadori only in 1960 – would have been an arcane object, held out and probably read aloud by Berberian, the group's only native English speaker. We might imagine her gentle American diction rebounding off the sitting-room walls as Eco and Berio wrestled with Joyce's forbidding constructions, enjoying the perceptual lilt between the semantics and non-semantics of a language that was not, after all, their own but that, in its very unintelligibility, was a welcome, even familiar, aural experience. A Milanese evening, yet an evening revolving around the aural and linguistic encounter with an elsewhere, an aural experience with no place. Phonation and audition, then, but phonation and audition still unmoored from concrete language politics: a convivial return to the origins of language.

Conclusion

The resonance of Enlightenment theories of language in Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is hardly an isolated occurrence in mid-century Milanese modernism. In a retrospective essay on the efforts of 1950s and 1960s literary avant-gardes in Italy, Eco located the Studio di Fonologia of Maderna and Berio within this intellectual climate: the Milan of the years 1955–60, which he termed an ‘illuminismo padano’ – an Enlightenment of the Po valley.Footnote ⁹⁰ Eco's reference to the Enlightenment was made in relation to a series of events and enterprises undertaken in Milan, all of which concerned literary research on language. Among them were the first translations of literary works by foreign avant-gardes (notably Brecht and Joyce), the foundation of the literary magazine Il Verri (named after Alessandro and Pietro Verri, both very active writers and thinkers in the Milanese Enlightenment of the 1760s), and the inauguration of the literary review Il politecnico (also named after an earlier Milanese literary enterprise by Carlo Cattaneo).

The Studio di Fonologia is, strikingly, the only institution mentioned by Eco that is not a literary enterprise; indeed, it is the only activity concerned not with printed materials but with listening – a listening directed at the recorded and manipulated human voice. It is likely that Eco's point of reference for the studio's output was indeed Thema – the piece over which he had the most direct intellectual influence, and a piece that puts linguistic decoding and transcription at the heart of its poetics. The association – beyond Vico's onomatopeia – with a specifically Milanese Enlightenment is here particularly pointed. An erudite historian, Eco would have known that the Milanese Enlightenment had revolved around a magazine – Il caffè – that boasted a peculiar narrative frame: it was presented by its editor as the transcribed conversations among the learned customers of a bustling fictional coffee shop in Milan. Transcription of oral exchanges, the aurality of a public venue: the linguistic scene of the Lombard Enlightenment shared similar coordinates to those of Thema. Of course, Il caffè presented perfectly intelligible intellectual exchanges rather than the non-semantic complexities of Berberian's manipulated voice, the clamour of the Ormond bar; yet the stress on a linguistic depiction of a public space roots them both in a shared concern with the nature of a common tongue, and it is this concern, perhaps, that lies behind Eco's historiographical ordering.

Indeed, Eco's enigmatic reference to the Milanese Enlightenment brings us all the way back – beyond the primal linguistic scene of Thema – to the politics of language within the state-owned media. If the studio belongs to a Milanese Enlightenment, it does so most of all in virtue of its relation to the project of linguistic reform carried out by state broadcasting. Both enterprises share the construction of a fictional, ideal speaking subject. The act of transcription offered as the condition to Il caffè's life as a text is a politically charged narrative expedient: the construction of writing as the transcription of a perfectly transparent common spoken language. It is not difficult to note the parallels between such conceits and the complex negotiation of Italian as a spoken language by the national radio – the grafting of the ‘grain’ of the mother tongue onto the ideal speaker's voice, and the wry offering up (in Ritratto) of uninflected Italian as a Milanese ‘voice of mankind’.

It is not a coincidence, perhaps, that the chronology of the studio's work on the voice coincides with the most intense moments of encounter and confrontation with the economic and political parameters of the RAI. If Ritratto was crafted the year before the studio's opening as a pitch to RAI executives, it is also remarkable that the year after Thema's completion, 1959, was also the year of Berio's resignation as director; the studio's head engineer, Alfredo Lietti, resigned the following year. With the emergence of the new medium of television, radio quickly became obsolete as a means of entertainment and linguistic education, and the budget for the radiophonic avant-garde – and its quickly ageing state-of-the-art technological apparatus – dwindled. Most of Berio and Maderna's now famous elaborations on recorded speech were created over the following two years, as if to mark the overlap with, and incumbent expulsion from, the political and linguistic project of state-owned media.Footnote ⁹¹

And so we are back to the discourse on the threshold – the state of simultaneous belonging and not belonging, of speech and insignificant vocality that haunted Prieberg's loaded depiction of the studio's geopolitical location. Near the edge of the hypermodern city hover the silent ghosts of a rural past, or so the story goes. And yet, what is perhaps most disturbing about Prieberg's peasant, with his white clothes, dark skin, caged bird and shawm, is that he, too, is already an aestheticized version of a concrete political reality, the immigrant communities that lay huddled around the expanding city bounds. The lyrical peasant is a ghost because he has been beautified out of political relevance. He plays the old shawm because he is not, in fact, a speaking political subject. Years later, the writer and activist Goffredo Fofi would report the Turinese workers’ perception of southern immigrants through an image that looks like a grim – and perhaps more accurate – version of Prieberg's musical peasant: ‘Essi guardavano con una punta di disprezzo i loro cugini di campagna che, a sentir loro, andavano in giro “con le radio appese al collo, le scarpe piene di buchi e parlavano solo in dialetto”’ (‘They looked with contempt upon their cousins from the countryside, who, by their account, walked around “with radios hanging around their neck and holes in their shoes, and spoke only in dialect”’).Footnote ⁹² Apart from the overt markers of poverty, it is the sonic imagery – the imagery around the voice, specifically – that has been most intensely modified: Prieberg's peasant did not speak, but instead blew into a shawm; Fofi's immigrant is overloaded by broadcast speech he – who ‘speaks only dialect’ – does not own, or, probably, understand. What is melody in Prieberg becomes unintelligible speech in Fofi, and the technology of the wind instrument – channelling breath away from the voice and into melody – becomes the technology of radio broadcasting, doubling the immigrant's dialectal utterance as a second, inscrutable voice issuing from the device hung around his or her neck. We might understand the studio's work of the early 1950s as bouncing conceptually between precisely these two images, harnessing music now as consolation from, now as awed rediscovery of, the sinister gift of language.