RECREATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE

THE CREATIVE CONTINUUM IN BRIN, BY LUCIANO BERIO

Abstract

This article investigates musical recreation processes involved in translating a piece originally written for piano into a guitar piece, Brin, composed by the Italian composer Luciano Berio in 1990. Considering the relevance of Luciano Berio's thought and work to the field of musical arrangement/rewriting, this article focuses on analyzing, discussing, and reflecting on inventive processes and procedures linked to musical (re)creation in the context of 20th and 21st-century music. Initially, I conduct a musical analysis of the work focusing on gesture and sonority. Then, I analyze the arrangement/rewriting processes and the procedures – inventive actions – employed by Bruce Charles in translating the work for guitar, in order to observe the following set of inventive procedures in the analyzed translation: notational recreation, reconfiguration of sound aggregates, maintenance and additional resonance strategies, exploration of scordatura, and spectral activation ornamentations.