Luciano Berio

We are dedicated to new opera, opera nova.

Opera nova, you know, it's like a living art form, it's future looking forward and we have composers like Josi de Oliveira who's 90 and she was a fantastic concert pianist for Stravinsky and Berio she was like the best pianist at the early 20th century and when she was very young and then she became a very important composer for Brazil also she has 11 operas we have composers like João Guilherme Ripert who has like 17 operas so we're really bringing to the us a scene of a new opera that's very vibrant and very exciting i think it's an opportunity to hear music that has never been performed in the us most of it a couple of pieces have been played here before but most of the music is really a U.S. premiere, and it's very exciting.

I think it's a moment when the opera culture is reinventing itself.

There's a lot of new operas coming up, and I think that Brazil has been doing it for, you know, At least 200 years we have a very strong opera tradition and people don't even know about it.

Phil Lesh's father was dying.

It was 1970, and the Grateful Dead's bassist, a classically trained musician who'd studied with Luciano Berio and approached the electric bass like an avant-garde instrument, had never sung lead on a Dead song.

He'd never needed to.

Garcia handled most of the vocals.

Phil Lesh was the Grateful Dead's bass player, and he was, by any honest reckoning, one of the strangest and most inventive players ever to hold that instrument.

He had been classically trained.

He had studied with a composer named Luciano Berio, an avant-garde man from a very different world of music, and Lesh brought all of that with him to a rock and roll band.

He played the bass the way nobody else quite did, not as a foundation holding everything up from underneath, but as a second melody moving through the songs, a low and roaming voice that wandered away from the notes you'd expect and found its own quiet paths through the middle of everything.

He had a trumpet teacher who pointed him toward the trumpet parts in the great orchestral works, and he studied the three Bs the way every little classical student did, as he put it once, Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.

Later, he went to a college class taught by the modern composer Luciano Berio, a figure from the far frontier of serious music.

And it was in that class that he met Tom Constantin, who would one day play keyboards in The Grateful Dead.

What he had not done, in all of that, was play the bass.

Sono a disposizione di chiunque voglia sporgersi oltre il proprio campo, prendendosi il tempo necessario a capire cos'ha di fronte.

È una cosa che io dico sempre, me lo diceva sempre mio amico Luciano Berio, che era un musicista, a proposito di sconfinamenti.

Ci sono arti che si assomigliano in qualche maniera.

Lui diceva sempre la musica, ma anche l'architettura vive di tempi lunghi come i fiumi, come le foreste, come le montagne.

Who were the, uh, 20th century composers you played?

It was Berio and Carter-

Okay

... who really expressly avoided this kind of literal repetition.

And the task they were doing was just rating how much they enjoyed the excerpt and how likely they thought it was to have been crafted by a human composer rather than randomly generated by a computer.

And that simple change not only made the music more enjoyable for people, but also made them think that it was more likely to have been composed by a human.

Berio is, like, rolling over in his grave.

[laughs]