Berio - Chemins II for viola and 9 instruments

The best way to analyse and comment on a musical work is to write
another one using materials from the original work: a creative
exploration of a composition is at the same time an analysis, a
commentary and an extension of the original. The most profitable
commentary on a symphony or an opera has always been another symphony or
another opera. This is why my Chemins, where I quote, translate, expand and transcribe my Sequenzas for solo instrument, are also the Sequenzas’ best
analyses. They are a series of specific commentaries which include,
almost intact, the object and subject of the commentary. The Chemins are not the displacement of an objet trouvé into a different context or the orchestral “dressing up” of a solo piece (the original Sequenza),
but rather a commentary organically tied to it and generated by it. The
instrumental ensemble brings to the surface and develops musical
processes that are hidden and compressed in the solo part, amplifying
every aspect, including the temporal one: at times the roles are
inverted so that the solo part appears to be generated by its own
commentary.

Why this insistence on elaborating and transforming again the same
material? It is, maybe, a tribute to the belief that a thing done is
never finished. Even the “completed” work is the ritual and the
commentary of something which preceded it, of something which will
follow it, as a question that does not provoke an answer but a
commentary, and another question...

Chemins II, for viola and
nine instruments, was written in 1967 for Walter Trampler. From that
work other “solutions” were later developed: Chemins IIb for orchestra (1970) and Chemins IIc for bass clarinet and orchestra (1972). These three Chemins
are related to each other something like the layers of an onion:
distinct, separate, yet intimately contoured on each other; each new
layer creates a new, though related surface, and each older layer
assumes a new function as soon as it is covered. Chemins IIc is the farthest layer from the original model. I developed in it a virtual melody which was implied in Chemins II, integrating and superimposing the bass clarinet as a soloist.

Luciano Berio