Quotes from Luciano Berio

In music, as I find myself forever saying, things don't get better or worse: they evolve and transform themselves.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

A composition can include an element of improvisation as one of its layers. But jazz improvisation is based on specific codes, which don't allow the possibility to construct multiple layers, to put together different words, to have different rhetorical gestures intact.

Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

In music, as I find myself forever saying, things don't get better or worse: they evolve and transform themselves.

Creating music implies the desire to give.

Audiences must be educated, too -- in a very gentle way, of course, but the relation of the audience to music is very mobile, very different. Certainly a Chicago audience can react differently from a Paris audience or from a Rome audience.

Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.

Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

Some composers are just interested in music as form. I am much more interested in the formational aspect, in music as a process.

You must know history. Even if you want to refuse, to reject things, you must be aware of what you are rejecting.

Perhaps that's just what music is: the search for a boundary that is continually being shifted.

Music, as you know, is an incredibly complex process, including conceiving, writing, studying, organizing, listening. The fabric of music has its roots everywhere. That's why it is so beautiful.

Music became more of a film camera, or a microscope exploring all the details of a text. As a result all phonetic aspects of the text were assimilated into musical process.

I don't think music is a commodity. It can be something that you buy in a supermarket and you throw it away! There's a lot of music you can use in this way, but I'm not interested in that music, even if sometimes it's funny to hear and pleasant to hear. I'm far away from that.

Music is something that you have to do with your body. You listen with your body. In fact, a good musician has to think with his belly and to feel with his brain. That is very important.