| |
| | Joyce - Music: Luciano Berio's "Thema" |
 | | Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) is, along with Varèse's Poème electronique (1957-58) and Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), one of the classic works of electronic or "electro-acoustic" music, music composed directly on tape using pre-recorded and manipulated natural and electronic sounds. |
 | | Berio cites Joyce's own claim that the formal structure of "Sirens" transposes the fuga per canonem (Berio, "Poésie" 27, Ellmann 462), though he notes that "the Joycean polyphony, naturally, refers only to the network of facts and characters: a reading voice is always a 'solo' voice and not a fugue" in itself (Berio, "Poésie" 27). |
 | | Thema is a hard work to obtain, and various CDs that have featured it have been deleted. |
| www.themodernword.com /joyce/music/berio_thema.html (1059 words) |
|