Sinfonia (Berio)

Sinfonia for 8 Singing Voices and Orchestra is a 1968 work by the Italian composer Luciano Berio commissioned by the New York Philharmonic (for its 125th anniversary) and dedicated to Leonard Bernstein. The "singing voices" are not incorporated classically but rather speak, whisper and shout excerpts from texts in order to paint in sound an abstract and distorted history of culture. They are usually amplified. The source texts include Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable and instructions from musical scores by Gustav Mahler. The dedicatee writes in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from 1973 that Sinfonia was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties.