Obit from the New York Times.

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   Luciano Berio, 77, Composer of Mind and Heart, Dies
   By PAUL GRIFFITHS

   Luciano Berio, an Italian composer whose many compositions,
   ranging from chamber music to large-scale orchestral works and
   from operas to songs, combined innovative imagination and
   analytical depth with a richly sensuous feeling for sound and
   form, died yesterday in Rome.  He was 77.

   An outstanding orchestral and vocal composer who was perhaps
   most remarked upon for his works with solo voice, he was especially
   known during his long residence in New York City for conducting
   his own works with the Juilliard Ensemble, which he founded.

   Mr. Berio's love for music was exuberantly promiscuous, and it
   drew him close to Italian opera (especially Monteverdi and Verdi),
   20th-century modernism (especially Stravinsky), popular music
   (the Beatles, jazz), the great Romantic symphonists (Schubert,
   Brahms, Mahler) and folk songs from around the world. All gave
   him models for original compositions or arrangements, or for
   works that were neither entirely new nor entirely old, works in
   which threads of the old could be combined with new strands. An
   outstanding example is the middle movement of his "Sinfonia" for
   orchestra and vocal octet (1968-9), where the entire scherzo
   from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony rolls along, supporting a
   tapestry of short quotations, new ideas and spoken interjections.
   Even when his music is ostensibly original it conveys a homage
   to the past. For him to write an opera, a concerto, a string
   quartet or a piece for solo clarinet was to contribute to a
   tradition. That did not mean following traditional forms, which
   would have been far from his thinking. Rather, the piece would
   emerge and develop as if it were a memory, evoking textures and
   situations from the past.

   Mr. Berio was born on Oct. 24, 1925, into a musical family long
   resident in the Ligurian coastal town of Oneglia. His grandfather
   was his first teacher, and he grew up surrounded by chamber
   music. Immediately after World War II he entered the Milan
   Conservatory, where he studied composition with Giorgio Federico
   Ghedini, whose neo-Baroque style was an early influence, along
   with the music of Stravinsky.

   Among his fellow students was the American singer Cathy Berberian,
   whom he married in 1950, and with whom he made frequent visits
   to the United States, encountering a fellow Italian, Luigi
   Dallapiccola, at Tanglewood and electronic music in New York.
   Under these influences he entered the modernist stream with works
   like "Chamber Music" (1953), a set of James Joyce songs he wrote
   for Ms. Berberian to sing with clarinet, cello and harp.

   A meeting with another Italian, Bruno Maderna, brought him to
   the Darmstadt summer school, the annual meeting place in Germany
   for the European avant-garde. He attended regularly between 1954
   and 1959, and so came to know Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
   Gyorgy Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel among others. Contributing to their
   endeavors for radical innovation, he produced his most complicated
   conceptions, notably "Tempi Concertati" for flute, violin, two
   pianos and four instrumental groups (1958-9).

   Other works of this period include his first electronic pieces.
   He was co-director with Maderna of a studio for electronic music
   at the Milan station of Italian radio and produced one of the
   early classics of tape music: "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" (1958),
   based on a recording of Ms. Berberian's reading from Joyce's
   "Ulysses." In the same year, with "Sequenza I" for flute, he
   instituted a series of solo studies, each considering the history,
   performance style and aura of an instrument. By the time of his
   death he had composed 14 such pieces, for most of the standard
   Western instruments, including the human voice.

   As patterns of virtuosity, these pieces often prompted elaboration.
   For example, "Sequenza VI" (1967), which has a viola player
   scrubbing vigorously at tremolo chords, generated in succession
   "Chemins II" for the same viola player with nonet (1967), "Chemins
   III" for the viola with orchestra (1967), "Chemins IIb" for small
   orchestra (1969), a score from which the original solo viola has
   disappeared, and "Chemins IIc" (1972), in which it has been
   replaced by a bass clarinet. Here Mr. Berio was using his own
   music in the ways he often used others' music, as material to
   be analyzed, explored, imitated and developed.

   Meanwhile, he was pursuing his fascination with the human voice
   and with the drama of song.

   Mr. Berio's first composition for the theater, "Passaggio," had
   its premiere at the Piccola Scala in Milan in 1963 and was a
   provocative expression of its sole female character's subjection
   to social pressures. Subsequently his dramatic works became more
   poetic than political. "Laborintus II" (1965) is based on an
   anticapitalist poem by his longstanding friend Edoardo Sanguineti,
   but the music provides a gorgeous, dreamlike flow of imagery for
   voices and chamber orchestra, more engulfing than supporting the
   reciter.

   Between 1963 and 1971 Mr. Berio lived largely in New York with
   his Japanese-American second wife, Susan. He taught at the
   Juilliard School, where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, and
   became more active as a conductor. He wrote "Sinfonia" for Leonard
   Bernstein and the Philharmonic, and his first full-scale opera,
   simply called "Opera," for the Santa Fe Opera, which produced
   it in 1970.

 - seb