Obit from the New York Times. --- 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