Luciano Berio was an Italian compser. From 1950 to 1964 he was married to the American soprano Cathy Berberian, for whom he composed several works, among which his Circles, Sequenza III, Visage and Récital.
Together with Bruno Maderna he founded the Studio di Fonologia, an experimental orchestra. Later, he became a teacher at the renowned Julliard School in New York. His body of works cover a wide range of forms experiments. Hij wrote both chamber music and orchestral works, and electronic music. For his whole life he worked on a set Sequenze for solo instruments. His use of musical and literature citations and his incorporations of all kinds of folk music is characteristic of his work. Some of the authors he used to cite a lot are James Joyce, Edoardo Sanguineti, e.e.cummings, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
He became popular with his 1964 Folk Songs and his Sinfonia composed for the Swingle Singers from 1968. Berio also orchestrated music by other composers. Rendering, for instance, is his orchestration and completion of sketches of an unfinished symphony by Franz Schubert.
