Music as the Seeking of a Voice: Music, Literature and Aphasia in Berio's "Thema" and "A-Ronne"

“Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey?” Moving from this question posed by G. Agamben, the essay investigates the possibility that music is the result of a human ancestral search for a voice. More precisely, it shows how contemporary compositions have somehow suggested that the original connections between music and literature are merely vestiges of a more ontological relationship based on human loss of a voice, conceived as the pure intention of meaning. Analyzing Berio's literary compositions, Thema (homage to Joyce) and A-Ronne, it emerges that the musicality of the used texts depends on a systematic deconstruction of the verbal material which result in an aphasic text. Therefore, the price that those texts have to pay to become music is to achieve, in different degrees, a kind of incommunicability. What is left after this deconstructing process is the tension caused by the friction between a sound that tends toward the loss of language and an articulation that tends toward the loss of meaning.