«In the meantime, we’ll keep translating»: the strength of the ethical dimension in the creative thought of Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio’s music is animated by a profound ethical tension: a vocation for éthos that does not mean the possibility of defining a scale of values or prescriptive rules, but more a tendency to reformulate the relation between the individual and the community, between the subject and what is "Other", between one’s own context and other contexts, cultures, worlds and traditions. In this essay I deal with these issues through an interdisciplinary perspective, establishing a dialogue between Berio's musical poetic and other horizons of thought on contemporary culture. Starting from the image of the Tower of Babel, the analysis focuses on the concept of "translation" and on its dialectical interactions with the paradigm of memory, highlighting unexpected links between Berio's musical poetics and the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Jorge Luis Borges, George Steiner, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre ed Emmanuel Lévinas. The result is a network of interpretative hints which is particularly rich and lively, and which allows not only the verification of the presence of a strong ethical dimension in Berio's musical poetics, but also provides new perspectives and new analytical tools for the interpretation of its compositional practice.