Bbohman, CC BY-SA 4.0 httpscreativecommons.orglicensesby-sa4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 1989
Luciano Berio
"Throughout my life, I have undoubtedly accumulated a wealth of diverse experiences, always striving to gain practical knowledge of musical material, whether from the past or the present. It may be that this desire to know and master everything is, in a certain sense, Faustian—I am still uncertain whether and how I will have to pay for it, or if someone else is already paying the price on my behalf."
From the laudatory speech by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi:
His homage to the intelligentsia characterises a creative person who takes a lively interest in yesterday’s life – Berio’s art and his life are permeated by today’s thinking; in addition to his personal contacts with Umberto Eco, Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky, he reads Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. But Berio makes a clear distinction between the two: the artist’s task is to express in his works the insights he has gained intuitively through his experience, the philosopher’s task is to organise these insights into a system.
