---
id: thema
title: "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)"
year: 1958
category: "Sampling"
lang: en
canonical: https://nodemusic.cc/node/thema
source: node.music
---

# Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958)

Sampling · https://nodemusic.cc/node/thema

## Summary

Berio took a reading of Joyce's "Ulysses" and turned it into a musical storm. Words disintegrated into syllables, syllables into noises. A manifesto that human speech is also music, if sliced correctly.

## Full text

Berio took a recording of the beginning of Chapter 11 of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and subjected it to total deconstruction. The text, which is musical in itself, was sliced into phonemes. Berio classified speech sounds (sibilants, plosives, vowels) and edited them into new rhythmic structures.

There are no synthesizers here — the entire complex, almost electronic texture is created exclusively from the human voice of Cathy Berberian. It is a manifesto that speech is already music if one stops listening to the meaning of words and starts listening to their sound.

## People

- Luciano Berio (1925–2003) — Italian composer.

## Connections

### Influenced by

- [Studio di Fonologia](https://nodemusic.cc/node/milan.md) - ENABLED
- [Gesang der Jünglinge](https://nodemusic.cc/node/gesang.md) - INSPIRED

### Influenced

- [Red Bird](https://nodemusic.cc/node/wishart.md) - INSPIRED

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thema_(Omaggio_a_Joyce)