This innovative and entertaining vocalise, originally written for Cathy Berberian, has become a new music "classic"; it is a conceptual precursor to the composer's Song Books series, Aria No. 2, and the Europeras I-V. The score indicates ten different vocal styles to be employed, notated in wavy lines (somewhat similar in appearance to Tibetan vocal notation) in ten different colors, and containing 16 black squares that indicate "non-musical" sounds. A text of fragments and phrases in five different languages (Armenian, Russian, Italian, French, and English, all of which have unique vowel sounds) are associated with the various wavy lines ("Hampart-zuom Dirouhi Di questa terra Naprasno Conscience et Arise!"). The choice of the specific styles and the extra-musical sounds are made by the performer. For example, in the late Cathy Berberian's realization released on a vinyl recording in the 1960s, she chose to assign the dark blue color to jazz inflections, red to deep contralto intonations ("idyot a.k.u. oakhoa far-removed"), black with parallel dotted lines was delivered in Arnold Schoenberg's sprechstimme vocal style (a kind of pitched speech) ("Poost ya the burning bush"), black tint alone was identified with "dramatic," purple suggested the famous actress/singer Marlene Dietrich's breathy and sultry style ("Will you give me to tell you?"), yellow tinted material was delivered in a bright coloratura opera style ("Odyodzke cinq not as a birth but as love"), green was folk music timbres of various sorts, orange was Oriental (Chinese opera, etc.), light blue suggested baby sounds to Berberian, and brown was reserved for nasal intonations. The various extra-musical sounds in Berberian's realization consisted of electronic bursts and processed natural, extra-musical, or environmental sounds in a musique concrète manner. This radical composition not only introduced the element of indeterminacy to vocal music but also changed the nature of emotional gestures in singing by moving away from linear narrative and imagery to the expression and appreciation of these gestures as a kind of database available in ordinary language, and to the utilization of language as sound per se. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide
