The Italian composer Luciano Berio was born a century ago, in October 1925. A self-described ‘magpie-pasticheur’, he stole from a variety of musical sources ranging from Stravinsky to Victorian London street-cries to the Beatles. His music was rarely without a sly humour and (he claimed) a very Italian sense of melody and madrigal. Sinfonia, the symphonic ‘palimpsest’ Berio composed in the late 1960s during the student upheavals, combines the darkly humorous Scherzo from Mahler’s Symphony No 2 with spoken word from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (‘Where now? Who now? When now?’). In its own way as emblematic of the Civil Rights-era as Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the composition was admired by Miles Davis, for one, who detected jazzy colourings beneath the flights of commedia dell’arte. (‘Berio, give me a chord,’ Davis greeted the composer in New York in 1969. ‘You don’t need them,’ Berio replied.)

Berio is by a long chalk the most ‘literary’ of Italy’s postwar composers. Umberto Eco collaborated with Berio on his Omaggio a Joyce (Homage to Joyce), a ground-breaking electronic composition from 1958, which Berio wrote for his first wife, the Armenian-American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Her breathy, stuttering recital of the ‘Sirens’ chapter from Ulysses musically echoes James Joyce’s own gleeful re-fashioning of language. Berio followed the piece up a year later, in 1959, with Allez-Hop, which looped, cut up, and re-mixed a text by his writer friend Italo Calvino.

Throughout his 50-year musical career until his death in 2003, Berio re-arranged works by Monteverdi, Bach, Boccherini, Hindemith and Schubert. Music, for Berio, was less a venturing forth into ‘clouds of unperformable sound’, as he called them, than a writing on and over existing compositions. Rarely dogmatic, Berio was impatient of exercises in atonality and dissonance for their own sake. Delia Derbyshire, the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop pioneer, impressed Berio with her 1963 realisation of Ron Grainer’s Dr Who score, which she created out of tape manipulations and became television’s first ever electronic signature tune. Having acted as Berio’s assistant in 1962 at the Dartington Summer School in the UK, Derbyshire found she shared with Berio a love of popular song. (Impishly, Berio placed Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’ on a par with anything by Mozart.) From his Verdi-loving parents, Berio had inherited an understanding of Italian opera’s power to seduce and entrance.

In 1945, aged 20, Berio enrolled at the Milan Conservatoire, where he was astounded by a performance of Béla Bartók’s ‘Sonata for Two Pianos’, in which two percussionists and two pianists between them play seven different instruments. From 1953 to 1960, Berio and the Venetian composer Bruno Maderna co-directed an electronic music laboratory at the Italian state radio (RAI) head office in Milan. Like Maderna, Berio was interested in the Arabic rhythms and Arabic harmonies found in folk compositions from Armenia, Sicily, Sardinia and Azerbaijan. A great deal of folk is a kind of lament, and Berio created an appropriately dirge-like Sicilian-Saracen vocal style for violin in his mesmeric Voci, composed in 1984 in the villa where he lived for much of the time in Tuscany.

Berio’s use of collage exasperated some critics, who viewed him as an insufficiently serious deviser of musical counterfeits and fancies. ‘Why can he never actually state anything?’ one British journalist complained. Berio was met by a mocking and uncomprehending British press when he gave a lecture at the Italian Cultural Institute in London in early 1966. The 41-year-old composer was by then a big enough name to attract the attention of Paul McCartney, who had previously corresponded with Karlheinz Stockhausen over his use of electronic tape cut-ups (‘God man, I’m so jealous’, John Lennon reportedly told McCartney, probably not meaning it). McCartney was familiar with Berio’s homage to Dante Alighieri, Laborintus II (1963-65), in which gibbering voices and skewed jazz rhythms combine with words by the Genoese poet Eduardo Sanguinetti to represent the grafters and money-brokers of Hell. The piece was commissioned on the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. McCartney managed to chat briefly to Berio after the lecture, but a scrum of photographers broke them up. McCartney remonstrated angrily with the cameramen: ‘Why don’t you create something?’ (the London Daily Mail’s sarcastic heading next morning was ‘THIS IS WHAT A BEATLE DOES IN THE EVENING’.) McCartney was amused when Cathy Berberian later poked fun at the Beatles in her deliciously subversive tribute, ‘Ticket to Ride’, where the 1965 hit is declaimed in the style of an amateur Handel oratorio.

Berio’s hour-long magnum opus, Coro (1975-76), scored for 40 voices and a 40-strong orchestra, shows the influence of the Transylvania-born composer György Ligeti, who Berio had met in the late 1950s. In terms of popular culture, Ligeti’s choral masterworks Lux Aeterna and Atmosphères are forerunners of the meditative, pulseless drones of Tangerine Dream and Low-era David Bowie. Coro, with its cluster-filled swathes of orchestral chords and shimmering polyphony, interweaves medieval folk melodies and a snatch of African Gabon song with spoken word from a poem by Pablo Neruda (‘Come, see the blood in the streets’). It is a work of magnificent aural strangeness.

Berio’s greatest works engage the head as well as the heart. His ‘Sequenzas’ for solo instrument sound like nothing that came before and are among the most extraordinary music of our time. Berio’s aim in them was to explore the ‘hidden side’ of the instruments and make them reveal previously unimagined capabilities. He wrote 14 ‘sequences’ over a period of five decades up to 2002. Lasting between five and ten minutes each, they push instrument and performer to the limit of virtuosity. Nifty hand-crossing is required for the solo guitar, rapid arpeggiated sections for the piano, and superhuman feats of circular breathing for the bassoon. The word ‘virtuoso’ (from the Latin virtus, ‘excellence’) implies a degree of showing off; yet for all their sonic complexity, the pieces now belong firmly to the mainstream of Italian composition. From the early 1970s onwards, Berio compositions were featured almost every year at the Proms.

Sequenza IV for Piano, with its sustained silent chords and muted tones, looks forward to Berio’s great anti-opera, Un re in ascolto (1984, A King Listens), which investigates the network of minuscule sounds with which silence is paradoxically filled. Berio took the idea from Calvino’s fictional account of the five senses, Under the Jaguar Sun. Only three of the stories – taste, hearing, smell – were halfway finished when Calvino died in 1985. Silence itself is seen as quite noisy by Calvino: breathing, ambient beeps and noisy thoughts fill our heads. Calvino co-wrote the libretto, which allows for a cast of trapeze artists, dancers, magicians and choristers who ascend on wires while singing. The king of the opera’s title is a version of Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest; he struggles to create a work for theatre amid a chaos of rehearsals, stage directors and singers auditioning at the piano. Just as Calvino’s crack-brained 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller offers a Tristram Shandy-like disquisition on the notion that story-telling is a euphemism for lying, so Berio’s opera (or ‘azione musicale’, as he called it: a ‘musical action’) offers a self-conscious commentary on the act of writing music.

Luciano Berio’s last work, Stanze, completed in 2003 just weeks before he died at the age of 77, is a song cycle on themes of God and death, and is among the most beautiful music he ever wrote. The ‘Godfather of Italian composition’ (as Berio was known) remains our greatest explorer of instrumental timbre and melody. The wireless inventor Guglielmo Marconi believed that sound, once generated, never dies. Berio’s beguiling labyrinth of sound is very much here to stay.