Soft Speaking

- 347 milton babbitt a composers’ memorial texts - 348 Soft Speaking Jeffrey Kresky It was Milton Babbitt’s 90th birthday, and William Paterson University was awarding him an honorary doctorate. For an associated concert of his music its director Peter Jarvis asked him if he had anything squirreled away that might now come forth, and in response he produced a 1999 manuscript, Composition for One Instrument and Ben, a 15-second celesta solo, which I undertook to perform. (The “Ben” is Ben Weber, to whose work as copyist for the score of Composition for Four Instruments the title refers; both pieces start with the same solo trichordal succession, B-Eb-C. There had apparently been one prior performance.) As a keyboardist of only modest attainment, I had never performed any of Babbitt’s music, and was naturally concerned for its difficulty. But in the event, though I was able to execute the notes in their rhythm (if not quite up to tempo), it was, surprisingly, the specified dynamics that quite defeated me. In this tiny piece all attacks occur at either pp, p or mp levels. But it was not the expected difficulties of distinguishing such relatively close-together values and asserting them reliably across the whole registral spread of the keyboard (perhaps the performer’s version of the perceptual problem of judging different dynamic levels in different registers), or even of doing this on so notoriously unreliable an instrument, that got the better of me. (Never knowing if a note will “speak” leads one to over-attack, especially when two events are close together in time but far apart in space. Imagine leaping the length of the keyboard in the time of a 32nd -note at quarter = 80, but having to pull one’s punch in order to scale down from a p to a pp.) Rather, it was what I came to suspect to be a cognitive issue: I could never learn to “feel” – even in so brief a piece – just when a dynamic shift ought to occur. That is, it never became natural – a real problem when one has to respond to the notation so quickly; I had in a sense to force myself to strike a note at one or another level of loudness, rather than to come in time to “absorb” the dynamic life of the piece as a conveyer of some (real or imagined) expressive content that I could accept and then assert. This experience gave me a new appreciation of just how radical Babbitt’s use of dynamics may be. Though his music is always cited for its achievements in pitch and in rhythm, with the trademark “scatter” of his dynamics (like that of his registers) widely recognized as a stylistic hallmark even apart from any technical apprehension of their possible structural workings, my difficulties at the keyboard brought home how challengingly his use of dynamics departs from our deeply-rooted sense of their traditional, “proper” role, with its expressive and dramatic capacities so compellingly grounded in our everyday experience - 349 Soft Speaking of the material world, even to so basic a level as, for example, loud sounds being literally assaultive as they move through the air and strike the listening body. After all, we wouldn’t sing a lullaby at triple forte if we want the baby to fall asleep. Was I, then – quite unawares – disabled for the lack of a suitable (if irrelevant) “rhetorical” track in the succession of dynamics? Very near the end of the piece there is a moment when a single pitch followed by a dyad form a group at p that is immediately repeated, in the identical rhythm, at pp, and this particular dynamic adjustment I never failed to execute – it seemed “natural,” probably because it invoked the familiar trope of “echo.” I have often noticed that in performances of Phonemona the soprano seems to project, by intention or not, an invented rhetorical stratum of groupings of phonemes: her facial expressions, hand gestures and other bits of body language seem to suggest exclamation points, question marks and other, subtler, inflections, as if the absence of any such rhetorical “sense” was intolerable when making utterances of a sort that...