JOSEPH DUBIEL

"With wanton heed, and giddy cunning" : Milton Babbitt's "Allegro Penseroso"

Abstract

Under the influence of Milton Babbitt's theoretical writings, analysts of his compositions are usually able to reconstruct with accuracy some of the early stages of his composing process. The custom of calling these constructions "precompositional" indicates a well-founded uncertainty about the exact status that ought to be claimed for them. They are genuinely compositional, in that they represent elaborate reasoned choices made from a background of systematic possibilities ; yet their structure may not always be expected to emerge straightforwardly as the structure of the finished music. Even in the very domains in which precompositional specifications are made-typically those of pitch-class succession and register, and, to some extent, of duration and dynamics-these constructions are not ultimately authoritative. Their organization remains open to interaction with subsequent, less obviously constrained choices that can significantly affect the music's experienced movement in these domains ; and occasionally they are subject to outright violation, in pursuit of local configurations that cannot reasonably be regarded as mistakes.

These issues will be illustrated and discussed with reference to Babbitt's Allegro Penseroso, a piano work composed in 1999 for Marilyn Nonken. A simple plan of registers, and a plan of dynamics that is to some extent parallel to it (although not synchronized with it), emerge in the music as complexly inflected, at times substantially transformed.
The significance of these plans as structure cannot reasonably be assessed in any general way, without reference to these inflections and transformations ; in particular, it is not adequate to represent this significance as merely statistical, or as that of an assumed authority, simply constraining subsequent decisions.
Similar claims may be made about pitch-class and rhythmic aspects of the work. Connections can be drawn between different applications of the principle of even-handed exhaustion of a range of possibilities-with what might be called an extension of the concept of the aggregate. An important is that the inherent qualitative undifferentiation characteristic of pitch class and rhythm may not be expected in other dimensions ; thus the mere fact of engaging all the possibilities takes on a different meaning, in some ways a more striking one, in such areas as register and dynamics. The programmatic inclusiveness of Babbitt's music in matters of texture seems an important determinant of its peculiar character of ironic understatement amid even the most extreme circumstances.

Biography of Joseph Dubiel