My Ends Are My Beginnings for Clarinet in B-flat (Bass Clarinet) Solo.

Mead, Andrew

C. F. Peters has recently released two compositions by Milton Babbitt, My Ends Are My Beginnings (1978) for solo clarinetist (Bb clarinet doubling bass clarinet) and Soli e Duettini (1989) for two guitars. They are presented in handsome editions, attractive and relatively error-free. The published scores for the most part hew closely to the composer's notational conventions, with one notable exception. In Babbitt's manuscripts and in most of his previously published scores accidentals affect only those notes they immediately precede, but here tied notes' are excepted. This exception can lead the reader, especially one familiar with the composer's other works, to hesitate occasionally over the correct pitch, though context usually clarifies the question. This minor difficulty aside, these are welcome additions to the catalogue of Babbitt's available scores, representing his work at its full fruition and maturity.

My Ends Are My beginnings is in three large sections, the middle one for the bass clarinet. The music's sinuous, tortuous path gradually unfolds a four-part counterpoint of twelve-tone rows whose contributions to any given passage are constantly varied. While a direct sense of this counterpoint may not be immediately perceived, one becomes aware of it much as one does the long-range polyphony underlying J. S. Bach's compositions for solo single-voiced instruments. Players will be readily led to such an awareness by the fact that the instrument's registral break separates the music into two sets of pairs of braided voices; the act of playing will itself impose guides for understanding.

The work's title too provides insights into the music. As is the case with most of Babbitt's compositions, the title refers to a number of aspects of the piece, not the least of which is the fact that adjoining ends of the three sections are simple transformations of each other. The title's plurals further hint at the multiplicity of trajectories one is invited to pursue through the music.

Rich as the pitch language is, much of the challenge in this piece will derive from its rhythms. While in a single tempo throughout, the composition's basic pulse stream is constantly reinterpreted metrically, and the resulting spans are subdivided in myriad ways producing an enormously varied rhythmical surface. Nevertheless, one is never too far from the basic pulse, and the rich variety of rhythms creates a complex network of association throughout the piece, which, entangled with the pitch structure, creates a sense of musical accumulation that spans the work's three sections. The effect is not unlike that achieved by gifted storytellers, whose asides and digressions are gradually revealed as part of the central tale.

Soli e Duettini for two guitars is one of three identically titled duos composed within a short span, all dealing with the interactions of a pair of musical conversationalists. The other two are for flute and guitar, and violin and viola. Taken as a whole, the three works deal with identity, similarity, and difference, not only at the obvious level of their instrumentation, but at deeper levels of musical language as well. Much of the drama of the guitar duo entails the differentiation, self-assertion, and ultimate subsumption into a larger whole of the two identical protagonists. This is not accomplished through the obvious means of confrontational gesture but through the subtle differences and similarities of the musical languages each instrument speaks.

As is the case with My Ends Are My Beginnings, the music derives from the gradual unfolding of a web of contrapuntally combined twelve-tone rows, but what is striking about the more recent work is that each instrument has its own independent network, each derived from its own (albeit related) twelve-tone ordering. The relationship between the two guitars hinges on the relations between their underlying pitch structures.

The clarinet work and the guitar duo come from two different periods of Babbitt's compositional development, distinguished by their treatment of their underlying webs of twelve-tone counterpoint. Despite the considerable differences between these works, listeners unfamiliar with this music may find them all too similar. This is not surprising, given the distance in language and rhetoric between Babbitt's musical world and much of both traditional and contemporary practice. Repeated engagement with Babbitt's music, however, whets the ear and mind to an appreciation of each of his composition's individualities. Babbitt's music does not unfold in traditional gestures, but its constantly changing surfaces lead the listener to an understanding of the larger musical forces at work, whose implications are in turn heard fractured and refracted in the music's immediate unfolding. The interplay. between the moment and the whole is the source of his music's expressive resonance.

This is music both demanding and rewarding in its complexity to listener and player alike. Returning to it again and again leads the player and the listener to an appreciation of its rich fabric of associations. This is generous music, affording repeated hearing and playing; its complexities are honestly achieved, and one need not have recourse to the composer's sketches or a privileged description of his methods to divine the connections between its surfaces and the relationships underlying its longer spans. Nor does Babbitt's music partake only of the intellectual. This is music to be heard and played, whose surfaces offer sensuous pleasure while inviting one into a contemplation of its larger structures.

Babbitt's music is a most happy union of understanding and feeling, of the intellect and the emotions, of the pleasures of the senses and the joys of the mind. The composer has often remarked that he wishes to write music that is as much as it can be, rather than as little as it can get away with, and in doing so he has treated us, his audience, as adults. These two publications allow us to continue to enjoy his generosity.