Is It Serious?
Joel Gressel · Perspectives of New Music · 2012
- 171 Joel Gressel: Is It Serious? I last saw Milton Babbitt at a concert that included his Philomel. I had wondered whether one low iteration of the words “Is it Tereus?” used his voice. When I asked him, he quipped “Is it serious ?” before confirming that no, it was Bethany Beardslee’s voice. Hence the title; but the question remains: is my piece serious? On the one hand, it does have some somber phrases near the beginning, a plaintive (shepherd’s?) aria a few minutes later, and systematic bases for the pitch and rhythmic relationships. On the other hand, there are jazz-like sections where the instruments seem to be warming up separately, a chorus of bird calls, and a final long set of variations on a misshapen blues tune. The piece closes “in all seriousness” as the variations slow and present falling fragments of the music just heard, suggesting a shattering descent into semi-consciousness. Is It Serious was composed in the summer of 2010 on my home computer using an updated version of the Music 4BF program that presumably no one else has used since the 1980s. All the sounds were digitally synthesized. There are just six basic 12-tone melodic strands in the whole piece, of which only one appears in any passage. The rhythms of these strands are shaped (by force of habit) by ratios that expand or reduce successive measures as well as the beats within these measures. The normal 12-tone square of 48 row forms has been distorted by interpreting the numbers not as members of the chromatic scale, but as indices to three ascending diminished -seventh cycles. Transposed rows have segments in common, but no two are the same. The recurring intervals between any two transpositions assume more importance than the specific order of the underlying row. It is quite easy to ask the computer to overlap these melodic lines with different instrumental colors at different speeds. In this piece the overlaps range from starting two voices in unison but slightly delaying one so that two colors emerge from one, to having an imitation start a few seconds late and then catch up, to having a following voice catch up part way through to become the leading voice. The duration of the piece is just under 10 minutes, and it is dedicated to the memory of Milton Babbitt. -Joel Gressel ...