"A Composer's View" in "Music Librarianship in America, Part 4: Music Librarians and Performance"

"A composer's view" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 4: Music librarians and performance" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Babbitt, Milton. 1991. "A composer's view" in "Music librarianship in America, Part 4: Music librarians and performance". Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1), Spring 1991: 123-132. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42661672 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 123 A Composer's View Milton Babbitt ince we are gathered in this hall in a spirit of scholarly inquiry, celebrating the S central instrument of such inquiry, I think I can best begin-at least, I dare to begin-by posing a question: "What am I doing here?" I do not come here as a scholar, I come here as a composer. If I seem to be somewhat aporetic, I assure you it is not because I feel in the presence of so many librarians the way Wystan Auden once said he felt in the presence of scientists. He said that he felt like a ragged mendicant in the presence of merchant princes. Well, I don't feel that way: I sim- ply feel like a ragged mendicant. The aporia actually results from pondering the complex problem that must have beset the planning committee in choosing speakers. Surely they had to imagine what manner of composer would be so quixotic, so foolhardy, so abandoned as to presume to tell other composers that they should submit their fragile afilatuses to the conflict, to the battle, and to the insult of the thoughtful word, particularly about music, to expose them to such an un- settling influence. Who am I to dare direct any composer, particularly one of our Milton Babbitt is professor of prelapsarian composers (that is, a composer who aspires to compose in a prelapsarian composition at the Juilliard mode), to enter the library and perhaps, in fact undoubtedly, to encounter if not School and William Shuabel the music, at least the name of, let us say, Eduard Grell, that supreme prelapsarian Conant Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is who insisted that music had its fall from grace when musical instruments dared to currently holder of a John D. intrude upon the virginity, the purity, of the human voice. Eduard Grell I men- and Catherine T. MacArthur tion in this case because our prelapsarian pikers would do very well to go back and Foundation fellowship. Among examine what has happened to his music. Apparently, even having been a friend his recent compositions are of Brahms's hasn't helped his music survive, and very few of us can boast that we Transfigured Notes, for string are friends ofBrahms's. The problem here is to determine what composers should orchestra (1986; premiered 8 February 1991 by the Boston wander into what libraries. Would you like to lead the already overburdened, Composers Orchestra, con- apatetic composers into libraries, where they would have to adjust to yet another ducted by Gunther Schuller) atmosphere, to yet another environment, in order to be all things to all people? and Consortini, for 5 instru- I was very puzzled by a statement made by John Braine, the novelist, apropos of ments (1990; recording to be libraries. He said, "Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a released by Gunmar Music). harem." 1 I pondered that: What does it mean? Does it mean that-I wonder to what extent I dare say what I was going to say-does it mean the writer is disinterested, or uninterested, or merely rather wistful? Now if you consider the composer under those conditions, it's really much worse. Therefore, I was trying to find an analogy, but it's beyond my medical knowledge. After all, the writer in the library, even if surrounded by these forgotten books, can pick them up and read them. But 1 Quoted by Robert Gutwillig, "A Talk in London with John Braine," 77,e New York Times Book Review, 7 Oct. 1962, p. 5. 124 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN consider the composer who wanders through the library and sees these mounds of scores which, after all, are unheard, unperformed, and therefore, scarcely music anymore. What can the composer hope for, in all statistical sobriety? That some Ph.D. student of the future--someone who is desperately seeking a subject-might indeed write a thesis that will have a lifespan as fugacious as the music itself In spite of all of that, in spite of the hazards, I must confess that I have stumbled into a library or two, or at least stumbled around a library or two. I am very grate- ful to libraries for, among many other things, having supplied me with a modest, not specifically musical discovery with regard to the novelist Somerset Maugham. When Maugham had reached a rather advanced age, someone decided to place another honor upon his head. He arrived at the point where he was supposed to make a little speech, rose very slowly, and said, "You know, old age is not with- out its advantages-" There he stopped, as I just did before, and everyone thought, "The poor old man has finally had it." And then he continued, "-but on second thought, I can't think of any. "2 As a matter of fact, I can think of one. It is the moral prerogative for a writer or a composer of a certain age to engage in nostalgia (although even nostalgia isn't what it used to be). So I shall indulge in my nostalgia. Unfortunately, I can't go back as far as Raphael Hillyer did, because I didn't have such an exotic childhood. I've still never been to Budapest, and I was sev- enty when I first entered the Moscow Conservatory Library. I shall go back only to old East Fifty-eighth Street in New York, when I first came to the City in 1934. On East Fifty-eighth Street was a branch of the Public Library. On the second floor of that public library was a circulating library of scores (figure I), and many of us took everything we ever learned out of that library. But tucked away in a comer was a little fiefdom of scores that were not allowed to circulate, that were not obtainable or available anywhere else, that were really classified "for eyes only," because there was absolutely no way you could hear them except to sit and look at them. Sitting in a corner of that corner of the library was a woman, a magnifi- cently benevolent despot, named Dorothy Lawton. I realize in retrospect that I really should not have thought of her as "Madame Lafarge," because what she had in her hand was not a knitting needle but a pencil. But she sat there watching us intently, and if anyone so much as put a thumbprint on a page of a score, or was led to shed a tear on a score, heads would roll. She had every right to be so protective of these scores, because they were the means by which most of us heard a great deal of music that we couldn't hear in any other way. In Brahms's opinion, it was the best way to hear music. We had to concoct these ideal performances in our own heads- heaven knows how accurate they were, particulary at that stage of our lives-but it had to be that way. So we sat there peering over these scores, which of course had never been recorded (virtually nothing had been recorded except the Bach Brandenburg Concertos), and they were the most exotic, recondite things we could imagine. And by the way, that is the only way I have heard most of those scores, even to this day. We have not developed a repertory in this country, although I hoped for many years that one of our conservatories would become a repertory conservatory. When Gunther Schuller headed the New England Conservatory, he began to develop one. At the Juilliard School, the "focus weeks" require repertory companies, but only 2 This story was told to me by Mel Powell. A Composer's View 125 for that one week a year. We have no repertory performance whatsoever of music Figure1 . The East Fifty-eighthStreet Music Library,New York City, in an from the 1930s, that most varied, incredible, pluralistic period (with the possible undatedphotograph. exception of our own), because most of that music disappeared-not for musical reasons but for other, rather more horrible reasons. I also recall another New York library, the central facility on Forty-second Street. During my earliest days in the City, one of my first discoveries was of another tiny room that housed a music library. It was tucked away in the northwestmost corner of the building-a little, dimly-lit room with a few dimly-lit tables at which few people ever sat. Surrounded by walls of periodicals, you handed in your call slips to have books retrieved for you. I sat one day in that tiny room when I was seventeen years old, just out of the Deep South, having had very little experience or exposure to such things. I handed in my slips for books-who knew for what: Marcia Davenport, Ernest Newman, I don't know, Robert Haven Schaufiler-and while I was waiting for them to be retrieved from this incredible dungeon where they were kept (you never, ever saw the stacks!), a very strange thing happened.

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