Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt, Page 4
IMBRIE:
The 12-tone method
Roger Sessions eventually adopted the 12-tone method once he was convinced that it would in no way interfere with his personal style, and that he could adapt it to his needs at all times. This was during a time when many other composers were similarly influenced. It was thought that the future of music might well lie in this direction. Among these many others, I also attempted to write music using this technique. I found it intriguing, but eventually I decided I could do just as well without it. (Roger himself stated at least that he “reserved the right to commit rape or mayhem on the [twelve-tone] row”).
The Opera
The musical life in northern California remained healthy for a long time. Not only were there several chamber groups devoted to new music (much of it composed in the vicinity and some of it imported from the East and from Europe and Asia), but the San Francisco and Oakland Symphony orchestras and the San Francisco Opera, as well, did their part. Several of us had works commissioned by these groups. I was thus enabled to have good performances of concertos and symphonies, and also my opera entitled Angle of Repose, based on a novel by Wallace Stegner.
Stegner himself, for obvious reasons, did not wish to convert his wonderful work into a libretto. With his sympathetic approval, I finally found the right person for the job; another novelist named Oakley Hall. The story of this novel intrigued me for a number of reasons. First it was about California. (This pleased not only me, but the opera director at that time, Kurt Adler). The year of the performance was 1976, the bicentennial year for the United States. To celebrate this occasion, several opera houses in this country were given funds to commission new operas. Adler was horrified to learn that some cities (like Chicago, for example) commissioned European composers. He decided that San Francisco would commission not only an American composer, but one who lived in the San Francisco area.
The novel is not only about California, but about a family living there a hundred years ago, and about their descendants living in the 20th century. I was fascinated by the flashbacks between the 19th and 20th centuries, and how the lives of those two sets of people interact with one another; how a historian living today looks back on his ancestors and how they teach him to deal with his own problems.
To form a libretto from the novel, it was clear that much of the novel had to be omitted. Not only that, but for operatic reasons it became necessary to change parts of the story itself. Two minor characters in the novel became one major character in the opera. In my opinion, Oakley Hall did a wonderful job of turning the novel into a libretto. We had to discuss each scene he envisioned before the actual text was written so that we could decide where so called ‘arias’ and ‘recitatives’ might take place.
For me, the most intriguing problem was stylistic. How could I capture a sense of the appropriate type of music for a chorus of miners – people who work in mines? Or a banjo player of the 19th-century, or a party in San Francisco where people dance to walls, or in the 20th-century, the conversation between an older man with his rebellious daughter? In the latter case, I had the soprano sing a full-fledged aria which closes the second act. Throughout the opera I hoped to balance all these stylistic references with a sense of unity, which should emerge from my own musical sensibility. (I’m hoping I’ll have time to play some of these examples for you from the opera).
On Style
Perhaps I should say a bit more about the meaning of the word ‘style’. What is my style anyway? In one sense, it is like asking someone how do you walk, how do you talk. Most of us would say, “Ask someone else.” On the other hand, we are indeed capable of imitating people, either for fun or through admiration; either consciously or unconsciously. As a composer, I must assume that my own personality will prevail and will unify the various components of the work that I write. I not only assume this, but I insist on it.