MILTON BABBITT: A Celebration of his Life and Music
October
31-November 1, 2003
Millsaps College
Jackson, Mississippi
ELizabeth
Keathley
The
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Milton Babbitt, Bethany Beardslee, and Women's Voices
Milton Babbitt's Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized accompaniment, premiered by Bethany Beardslee in 1961, marks a watershed for twentieth-century composition and performance. Although earlier works had incorporated the recorded human voice into electronic compositions (Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, 1956; Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce, 1958), Vision and Prayer's coupling of electronic sounds with live vocal performance made unprecedented demands on the singer's technique and musicianship, influencing subsequent avant-garde vocal composition. One significance of the resulting repertory for extended vocal technique is that it permitted women performers to assume a position of creative power and prestige--literally to have a voice--in a modernist culture that was in some respects hostile to them. Babbitt's Philomel, composed for Beardslee in 1964, thematizes the process of a woman finding her voice and demonstrates a mutual influence between vocal technique and compositional choices of electronic timbre and articulation. Finally, although the literature tends to emphasize the serial and technological aspects of these two works of Babbitt, their clear rootedness in vocality shows that they are, above all, human.
