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Roundtable 1: Remembering Milton Babbitt
CAC 259, 1 p.m.
Guest Presentation:
Joel Hoffman , Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati
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Paper Session 1: The Music of Milton Babbitt
CAC 252, 2 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Making Connections: Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music
Andrew Mead, University of Michigan
For certain musicians of a certain age, Milton Babbitt is very much at the center of things
musical, but it is not hard to make the case that his development as a composer was
conditioned by experiences that could be construed as marginalizing. In many ways his
music stems from a radical rethinking of the underlying assumptions associated with both
European and American schools of composition. But in stripping down Schoenberg's
"method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another" to first principles,
Babbitt created for himself a land of opportunity, a place to be creative on its own terms.
This leaves us with the question, how can we connect with what might seem like an
isolating position? Certainly, the intellectual beauty of this music provides a strong point
of contact, but there are other ways of doing so as well. The paper acknowledges the
former while illustrating some of the latter through some brief analytical vignettes.
Conventional and Unconventional Approaches to Babbitt’s Unconventional
Projections of Form
Joshua Banks Mailman, New York University, Columbia University
Babbitt’s body of music sustains its status as one of the most original ever created, and
losing none of its freshness over time. The reasons for this have never been fully
explained. The significance of Babbitt's contribution to music indirectly derives from his
formalization of serialism but reaches beyond this. Despite the originality of his music,
unfortunately Babbitt’s contributions to 12-tone theory have largely overshadowed his
innovations as a composer, and therefore indirectly his contributions to musical
aesthetics. Babbitt’s own writing, like Schoenberg’s, is often so concerned with
demonstrating coherent connections with tradition (which for Babbitt was primarily
Schoenberg’s legacy) such that the boldness of his own innovations is utterly drowned
out. This results in a the false impression that the challenges that Babbitt’s music poses
for listeners is merely a more extreme version of those posed by Schoenberg’s music.
Yet this is not the case. On the contrary, in a way that Schoenberg’s music never does,
Babbitt’s music rethinks how musical form may be forged, and it is this that poses the
greatest obstacle to conventional listening habits.
The issue of musical form in Babbitt’s music is neglected, possibly, because it is
somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, in some aspects seem almost perfunctory (the
crisply schematic use of on/off status of instruments or registers to delineate sections)
while other aspects (pertaining to pitch-class relationships and rhythm) are among the
more nuanced aspects of musical continuity that any listener is likely to experience-—or
attempt to experience—in any music whatsoever.
As is well known, from the writings of Mead (1994), Dubiel (1990, 1991, 1992), Morris
(1997, 2001), and many others, that subsections and sections in Babbitt’s music
correspond systematically to aggregates and blocks in the underlying compositional
architecture, and are often projected by the crisp changes such as the entrance and exit of
instruments. To experience some aspects of this unconventional approach to form,
actually a conventional analytical listening approach sometimes works, so long as we
permit unconventional qualitative categories to characterize sections.
In other respects, however, form in Babbitt’s music is more problematic. For instance,
because of the extremely variegated rhythm and texture of his music, often the
instrumental and registral shifts are only detectible after some duration of time. As time
lapses, these and other kinds of form bearing change are detected statistically,
accumulation of evidence.
Therefore it is useful to conceptualize the surface of Babbitt’s music as a flux of
emergent qualities. These emergent qualities in Babbitt’s music are often quite
unconventional and so not obvious to focus on. Fortunately these emergent qualities can
be modeled quantitatively, so as to indicate dynamic forms unfolding gradually over
time. Such fluctuating emergent qualities, thus modeled, serve as vessels of form.
Excerpts Babbitt’s Quartet No.1 (1948), Semi-Simple Variations (1956), and Whirled
Series (1987) are analyzed from this point of view, in particular in terms of three vessels:
vRangeOfLoudness, vIntervalVsInterval, and vPitchPermeation. By conceptualizing form
in this way it is shown that one of Babbitt’s most important contributions to music is the
innovative ontological assertion of new ways to project form.
Reconsidering Organicism in Milton Babbitt’s Music
Zachary Bernstein, Doctoral Student, City University of New York
Milton Babbitt’s writings often discuss music using the language of organicism, and
much writing about his music has followed suit. Others, most notably Joseph Dubiel,
have tended to ignore or dismiss the role of organicism in Babbitt’s music. In this paper,
I discuss three analytical situations that encourage us to rethink certain aspects of
organicist analysis. The first two situations––the convoluted path to the series in
Composition for Four Instruments, and the presence and implications of serial anomalies
––suggest that organicism may still be productive in an attenuated state, despite its
problematical nature. The final issue, uncompleted time-point arrays, is more perplexing,
and demonstrates the urgency of a reconsideration of organicism in this music.
Structure and Infrastructure in Milton Babbitt’s music:
Listening to Babbitt’s Concerti for Orchestra
Robert Morris, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Milton Babbitt’s Concerti for Orchestra (composed in 2004, commissioned by and
dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musical director James Levine) is
perhaps the most intricate and unusual of Babbitt’s last works. A certain lightness in the
orchestration, including solos for various instruments, moments of repose between
turbulent and/or dense passages, and a long silence near the end of the piece distinguish it
from Babbitt’s earlier orchestral works.
As in other Babbitt works, the musical surface is replete with interesting details, musical
shapes, and cross-associations; but how do these easily heard musical relationships relate
to the serial structure of the piece? While analysis of the opening sections indicates the
work is serial—a superarray composition—the ending shows little sign of serial structure.
The reason this difference is not obvious, at least on first hearings, has to do with the way
Babbitt articulates twelve-tone row pairs in his later works: the two rows are presented
within a pitch register without differentiation. Furthermore, Babbitt presents serial arrays
simultaneously so that their combination produces either incomplete or weighted
aggregates. This tends to push the serial structure away from the sounding surface of the
music, so that the musical surface may sound as if it is not based on rows or aggregates.
In this way, structure becomes infrastructure. The ostensible absence of serial
coordination at the end of Concerti raises a question: Does serial infrastructure have any
necessary relation to the musical surface? To address this query, I draw on the work of
Dora Hanninen, who has identified three distinct but interrelated orientations to musical
organization that ground her theory of music analysis.
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Paper Session 2: Post-WW II Serialism in the Americas
CAC 252, 5:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
A First Investigation of Berio and Martino as Students of Dallapiccola
Richard Hermann, University of New Mexico
Dallapiccola was renowned as a teacher of composition although not frequently of
Italians in Italy. Instead, he taught secondary piano at the local conservatory in Florence.
Nonetheless, students came to him from all over the world, especially North America.
With alarm and sadness, Nono noted in a letter of 13 October 1956 to Dr. Eigel Kruttge,
director of the concert series Musik der Zeit (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Köln), that Italy
could lose this master musician to America, and, indeed, Dallapiccola taught briefly at
Queens College in 1956 and before that at the Berkshire Festival (Tanglewood), the
summer home of the Boston Symphony, in 1951 and again in 1952 when he taught Berio.
Though he was also a composition fellow at Tanglewood, Donald Martino studied with
the Maestro in Florence as the beneficiary of two Fulbright scholarships in 1955-6.
Ironically, the American studied with Dallapiccola in Italy while the Italian studied with
him in America.
This initial study focuses on the music that Dallapiccola, Berio, and Martino composed
just before, during, and just after their didactic encounters. Movements or sections of
Quaderno musicale di Annalibera and the Goethe Lieder by Dallapiccola, Study and
Chamber Music by Berio, and a Set for Clarinet, Sette canoni enigmatici, and the Piano
Fantasy by Martino are compared for design as well as temporal and pitch structure
commonalities and differences. In short, preliminary investigations show a major and
rapid shift from Neo-classicism through a non-thematic atonal style and onto nearly
classical 12-tone writing on Berio’s part while Martino continues his line of thinking
increasing chromatic saturation and working out explicit contrapuntal problems that
would shortly afterwards lead on to his initial encounters with serialism.
Louise Talma’s Serialism: Solving a Compositional Catch-22
Kendra Preston Leonard, Independent Researcher
While working on her opera The Alcestiad, American composer Louise Talma (c. 19061996) wrote to Thornton Wilder, her librettist, that she was concerned about his practice
of categorizing their work as “outrageously twelve-tone,” writing
[Y]ou frighten me when you tell people this is going to be a twelve-tone
opera, because that arouses Great Expectations which are bound to be
dashed, since long stretches of it are not 12 tone and none of it is “in the
manner of Schonberg.” People like Boulez and Stockhausen will simply
hoot at the idea that there is any serial technique in it all since for them
any kind of return before the whole series has been used up automatically
invalidates the whole notion.
Talma was worried that the label “twelve-tone” would deter audiences from attending the
opera, while at the same time her non-strict approach would be denigrated by her
contemporaries, such as Babbitt, who used the technique.
Talma had every reason to be apprehensive. Her approach included the use of tonallycentered materials, an emphasis on preserving the clarity of the words in text-setting, and
the traditionally French importance of the grand ligne. She had already been shunned by
the coterie of non-academic composers, including Copland and Thomson, who had
trained alongside her with Nadia Boulanger on account of her gender and for adopting
serial practices; now she was likely to be dismissed as a pretender to the dominant
method of university-affiliated composers as well for incorporating fleeting tonal centers
and functional harmony. However, Talma’s methods of using serial techniques can also
be read not only as a composer’s personal style, but an attempt at reconciling the two
primary schools of compositional thought present in during the middle of the twentieth
century. The Alcestiad was premiered in Germany, rather than the United States, where it
was critically acclaimed for its mixture of lyricism and Talma’s intelligent use of serial
techniques that neither alienated nor bored the audience.
In this paper I will examine Talma’s methods of combining the two foremost
compositional approaches of her time, the implications of doing so in an often sharply
divided compositional community, and the effect of these methods on her standing and
career.
Locating Krenek’s Sestina
Anton Vishio, New York University
When I was a student, Milton Babbitt once strongly recommended I study Ernst Krenek's
Sestina. This essay represents a much-delayed reflection on that piece, on its place in the
development of extended serialism, and on what about the piece may have resonated with
Babbitt in the first place.
The Sestina has had a checkered critical history, to say the least, although this has been
due more to its composer’s infamous exegesis of the composition and related technical
apparatus delivered at the 1959 Princeton Seminar for Advanced Musical Studies than to
any experience of the rarely performed work itself. Beginning with Paul Henry Lang’s
excoriation of Krenek’s essay in an introduction to its first publication the following year,
through Stanley Cavell’s influential critique in his essay “Music Discomposed,” to
Richard Taruskin’s recent account of the controversy in The Oxford History of Western
Music, Krenek’s “forthright” assertion of the role of an impersonal process in controlling
the succession of events in the piece has been criticized in particular for its abrogation of
creative responsibility to the listener.
But Krenek’s essay has other tensions. While the lecture was delivered in the heart of
American serialism, it seems to aspire to take part in a different conversation, one with
various composers associated with Darmstadt; in particular, Krenek’s approach to multiparameter serialism is clearly influenced by Pierre Boulez, as is the Sestina's scoring for a
modified and expanded “Marteau” ensemble. Yet ultimately, I argue, the piece has
surprisingly little in common with the composer’s much younger European
contemporaries; as M. J. Grant notes in another connection, Krenek was not interested (as
Stockhausen had been) in “build[ing] degrees of textural incomprehensibility” into the
materials he worked with. The self-referential and musically foregrounded text of the
Sestina, with its focus on time, chance, and measure, is an essential part of the work’s
experience and of its continuity. Moreover, the dramatic pronouncements of Krenek’s
technical essay mask an interest in the process of active reconstruction of the listening
occasion; in the end, he emphasizes that “communication” derives from the interaction of
the “listener’s reaction” with prior “auditory experience.” That this is possible at all
relates to the care with which the composer has structured as many parameters as possible
according to the sestina plan, permitting its pattern of variation to be perceived at
multiple levels. Despite differences in techniques, this perspective suggests a closer
connection after all to Babbitt, who wrote in “Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone
Composition” that “the resources [I have] indicated here do not constitute a guarantee of
musical coherence, but they should guarantee the possibility of coherence.”
Although Krenek describes a number of other permutational strategies in his article, the
sestina model seems to have particularly taken hold, as is evident in several of his
subsequent compositions. Around the time of his engagement with this model, a group of
French writers and mathematicians banded together to form a workshop of potential
literature, the Oulipo; coincidentally, an early and ongoing area of research of the group,
driven by its co-founder the novelist Raymond Queneau, has been on the form of the
sestina and its generalizations. I use this parallel to suggest another basis for theaesthetics
of Krenek’s compositional procedures, and to explore other connections to Babbitt’s
serial explorations of the 1950s.
The Compositional Origins of Wuorinen’s Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra
Bruce Quaglia, University of Utah
In 1974, Charles Wuorinen composed A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky by incorporating
unfinished musical fragments and charts that Stravinsky had left behind at the time of his
death, presumably intended for a final and unwritten orchestral work. Wuorinen's direct
encounter with the methods of Stravinsky’s late serial practice held profound
consequences for his own music. First, certain aspects of Stravinsky’s serial techniques
pointed towards a connection with earlier musical languages primarily by means of their
latent pitch centricity. Stravinsky's array techniques also suggested a number of possible
extensions that quickly became part of Wuorinen’s own compositional stock and trade for
a time.
Wuorinen’s 1983 composition, Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra, grows directly from a
central passage in the Reliquary that is marked simply as “Lament.” This passage uses
the lagniappe of rotational arrays that Stravinsky had not yet employed in his composed
fragments and which may or may not have been eventually discarded if Stravinsky had
completed the work himself. Wuorinen took this short passage from the Reliquary and
exploded it by a sixteen fold “super-augmentation” in order to provide the large-scale
scaffolding for the Rhapsody. The work was then composed from the largest time scale to
the smallest using a process of recursive iteration that figures prominently in Wuorinen’s
evolving engagement with the work of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. In this talk,
both Stravinsky and Wuorinen’s working methods are revealed to a certain extent by an
examination of primary sketch materials. This presentation discuss those sketches, the
history and analysis of both works, and the aesthetic and theoretical implications of the
compositional techniques involved.
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Roundtable 2: Critical Perspectives/New Pathways
CAC 259, 9:00-10:30 a.m.
Moderators:
Jeffrey Stadelman, University of Buffalo
Franklin Cox, Wright State University
The cross-hatching technique…
Jeff Stadelman, University of Buffalo
For more than one member of the author’s generation, the music, words and professional
presence of Milton Babbitt offered a heady general model for thinking and constructing
music that promised unprecedented (or rather, in the face of contemporary “failures,”
refreshingly precedented) structural depth, control, breadth, coherence. Methods and
structures that engendered “cumulative containment and successive subsumption” might
bring within reach success at what was taken as the hardest task—piece-specific control
of proliferating and involuted association networks within the arc or envelope of a pieceencompassing form.
One noticed the power and generality of, in particular, the thinking within pitch, that
seemed to allow nearly infinite extension, exploration, personal recasting. The music and
writings of composers such as Donald Martino, Charles Wuorinen, Robert Morris,
Stephen Dembski, and Peter Westergaard, among others, indicated the outlines of what
might be possible, and to what extent the Babbittian scaffolding might support multiple
and distinct musical personalities.
This presentation explores one portion of Babbitt’s continuing legacy for composers—
oddly enough, by interrogating what seems at present to be the ironclad rejection of the
composer’s music by a newly emerging generation of American composers in their
twenties.
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Roundtable 3: For Milton Babbitt: a Memorial Recording
CAC 259, 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Moderators:
Benjamin Boretz, Bard College
Christian Carey, Westminster Choir College
Ashlee Mack, Knox College
Andrew Mead, University of Michigan
Robert Morris, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
James Romig, Western Illinois University
A number of Milton Babbitt’s compositions are occasional works. Some, such as My
Complements to Roger and Swan Song No. 1, dedicated, respectively, to Babbitt’s teacher
Roger Sessions and to the Cygnus Ensemble, are affirmative in nature, celebrating special
occasions or thanking stalwart performers of Babbitt’s music. On the other hand, A Solo
Requiem, dedicated to Godfrey Winham, commemorates the memory of a departed
friend.
This roundtable discussion includes some of the contributors to a new set of CD
recordings commemorating Milton Babbitt. Perspectives of New Music and Open Space
Magazine are releasing it in collaboration. Some, such as Odds and Ends, by Robert
Morris, were written while Babbitt was still alive, as birthday greetings and other tributes.
But a number of the pieces included on the CDs have been composed since Babbitt’s
passing, as musical remembrances.
Most of the participants are composers who contributed pieces to the recording: Ms.
Mack is a pianist who recorded several of the works. Several have also studied with or
written about Babbitt. The participants will talk about the genesis of the Babbitt
PNM/OSM recording project. In addition to discussing some of the pieces on the
recording, they will describe the affinities between their own creative processes and
Babbitt's compositional work. Finally, they will talk about Babbitt’s legacy as a teacher
and theorist.
The CDs will contain many pieces composed in honor of Milton Babbitt, on the occasion of his passing.
The release also includes a book containing all scores, notes on the music by the composers, and several
essays about aspects of Milton Babbitt's presence. This will be mailed along with the CD album as a special
supplement to PNM 49/2 and will also be mailed as Special Issue 14 of The Open Space Magazine. They
may also be purchased separately at the websites of PNM and OSM (information below).
Perspectives of New Music (www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org) is directed to a readership consisting of
composers, performers, scholars, and all others interested in any kind of contemporary music. Published
material includes theoretical research, analyses, technical reports, position papers by composers,
sociological and philosophical articles, interviews, reviews, and, for special purposes, short musical scores
or other creative productions.
OPEN SPACE Publications, and THE OPEN SPACE MAGAZINE (http://www.the-open-space.org) are
output from a community for people who need to explore or expand the limits of their expressive worlds, to
extend or dissolve the boundaries among their expressive-language practices, to experiment with the forms
or subjects of thinking or making or performing in the context of creative phenomena.
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