Babbitt (1916 - 2011)

[Richard Barrett]

"lyricism", "drama", "variety"

Is that all?

The thing is I really want to like it. On the face of it, the combination of highly systematic composition techniques, electronic explorations, hyperactivity as you call it, a certain sense of humour, a lack of concern for tradition etc. should be a mixture that appeals to me. He certainly succeeds in making audible his symmetries and permutations and all that stuff, but to me it all seems heavily pedantic - there's never a moment when I think "what the hell was that?", never a moment of epiphany, or a sense that all the systems are there to expand the imagination. It seems to be no more nor less than the sum of its parts, or the "real action" is taking place at a level that's inaccessible to me. But maybe it will eventually become accessible...

[Boilk]

In general Babbitt's music sounds too much like musical sudoku ... a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder for pitch, rhythm and other relationships, perhaps what happens when a mathematics researcher applies his considerable analytical prowess to music. Much of it seems to be cleverness better appreciated with a score than speakers. He's received his just dues inside academia, and his just dues outside of it - which is why there'll never be a Babbitt Total Immersion Day!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

In general Babbitt's music sounds too much like musical sudoku ...

Sudokus are very popular aren't they?

a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder for pitch, rhythm and other relationships,

Essential requirements for a composer don't you think?

perhaps what happens when a mathematics researcher applies his considerable analytical prowess to music.

Perhaps - but Boulez' Music doesn't sound like this, does it?

Much of it seems to be cleverness better appreciated with a score than speakers.

You prefer stupidity better appreciated with Speakers? Stick with the House of Commons.

He's received his just dues inside academia, and his just dues outside of it - which is why there'll never be a Babbitt Total Immersion Day!

Sorry - not being a mathematics researcher, I don't follow the logic of this.

[Daniel]

You prefer stupidity better appreciated with Speakers? Stick with the House of Commons.

Most adroit.


When I'm in the mood for listening to something that in my imagination is spare and pared of emoting I sometimes try Babbitt (though am prepared to find whatever presents itself), but haven't yet connected with any of his music. Not yet given up.

[Quarky]

In view of continued discussion about Milton Babbitt, I have listened again to this programme, before it disappears from iPlayer.

Have to confess, I can't see what the fuss is about. Having spent the previous evening with a new piece of electronic kit for my ham radio set up, with all sorts of whistles, tones and chugging sounds, I found the initial piece Reflections a welcome relief and very musical. The music flowed over me, I was able to follow an "envelope", which is one of the current KPIs for good music.

Milton was a child of his time, being caught up with electronic music and Jazz, which were at an apogee post-war. Philomel seemed to me at base a combination of Cole Porter type singing and electronics. Thankfully, the underlying serialism was totally lost on me, and I have no intention of attempting to follow that.

What's the problem?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[Serial_Apologist]

current KPIs for good music.

Very nutritious, I should imagine. Are they obtainable in sealed bags?

Thankfully, the underlying serialism was totally lost on me, and I have no intention of attempting to follow that.

What's the problem?

I rather think Arnold Schoenberg would have concurred with that question.

[Richard Barrett]

What's the problem?

Well, the problem for me is certainly not the serialism! (don't get me started on so many people's confusion of how music was constructed with what it's actually doing...) I like your mention of Cole Porter in the context of Philomel but I can't say I hear it like that. Something I find a bit odd about Babbitt's electronic music is that it all (or everything I've heard) seems content to restrict itself to chromatic pitches, notatable rhythms, quasi-instrumental textures and so on, as if somehow the idea of composing and playing a traditional score still reigns supreme (which of course isn't the case in the contemporaneous electronic music by Stockhausen for example). I guess that is one response to having to deal with a situation offering a bewildering infinitude of possibilities.

For me a discussion like this, however intermittent, is quite useful in identifying what it actually is that I or others find problematic in some music or other; once that issue is identified, it can so to speak be set aside in order to enable concentration on the music's other qualities, which is the way I've come to appreciate many things whose appeal was opaque at first.

[Serial_Apologist]

Perhaps rather than ‘responding’ to a situation offering an infinity of possibilities, he saw the technology primarily as a way to get entirely accurate executions of his already largely formulated musical thinking. Thus, an approach in sharp contrast to the next generation, who (as you imply) saw a way out of traditional models of pitch, harmony, timbre and of course instrumental gesture.

I still think there's a lot that can be done with traditional models of pitch, harmony, timbre and of course instrumental gesture, without feeling some urge to turn back to tonality, which imv few serious contemporary composers (eg the late John McCabe) have successfully acomplished. Giving up on atonality (and various means and none for the structuralisation thereof) is tantamount to sacrificing the infinitude of possibilities, harmonic, melodic, thematic, athematic, thereof offering themselves up since 1908, like omitting the sky from a painting. I'm a believer in modernity for all its faults and mistaken byways; I guess my attitude stems from persevering as a disciplined listener with the Second Viennese School and those thereby influenced directly or indirectly, such as Carter and Ferneyhough, gaining the enrichments of that effort, and not wanting others to be deprived of them - which probably make me old-fashioned - like a critic on radio a number of years ago accused Boulez of being: namely nostalgic for a past age of serial order in music!

[Richard Barrett]

technology primarily as a way to get entirely accurate executions of his already largely formulated musical thinking

i reckon that's probably an important factor... although it then begs the question of whether there's any perceptible advantage in such "entirely accurate executions", as well as clinging unnecessarily to a view of musical structure based on the score as the ultimate paradigm and reference (which in fact is a 19th century notion more than anything else).

There is of course, as S_A says, "a lot that can be done with traditional models of pitch, harmony, timbre and of course instrumental gesture", although it's hard to understand the attraction of doing that in the electronic domain, which seems to me a bit like writing piano music that only uses the middle two octaves of the keyboard (mind you Schumann got away with that, more or less).

[ahinton]

I still think there's a lot that can be done with traditional models of pitch, harmony, timbre and of course instrumental gesture, without feeling some urge to turn back to tonality, which imv few serious contemporary composers (eg the late John McCabe) have successfully acomplished. Giving up on atonality (and various means and none for the structuralisation thereof) is tantamount to sacrificing the infinitude of possibilities, harmonic, melodic, thematic, athematic, thereof offering themselves up since 1908, like omitting the sky from a painting.

Much as I agree broadly with what you write here, I would venture a similar observation about giving up on tonality, especially as it remains capable of enriching the tonal palette available to the composer and, in any case, I've always regarded "tonality" and "atonality" as a matter of degree, based upon the nature and amount of concentrated listening experience, rather than specific phenomena that sit firmly on either side of some imaginary dividing line. I also don't quite buy into the notion of "turning back" to tonality as it's been around for so long and has never actually gone away.

[Richard Barrett]

Varèse on Babbitt in 1965: "It seems to me that he wants to exercise maximum control over certain materials, as if he were above them. But I want to be in the material, part of the acoustical vibration, so to speak. Babbitt composes his material first and then gives it to the synthesizer, while I want to generate something directly by electronic means. In other words, I think of musical space as open rather than bounded, which is why I speak about projection in the sense that I want simply to project a sound, a musical thought, to initiate it, and then to let it take its own course."

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Varèse on Babbitt in 1965: "It seems to me that he wants to exercise maximum control over certain materials, as if he were above them. But I want to be in the material, part of the acoustical vibration, so to speak. Babbitt composes his material first and then gives it to the synthesizer, while I want to generate something directly by electronic means. In other words, I think of musical space as open rather than bounded, which is why I speak about projection in the sense that I want simply to project a sound, a musical thought, to initiate it, and then to let it take its own course."

- a neat summation of the two composers' respective attitudes to making Music.

[Richard Barrett]

Of course my reason for posting it (apart from having just come across it by chance) was to draw attention to the centrality of "control" and the "bounded musical space" which are more elegant ways of expressing what lies behind my own problems with Babbitt. The distinction is between Boulez's notion of serialism as a universe in constant expansion and Babbitt's (presumed) notion of keeping that universe small enough for its entire contents to be overseen and controlled.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ah - I hear it somewhat differently: Babbitt's serial universe is as expanding as is Boulez's - but rather than expressing this in works that themselves expand (as Boulez did with each compositional "return" to a piece), Babbitt treats each work as an individual world to be explored within that expanding universe. The concept of "expansion" is perceived as each work explores different facets of an (seemingly limitlessly) expanding serial space. What you suggest as "oversee(ing) and controll(ing)" I feel to be ways of "mapping" paths through the bewildering/amazing arrays of serial possibilities. Boulez prefers to allow the possibility of getting "lost" and "improvising" pathways - closer to Nono's "wayfarers; there are no ways, there is only faring", although Nono's attitude and achievement is very different still.