Babbitt (1916 - 2011)

[Richard Barrett]

although Nono's attitude and achievement is very different still.

and to me much more important, for example in emphasising music's (both actual and potential) relation to society... I don't want to give the impression that I'm extolling Boulez over Babbitt, it was just his formulation about the expanding universe that came to mind. Actually I don't think Boulez's music is a very convincing example of that idea, in comparison with Stockhausen in particular, where the resources of electronic music embodies an entirely new paradigm for musical thought, including serial thought, which then feeds back creatively into instrumental music (fulfilling the promise expressed by Varèse, who himself never quite got there), serial procedures not as a way of relating everything (in a composition) "back" to a formative kernel but of relating everything to everything else. No doubt I've said this here before, pardon my obsession. Babbitt's music in comparison seems to me parochial. I would love to be able to change my mind about this.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

serial procedures not as a way of relating everything (in a composition) "back" to a formative kernel but of relating everything to everything else. No doubt I've said this here before, pardon my obsession. Babbitt's music in comparison seems to me parochial. I would love to be able to change my mind about this.

I think that that is an important (and perceptive) distinction - but I also think that Babbitt was the first composer to reach it in his work - in that his is the first Serial Music in which you can waste an awful lot of time trying to find "The Row". I speak whereof I know - eventually it dawns that finding the source of the Nile isn't nearly as rewarding as sailing on it.

But I like Babbitt's stuff and you don't (yet) - so our perceptions of what he's achieved aren't going to coincide. So I'll stop here by agreeing that, when it comes to the crunch, Nono's work is the more significant to me, too (and Stockhausen's, for that matter). Now, I've got this CD of Music for 'cello & electronics to attend to ...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Babbitt (1916 - 2011)

Realizing that there's only a fortnight left of his Centenary year, Music Matters devoted a decent quarter-hour to commemorate the anniversary yesterday (repeated tonight at 10:00, and available on the i-Player).

Some lovely insights into the man's genially formidable intellect, with pertinent comments on his Music's equidistant roots in Serialism and Jazz, the programme nevertheless rather skirted over how difficult his Music is to perform. I first encountered it at the 1981 Musica Nova Festival in Glasgow, where the BBCSSO comprehensively sabotaged their performances (as one of the Violinists gleefully bragged in the pub afterwards) some of the players regarding it as a serious personal insult to be required by a composer to begin a note on the fourth quaver of a quintuplet. Not unsurprisingly, I came away hating what I'd heard, but also intrigued that the works performed by artists dedicated to the Music (Vision & Prayer, Philomel, the Piano Music) sounded so much more convincing. Interesting that the clips of orchestral Music on MusMatt also sounded stiffest and merely a sequence of sounds following one after the other with little to connect them - the sense of a counterpoint of "sparkling", pointilliste material unfolding against a progression of sustained chords (a chorale, if you like) was completely lost.

I have since come to love this Music - the way it teases and dances and sings. The word "complexity" was used three or four times, but Babbitt himself used far more appropriate vocabulary when referring to the "richness" of Bach, Brahms, Schoenberg - and I think of it more as "generosity": the "connectivity" of the chords in the "Chorale" I mentioned above takes on a greater richness (and thus gives greater rewards for the listener) from the very shades of timbre with which each successive chord is endowed - and it is this very richness that makes it so difficult for Musicians with limited rehearsal time (and limited sympathy and understanding) to make clear in performance.

The reminiscences of the man by his friends and pupils are a delight to hear - and good to have the "Who Cares if You Listen?" myth comprehensively debunked yet again.




And a couple of articles on Daniele Gatti (who has a refreshing attitude to works/composers he doesn't like: he plays them until he does!) and on Hans Richter, who died a century ago.

Good programme, splendidly presented by Sara Mohr-Pietsche.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0855xtn

[Richard Barrett]

I've been listening to Babbitt's Correspondences for string orchestra and tape, in what seems like an excellent performance of an incredibly difficult piece by the Chicago Symphony with James Levine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-l2OFHs5I

It really sounds as if the polyphonic strands of the electronic part are interwoven with those of the live orchestra, with the perspectives between all these strands constantly shifting, sometimes startlingly. This is more like it, as far as I'm concerned. I would be happy for this piece to go on much longer than it does.

[Richard Barrett]

Continuing with this theme, in case anyone's watching: another two pieces I checked out last night were the electronic Occasional Variations and the Piano Concerto. Something that struck me about the first of these, as well as Correspondences, is that there seems to be little or no perceptible large-scale form. Not that this is in itself a problem; but the Piano Concerto inhabits the same kind of world of febrile micromovements and has a discernible overall shape, and, I might add, lets go of all those traditional associations between instruments and their typical materials (expressive strings, stentorian brass etc.) to which for example Carter was often still prone. So there are now three or four pieces by MB that I've really quite enjoyed.

[ahinton]

Continuing with this theme, in case anyone's watching: another two pieces I checked out last night were the electronic Occasional Variations and the Piano Concerto. Something that struck me about the first of these, as well as Correspondences, is that there seems to be little or no perceptible large-scale form. Not that this is in itself a problem; but the Piano Concerto inhabits the same kind of world of febrile micromovements and has a discernible overall shape, and, I might add, lets go of all those traditional associations between instruments and their typical materials (expressive strings, stentorian brass etc.) to which for example Carter was often still prone. So there are now three or four pieces by MB that I've really quite enjoyed.

Interesting- but is there really a fundamental problem with "all those traditional associations between instruments and their typical materials (expressive strings, stentorian brass etc.)" provided that the composer doesn't lazily have undue recourse to them to the near-exclusion of other possibilities?

[teamsaint]

I gave the Piano Concerto a listen tonight, ( after having listened to some other pieces also mentioned here ), and I thought the concerto was the most exciting "new to me" music that I have heard in , well a few weeks at least. ( thankfully the Xmas CDs are back on the shelves now.)

Can't really put into words why that is, although the combination of textures , longer held notes in the string lines, against the more propulsive rhythmically dynamic piano part has something to do with it. Which is doubtless very superficial, but it's a start.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm watching with great interest - loads of stuff to catch up with; will say more when done!

[Richard Barrett]

will say more when done!

I hope so. I'll be having a go at some of the chamber music later today, although clearly my "way in" has been through MB's compositions with electronic sounds. I've always tended to regard electronic music that's as centred on pitches and rhythms as MB's is as a highly limited and limiting use of the medium, especially since it seems to tie in with what I was saying upthread about making a musical universe that's small enough to facilitate a comprehensive sense of overview and control. If you're going to use an electronic music studio as if it were a traditional instrument or ensemble why not just use those things instead? Also his use of traditional instruments is highly "classical" and doesn't expand their timbral potential beyond what you might find in Schoenberg. But actually the way he's (presumably) systematising the timbral evolutions of his synthetic sounds has a fascination of its own.

[Daniel]

I also listened to the piano concerto on youtube and kept getting the vague impression that I was listening to a kind of re-imagined Mozart concerto, hearing (apparent) sequential phrases and rhythmic melodic gestures, and a kind of wittiness I often associate with WAM. I don't know whether that's a strange reading of a piece of music intended more as a sequence of connected nows than a narrative, but it's what I heard. I certainly warmed to it and enjoyed the colour tumbling Kandinsky-like around the score.

I should say Babbitt's music has become somewhat more accessible to me over the past 7 or 8 months, for which I largely have this forum to thank.

[Richard Barrett]

a kind of re-imagined Mozart concerto, hearing (apparent) sequential phrases and rhythmic melodic gestures

That impression makes sense to me. What you describe as the tumbling colour, though, is what got me more excited than anything else. What has stood between MB's instrumental music and me in the past has been its timbral conservatism, for want of a better word, and this may be a matter of not hearing the right pieces anyway (my first experience was Robert Taub's CD of piano music, in which I found it quite hard to distinguish one piece from another!); but composing timbrally with an orchestra is more a matter of putting instruments together than so to speak taking them apart, and what the liner notes for the piano concerto describe as a division of the orchestra into four registral strata, whose individual entries and exits and relation to the solo part outline the overall shape I was mentioning before, does produce a unique kind of ensemble sound.

[Daniel]

what the liner notes for the piano concerto describe as a division of the orchestra into four registral strata, whose individual entries and exits and relation to the solo part outline the overall shape I was mentioning before, does produce a unique kind of ensemble sound.

I agree, luminous, transparent and quite warm at times. The piece also exudes quite a marked feeling of buoyancy to me, which I imagine has quite a bit to do with subtleties of orchestration, afloat and very alive to its own eddies, if that makes any sense.
As far as an overall shape goes, it certainly eluded me first time through and may do many more times to come, but that doesn't bother me, I'm just glad to have discovered the piece.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Babbitt

[Neil]

I find this a very dynamic and exciting performance of Partitions by Robert Helps, a wonderful pianist and good composer in his own right. http://helpsweb.free.fr/Pianist/pian...p?page=audit14 I think his own Hommage à Ravel is gorgeous! http://helpsweb.free.fr/Pianist/pian...p?page=audit15 Surprising to discover he also enjoyed playing pieces by John Ireland. http://helpsweb.free.fr/Pianist/pianist.php?page=audit1

I feel I get the opportunity to hear far too much of Cage, Feldman, Glass, Reich... What about Donald Martino http://necmusic.edu/faculty/donald-martino https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvjCtElq9_Q ?
Or Robert Morris http://ecmc.rochester.edu/rdm/morris.bio.html
Or Richard Swift, for example? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Swift_(composer)?
All colleagues of Babbitt. Their music never seems to have been broadcast here in Britain in their lifetimes, as far as I've noticed. Only one of these four (including Helps) remains alive.
There's another one, dead as well, sadly. http://georgeperle.net/

[Serial_Apologist]

There was a time when George Perle was regarded as the No 1 spokesperson for serialism in the States.