Playing Babbitt by Ear: How I Composed More Semi-Simple Variations, Intermezzo, and Fugue on a Theme by Milton Babbitt for Piano Four-Hands

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Juri Seo
Keyword(s):  
Milton Babbitt

Babbitt’s Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside; Part I: Freedoms

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Banks Mailman
Keyword(s):  
Partial Ordering ◽  
Personal Traits ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
Iconic Figure ◽  
Inside Part

Milton Babbitt has been a controversial and iconic figure, which has indirectly led to fallacious assumptions about how his music is made, and therefore to fundamental misconceptions about how it might be heard and appreciated. This video (the first of a three-part video essay) reconsiders his music in light of both his personal traits and a more precise examination of the constraints and freedoms entailed by his unusual and often misunderstood compositional practices, which are based inherently on partial ordering (as well as pitch repetition), which enables a surprising amount of freedom to compose the surface details we hear. The opening of Babbitt’s Composition for Four Instruments (1948) and three recompositions (based on re-ordering of pitches) demonstrate the freedoms intrinsic to partial ordering.

Laudate Milton Babbitt

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2S) ◽  
pp. 336-346
Author(s):  
Rolv Yttrehus
Keyword(s):  
Milton Babbitt

The Shape of the Voice 1: Milton Babbitt

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2S) ◽  
pp. 100-102
Author(s):  
Warren Burt
Keyword(s):  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
The Voice

Milton Babbitt

Tempo ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (229) ◽  
pp. 47-49
Author(s):  
Rodney Lister
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Milton Babbitt

BABBITT: String Quartet No. 61; Occasional Variations for synthesizer; String Quartet No. 22; Composition for Guitar3. 1The Sherry Quartet; 2The Composers Quartet; 3William Anderson (gtr). Tzadik TZ7088.BABBITT: Quatrains1; Manifold Music2, My Ends Are My Beginnings3; Soli e Duettini4; Swan Song No. 15. 1Tony Arnold (sop), Charles Neidich, Ayako Oshima (cls); 2Gregory D'Agostino (org); 3Allen Blustine (cl); 4William Anderson, Oren Fader (gtrs); 5Cygnus Ensemble c. Jeffrey Milarsky. Bridge 9135.

UPON THE OCCASION OF THE MILTON BABBITT (1916–2011) CENTENARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN BORETZ

Tempo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (278) ◽  
pp. 29-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Banks Mailman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Solo Piano ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
Stylistic Changes

AbstractThis edited transcript of a public pre-concert discussion with composer, theorist and critic Benjamin Boretz not only touches on early personal encounters with Babbitt but also ranges over issues of reception of his music, listening experiences, transformations of music's temporality, connections to Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and postmodernism, stylistic changes over Babbitt's career and composerly poetics, as well as motivations and consequences for precompositional structures and systems. The discussion took place on 22 November 2015, at the first of three recitals during the 2015–16 concert season at Spectrum, in New York City, in which Augustus Arnone for the second time performed all of Milton Babbitt's solo piano works, this time in honour of the composer's centenary.

Timbral Thievery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan De Souza
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tuning Fork ◽  
Sound Sources ◽  
Hermann Von Helmholtz ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
Acoustic Instruments

Timbre often indexes an instrument’s materiality, and timbral variation often correlates with a player’s actions. Yet synthesizers complicate phenomenological links between sound and source. This chapter juxtaposes three instruments: an electromagnetic tuning-fork apparatus, developed by the nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz; the RCA Mark II, used by Milton Babbitt and other mid-twentieth-century composers; and the Yamaha GX-1, a large polyphonic synthesizer from the 1970s, played by Stevie Wonder and Keith Emerson. These synthesizers create new timbres and also imitate acoustic instruments, in a process that Robert Moog calls “timbral thievery.” Such imitations can provoke exaggerated or anxious discussions of synthetic and natural timbre. At the same time, performers may showcase the gap between timbre and instrument, exploiting a sense of uncanny or ambiguous sound sources for varied expressive ends. Ultimately, then, synthesizers help musicians both produce and conceptualize timbre.

MILTON BABBITT (1916–2011)The Widow’s Lament in Springtime (1959)

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Jane Manning
Keyword(s):  
Wide Range ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Voice

This chapter examines a brief but beautiful example of composer Milton Babbitt’s oeuvre—The Widow’s Lament in Springtime. This modestly proportioned song blends both sides of his composing persona—the lyrical and the unabashedly modernistic. The vocal writing is graceful and fluid. It is possessing of an exceptionally wide range, constantly swooping and dipping, yet is perhaps smoother and less fragmentary. Singers with a high level of musicianship will find it exhilarating to sing such lines, as long as problems of pitch and rhythm can be solved. They may even conceal vocal blemishes as the voice cruises over intervals in a curving legato. The tessitura is low enough to suit an alto, but higher pitches should take care. The low-pitched writing, moreover, aids clear enunciation, but flexibility is still a prerequisite for anyone undertaking this piece.

Foundations (1962–1967)

Wendy Carlos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Amanda Sewell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Audio Engineering ◽  
Engineering Society ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
First Time ◽  
Society Convention

This chapter follows Carlos from her time as a graduate student in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to her early professional career as a recording engineer with Gotham Studios. At Columbia, she studied with electronic music pioneers Vladimir Ussachevsky and Milton Babbitt, learning to compose music with magnetic tape and the RCA Mark II Synthesizer. Carlos met Robert Moog for the first time in 1964 at the Audio Engineering Society convention. They worked together as Moog developed modules for 900-series analog synthesizer. Carlos also began seeing Dr. Harry Benjamin, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, in his office in New York.

The Shape of the Voice 1: Milton Babbitt

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2S) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Warren Burt
Keyword(s):  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
The Voice
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