On Milton Babbitt, Schenkerian

This chapter explores the influence of Schenker on Babbitt’s theoretical views, analytical prose, and, most importantly, his compositional techniques. Beginning with a discussion of his upbringing in the New York City of the 1930s, surrounded by intellectual refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, the chapter details how Schenkerian organicism influenced Babbitt and how it intersected with his other, often quite divergent, interests. The metaphor of organicism is excavated in Babbitt’s writings and examined for its heuristic utility. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, another predecessor Babbitt repeatedly cited, is discussed as an additional potential influence. Babbitt’s principal compositional techniques—serial arrays, the time-point system, and cross-references—are reconstructed in light of his Schenkerian principles. Readers new to Babbitt’s music will find the basic outlines of his compositional approach surveyed here.

Thinking In and About Music

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) was, at once, one of the century’s foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life—“thinking in” and “thinking about” music, as he would put it—nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. Accordingly, this book undertakes an excavation of the sources of his theorizing as a guide to analysis of his music. Babbitt’s idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science—at least as much as more obviously relevant, and more frequently cited, predecessors such as Arnold Schoenberg—provide insight into his aesthetics and compositional technique. Examination of Babbitt’s newly available sketch materials sheds additional light on his procedures. But a close look at his music reveals a host of concerns unaccounted for in his theories, some of which seem to directly contradict theoretical expectations. New analytical models are needed to complement those suggested by Babbitt’s theories. Departing from the serial logic of Babbitt’s writings, his compositional procedures, and most previous work on the subject—and in an attempt to discuss Babbitt’s music as it is actually heard rather than just deciphered—the book brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality. The result is a richly multifaceted look at one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating musical minds.

Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt (b. 1916–d. 2011) was one of 20th-century America’s leading composers and a foundational figure in contemporary music theory. His music introduced a number of serial techniques, including the development of contrapuntal arrays and the extension of twelve-tone procedures to the dimension of rhythm. He was an innovator in the realm of electronic music, composing works for the R.C.A. Mark II Sound Synthesizer. As a scholar, Babbitt set the program for the first generation of academic American music theory. Theory, in his view, would be empirically grounded, expressed in rigorous language, and informed by analytical philosophy, cognitive science, and mathematics; it would, in short, become a formal research discipline. His papers on the twelve-tone system exemplify his novel vision of the field. He also gained notoriety as a polemicist: if music theory and contemporary composition are to operate according to the standards of research, he claims, they belong in the university, accountable to the judgment of knowledgeable peers and not to the wider public. These developments in musical technique, theoretical approach, and social positioning have attracted a great deal of commentary. Many analysts have set themselves the task of deciphering his novel compositional techniques; almost as many have turned to the perhaps even more daunting challenge of characterizing how his music is heard. Babbitt’s vision of music theory, influential as it has been, has received spirited critique, both in general and as a tool to explicate his music. And as a historical figure, Babbitt has attracted interest as a paragon of high modernism, an influential shaper of music theory, and an exemplar of Cold War cultural politics. The sources below give an extensive survey of Babbitt’s own writings, lectures, and interviews along with a sampling of the best analytical, critical, and historical work on the composer.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the University New Music Center, and “Foundation Music”

This chapter focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of university new music centers and contemporary chamber ensembles, offering new insights into a commonly understood historiography of U.S. twentieth-century music: the dominance and prestige of experimental music and serialism at universities. Most notably, composers at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Mills College served dually as outside experts and commissioned artists and performers. Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky benefited greatly from their involvement at Rockefeller and the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center. The composers and performers justified their work initially through the Soviet threat and rivalries with European studios, and later with innovation and creativity. The new music ensembles solidified a musical circuit that crisscrossed the country, making stops at many Rockefeller-funded centers. The foundation revealed ways it was both an advertent and inadvertent patron of what New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant pejoratively referred to as “foundation music.”

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

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.

Portmantonality and Babbitt’s Poetics of Double Entendre

This essay presents a theory of musical and verbal double entendre inspired by and applicable to the late-period music of Milton Babbitt. Rather than assuming the appropriateness of any single method (which might tend toward singularity of meaning), a number of approaches are applied to three late works: primarily his Whirled Series (1987), and secondarily his Canonical Form (1983) and Gloss on ’Round Midnight (2001). These are interpreted through various kinds of analysis, not only serial, but also tonal (chordal and voice-leading), associational, pitch-permeational, and form-functional. Connections to Tin-Pan-Alley song lyrics, jazz improvisation, hermeneutics, and Gibsonian affordances are discussed in relation to these musical analyses. All this is done to infer and cultivate connections (represented as a conceptual integration networks) between Babbitt’s extra-theoretic verbal expression and extra-dodecaphonic aspects of his music, connections that suggest an underlying poetics (a tacit motivational philosophy implicitly fueling his creativity) that provides pragmatic benefit to the artistic ambitions of diverse personal identities.