Afterword

We are left with more questions than answers. The most pressing, the question of whether Babbitt’s music realizes the organicist, constructional, and cognitive program of his writings, turns out not to be readily answerable: the topics addressed in his writings play a part in his music, but they are evidently only a portion of the compositional matters that concerned him. Listeners to Babbitt’s music would do well to consider the subjects raised in his writings, but they should not feel limited by them. The composer evidently was not....

Completeness and Temporality

Babbitt’s music is constructed from a hierarchy of exhaustive lists, so one can understand completeness in his pieces to be a result of the completion of these lists. In many cases, however, the endings of his pieces are not coordinated with the completion of exhaustive lists. This challenges the significance of the concepts, drawn from cognitive psychology and Schenkerian organicism, that Babbitt uses to justify his hierarchical compositional techniques. A new model of interpreting completeness in Babbitt’s music—drawing inspiration from Jonathan D. Kramer and Jerrold Levinson—is suggested as an alternative approach. Rather than envisioning Babbitt’s music as a processual unfolding of exhaustive lists, this chapter encourages listeners to comprehend his music as made up of interconnected moments cut off by a conventional rhetorical signal indicating closure.

Babbitt’s Gestural Dialectics

The array structures of Babbitt’s music, which present twelve-tone series fixed in narrow registers, seem abstract and impersonal. Nevertheless, numerous commentators on Babbitt’s music have celebrated the sense of motion the music inspires in its listeners. This chapter explores the tension between the music’s static contrapuntal structures and the dynamic experience that results, drawing from research on musical embodiment by Matthew Baileyshea and Seth Monahan, Candace Brower, Arnie Cox, Robert Hatten, Mariusz Kozak, Justin London, Patrick McCreless, and Andrew Mead. An exploration of these gestural dialectics sheds light on a variety of topics: virtuosity, text setting, the liminal periodicity of Babbitt’s later rhythmic practice, anomalous deviations from serial expectations, closing rhetoric, and partitioning. The chapter ends by discussing how scholars may navigate the distinction between Babbitt’s formalistic prose and the gestural experience of his music.

Poetic Form and Psychological Portraiture in Babbitt’s Early Texted Works

In five early texted works—“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” Du, Two Sonnets, Vision and Prayer, and Philomel—Babbitt uses a variety of means to project both poetic form and the psychological life of the characters represented. Trichordal derivation is used to model metaphors of reference, dependency, and layers of psychological action. Divergences between voice and accompaniment can also create layers of agency and implication. In several instances, Babbitt’s desire to reflect the meaning of texts leads him to musical structures that depart from the practice and principles he develops in his instrumental work. Moreover, in all five of these pieces, poetic form—the sonic, syntactic, and visual aspects of poetry—is projected in numerous ways; this is shown to derive from Babbitt’s youthful career in musical theater. Some ways involve the coordination of serial and poetic articulation, and some involve non-serial musical dimensions.

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.

The Surface and the Series in Composition for Four Instruments

Composition for Four Instruments is among Babbitt’s best-known compositions and is frequently cited as an example of a piece with trichordal arrays. Nonetheless, the work’s hierarchical underpinnings—the means by which its arrays can be understood as outgrowths of its underlying twelve-tone series—remain undertheorized, a situation that has resulted in the publication of many different series for the work. A close examination clarifies the work’s series by considering surface elements such as simultaneities and the sequence of array materials. The significance of surface events in determining serial structure leads to comparison with Richard Cohn’s work on Schenkerian theory and motive. Furthermore, these surface elements are rhetorically significant: the sole surface trichord that confounds serial derivation is used to link the beginning and ending of the work, contributing to a rounded conclusion.

The Seam in Babbitt’s Compositional Development

The years around 1960 saw Babbitt’s style change in three critical ways: he adopted the time-point system, began writing electronic music, and started using all-partition, rather than trichordal, arrays. The pivotal piece in these developments is Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments. A close analysis of this piece in light of its predecessors and its successors is revealing about a range of Babbitt’s priorities, and it provides a case study of his views on perception and cognition. During the preceding decade, Babbitt had pursued a growing interest in contrapuntal complexity, including four techniques detailed in this chapter. These techniques form the basis of Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments. Yet Babbitt felt that he had pushed contrapuntal complexity too far. The all-partition array—with complex counterpoint but simple lines—was a solution that balanced his competing aesthetic desires. The work also sheds light on Babbitt’s early use of the time-point system.

Construction, Cognition, and the Role of the Surface

What do Babbitt’s theoretical commitments tell us about how to listen to his music? This chapter excavates Babbitt’s reading in analytical philosophy (particularly of Rudolf Carnap) and cognitive psychology (particularly of George A. Miller) in an attempt to answer that question. Babbitt’s compositional techniques are reviewed in this light: array construction, interdimensional parallelism (e.g., the use of the time-point system to complement the twelve-tone system), and cross-references are shown to be motivated by a desire to write music amenable to rational reconstruction (in Carnap’s term) and sensitive to theories of memory and information processing. Babbitt’s views on Schenker are revisited: he found Schenkerian analysis to represent a model for musical memory. His understanding of language, too, is conditioned by his reading of philosophy and cognitive science. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limitations of Babbitt’s psychology as a guide to the analysis of his music.