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Milton Babbitt: Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962-1964)

From the album New Electronic Music from the Leaders of the Avant-Garde

The American composer Milton Babbitt died on January 29, 2011. Apart from his highly challenging music, Babbitt was most notorious for his 1958 essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” (originally entitled “The Composer as Specialist”).  In spite of the controversy it engendered, this piece was a thoughtful and by no means polemical investigation of the socio-aesthetic status of the avant-garde composer.  Babbitt ultimately argued that the composer of advanced music should accept and even embrace the relative inaccessibility of her work, and that this music should be seen as an analog to other domains of highly specialized cultural practice, whose value isn’t conjoined to their ease of understanding. Babbitt’s article made him into a bête noire of contemporary music, and the reaction to his arguments gave rise over the years to some highly dubious manifestations of aesthetic populism, which sought to ground the cultural value of music in its so-called “social significance.”  But the increasing specialization of musical subcultures in both popular and art music over the course of the late 20th-century, with its concomitant potential for both esoteric insularity and hybridized border-crossings, has in my opinion vindicated many of Babbitt’s claims.

What I find questionable in Babbitt’s essay is the framing of musical listening as a kind of reconstruction of the formal details of the work, as opposed to a unique and original act of perception that is asymmetrically related to the compositional process. In Babbitt’s words, the “inability to perceive and remember precisely the values of any [musical parameter] results in a dislocation of the event in the work’s musical space, an alternation of its relation to a other events in the work, and thus a falsification of the composition’s total structure.”  This idea did considerable damage in portraying the challenge posed to the listener of new music as one of intellectual training instead of imaginative openness, and thus sanctioned many ill-founded criticisms of modern music in the late 20th century.

Beginning in 1961, Babbitt composed a number of works for the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  Like the German founders of elektronische Musik, Babbitt saw the medium of electronic music as an ideal format for the realization of rigorously serial musical organization.  He was accordingly hostile to the primarily timbral interest that many composers perceived in electronic sound-production.  (Babbitt famously declared that “nothing gets old as quickly as new sounds.”)  But in spite of this attitude, Babbitt’s electronic works are to my ears among his most aesthetically appealing, and this in large part due to the shimmering, prismatic colors of the music, so far removed from the monochromatic dullness of most academic electronic music of the period.

February 01, 2011, 9:56am