Pulling a Fast More-Than-One: Milton Babbitt’s Time-point Practice

Abstract

Milton Babbitt’s employment of the rhythmic techniques known as the time-point system appears well-designed to obscure the premise on which the system is built, namely the maintenance of a steady pulse in modular organisation. In a variety of ways, Babbitt’s music brings any such pulse into contact, even conflict, with other pulses; and the timepoints of the system come more consistently to delineate spans filled with other activity than themselves to specify the times of events. Curiously, Babbitt’s theoretical presentation of the system comes in an article about the resources of the electronic medium, resources that appear to include the ease with which the machine can contribute to this obscuring of it. All this suggests some new thoughts about the relation of construction and result in Babbitt: that the alignment of the two may be even less close in rhythm than in pitch; that the usual definition of time-point technique may emphasise aspects of it that are not most important in Babbitt’s use of it, including its putative analogy to the pitch-class system; that Babbitt’s working method may in these respects have involved resisting the system to a degree not previously accounted for; and that the implications of this practice for listening are thus far very little articulated.

Keywords:

• Babbitt
• Rhythm
• Serialism
• Time-Points
• African Drumming
• American Minimalism
• Composing and Listening

Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to Zachary Bernstein, David E. Cohen, and Joshua Banks Mailman for generous participation in the development of this argument and provision of important material. Marion A. Guck and Roger Mathew Grant offered observations on an earlier version that have led to considerable improvement.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My work with Willie Anku helped me to realise the possibility of this connection, and has led me, directly or indirectly, to my African examples, which there is no room to elaborate here. Anku (2000) is representative, and includes citations of other valuable work of his.

2 To be precise, speed is an issue for Pressing, but not in a way that is easy to connect to Babbitt. Referring specifically to cyclical rhythms, he offers the interesting proposition that ‘Fast tempos . . . facilitate the focusing of attention on the cycle as a whole’, while ‘musics with characteristically slow tempi and cycles of 12 do not . . . use’ the kinds of time-line in question (1983, 48). In an article referring explicitly to Pressing’s, Justin London emphasises a different issue of speed that may be more relevant, namely the difference between perceptually manageable and unmanageable tacti, and the consequent inflection of what he calls ‘metric space’ (London 2002, especially pp. 140–45). Babbitt’s space, while modular, is not particularly metric, so it is difficult to pursue this point further; all the more as there is no cause to follow London in the assumption that pitch space will be organised tonally (and in fact considerable reason to do otherwise). In any case all the argument here is about particular practices, not about time in general.

3 In light of recent discussion of ‘instruments of music theory’, we could consider calling the programmable synthesiser a ‘materialization’ of the time-point theory (in parallel to Alexander Rehding [2016, 15.5] on Vicentino’s archicembalo and tuning theory). But the argument here is that synthesiser is associated with no essential change in rhythmic conceptions that Babbitt had already been enacting for some time, and independently of it. Instead the instrument might be said to have offered escape from the theory, or at least from some of its implications, until compositional imagination produced more substantive solutions.

4 This is the jumping-off point for the technique practiced by Charles Wuorinen in many works, and described to some extent in his Simple Composition (1979). The duration of a piece is divided proportionally to the intervals of a form of the row, each resulting duration subdivided similarly (usually by a different form), and then these are sub-subdivided. Wuorinen’s awareness of Babbitt’s early time-point music is discussed in Bernstein (2015).

5 Mentioned only once in print—under the remarkable designation of a ‘colleague’ of himself and Schoenberg (1991)—but frequently in teaching and conversation.

6 In very different ways, changes in the counting unit have been central to two brief discussions of rhythm in Babbitt. In Du, a piece composed before the time-point system (but well captured by Boretz’s generalisation about Babbitt’s practice), Christopher F. Hasty (1997, 275–81) concentrates on degrees of acceleration and deceleration in ways that do not depend on, and in some respects actively depart from, exact measurement. In Arie da Capo, Ciro Scotto (1988), writing from the viewpoint of a conductor, interprets changes in pace in terms of the distribution of different amounts of pitch material in different spans of time, the two determined somewhat independently.

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Joseph Dubiel

Joseph Dubiel writes about music, in theoretical and philosophical contexts, sometimes writes it, and teaches it at Columbia University.