The Private and Public Lives of a Lost Concerto: Milton Babbitt’s Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound

Abstract

Milton Babbitt’s violin concerto (1975–1976), entitled Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound, was premiered at Juilliard in January of 2016, an impressive feat given that it was only unearthed in the spring of 2015 and that the electronic part was incomplete. After discussing Concerti’s history and discovery, a pedagogical and philosophical perspective is offered for future soloists. Concerti demands the highest levels of technical preparation, intellectual engagement, and expressive commitment. The performer is encouraged to seek and live with two simultaneous lives of the piece: a private life, characterised by a ceaseless drive for betterment and deeper understanding, and a public life, in which organic utterances of expressive communication are the top priority.

Keywords:

• Babbitt
• Violin
• Electronics
• Virtuosity
• Performance Analysis
• Linguistics
• Legato Transient
• Dynamics
• Fingering
• Bowing

Acknowledgements

I thank Betty Ann Duggan and C. F. Peters Publishers for permission to reprint score excerpts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by this author.

Notes

1 This first five minutes of the electronic part can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/milton-babbitt/sets/concerti-for-violin-orchestra. A recording of the entire 2016 performance exists but, as yet, the Juilliard School has made it available only on a limited basis to its own students and teachers.

2 Researchers have developed robots with artificial vocal organs to better study and model the human articulatory system (Nhu and Sawada 2017; Kitani et al. 2012; Fukui et al. 2007; Sawada 2007; Nishikawa et al. 2004; Higashimoto and Sawada 2003; Ishizaka and Flanagan 1972).

3 See for instance the work of companies like Lyrebird, Voysis, or Voicery.

4 A spectrogram shows the spectrum of frequencies present as a function of time.

5 Both the computer and violin renditions of bb. 1–3 can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/milton-babbitt/sets/concerti-for-violin-orchestra.

6 A hybrid human-computer rendition of bb. 1–3 can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/milton-babbitt/sets/concerti-for-violin-orchestra.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Glenn

Julia Glenn, called ‘remarkable’, ‘gripping’, and ‘a brilliant soloist’ by the New York Times, performs internationally on modern and baroque violins. A member of the Tianjin Juilliard Ensemble and faculty at the Tianjin Juilliard School, she has also collaborated recently with the New York New Music Ensemble, Cantata Profana, Soloists of New England, and ACRONYM. She received her doctorate from The Juilliard School in 2018, where she worked with Joseph Lin, Sylvia Rosenberg, and Cynthia Roberts, her master’s from New England Conservatory in 2013, where she studied with James Buswell, and her bachelor’s in linguistics from Harvard University in 2012. Her doctoral dissertation was titled ‘Hearing in Tone: A Phonetic Approach to the Analysis and Performance of Chinese Contemporary Music’. She was the violin soloist for the world premiere of Babbitt’s Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound (1976). http://www.juliaglennviolin.com/.