Between Innocence and Experience: How Analysis Might or Might Not Have Affected My Hearing of Milton Babbitt’s Music

Abstract

This article discusses aspects of Milton Babbitt’s music read from the point of view of a listener’s emotional engagement with the music, frequently understood in terms of playfulness.

Keywords:

• Babbitt
• Around the Horn
• Playfulness

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Babbitt’s titles, while often humorous, contain multiple meanings that may draw the listener deeper into the music from the outset. Various articles have explored this, including Dubiel (1992); Maggart (2020); and Mailman (2020a and 2020b).

2 A piece such as Phonemena for soprano and synthesised tape (1975) exhibits both humour in its title and playfulness in the way the soprano’s agility is displayed moving through an effervescent landscape of sound by means of a complex set of nonsense syllables, but play is still evident in the elegant and moving re-setting of the same text in the opening and closing sections of A Solo Requiem for soprano and two pianos (1977). This latter is wonderfully illuminated in Dubiel (1991).

3 To give a quick (and favourite) example, in the fugue from the Prelude and Fugue in D BWV 532 one finds oneself at one point in the fairly distant key of c# minor, in which there is a full cadence employing a Neapolitan 6 chord. Although the passage is fleeting, it is not difficult for the player to notice that the over-all tonic of the fugue as a whole has appeared in a surprising (and delightful) new context.

4 A certain amount of specialised terminology has sprung up not only around Babbitt’s music but around a good deal of twelve-tone analysis. Some of these terms derive from Babbitt himself, and some from his students. A brief set of definitions follows:

Aggregate: in its simplest form, an aggregate refers to a presentation of the twelve pitch-classes without reference to how they might be derived from any row or combination of rows. Thus, an aggregate might be the result of the presentation of a single ordering of the twelve pitch-classes, or the combination of six elements from one, and six from another, or any number of elements from any number of orderings (rows). The combination of six and six is at the heart of Schoenberg’s inversional hexachordal combinatoriality, while Babbitt extends that practice in all sorts of ways.

Array: a presentation of two or more rows combined to produce successive aggregates. Arrays are sometimes designated by the number of parts (separate strands of rows – see ‘lyne’ below) found throughout. Babbitt used arrays built of four parts, six parts, eight parts (once) and twelve parts in much of his music.

 Lyne: this term, coined by Michael Kassler, refers to the individual linear parts of an array, prior to any decisions regarding their articulation in the musical surface, including rhythm, repetition, register, timbre, dynamics and so forth.

Partial Ordering: in an aggregate comprised of strands from more than one lyne, the elements of each lyne are ordered with regard to each other, but elements of more than one lyne are not. Deciding how and why the elements of an aggregate might be composed entails at least in part questions of what might be created by assembling elements amongst lynes into a passage.

Partition: this refers to how pitch-classes are distributed within lynes within an aggregate that is a segment of an array. Thus, the first aggregate of an array built of four lynes unfolding simultaneously might contain three elements (pitch-classes) from each of its four lynes, while the next aggregate contains five elements from one lyne, three from another and two each from the remaining two lynes. So-called all-partition arrays run through the complete possibilities of partitioning its aggregates into (in this case) four parts, that is, drawing pitch-classes from four or fewer lynes at a time.

5 Clearly, sets of changes are in no way identical to the notion of arrays in Babbitt’s music, but I think there are points of contact between the two that allow for the comparison. Both, to various degrees, depending on their audience, provide ordered strings of events (in one case chords; in the other, aggregate partitions) that can retain certain recognisable qualities in different interpretations/performances while affording a wide variety of interpretation. What is fixed and what is flexible will be different between the two, but the fact that each contains a potentially recognisable string of events that may be renewed and refreshed through multiple realizations is suggestive of at the very least a kind of happy parallelism. Ideas that illuminate this parallelism are to be found in Dubiel (1990, 91, 92, 97); Maggart (2020); and Mailman (2019 and 2020a). Articles in the current volume by Jordan (2021) and Zimmerli (2021) explore some particularities that link Babbitt’s compositional attitudes with jazz improvisation. Zimmerli not only discusses improvising based on the partial orderings afforded by aggregates in an array, but also demonstrates how arrays may be interpreted as a series of more familiar tonally-based jazz chords to underly improvisation. See also Mailman (2020a, [3.1.6.1]–[3.1.6.5]) for a systematic interpretation of the opening block of Whirled Series as a sequence of tonal jazz chord changes. These multiple interpretations of Babbitt’s music from both aggregate and extended tonal frameworks are also explored in Mailman 2020b, an approach that uproots more traditional approaches to aggregate-based music in general, and enriches possibilities for interpretation and engagement with this music in general.

6 Both Dubiel (1997) and Mailman (2019) make very clear just how little an array may determine in a composition, and just how much it is what the composer does within the restraints so provided that makes an array-based piece into a piece of real music.

7 To mention a favourite example, when at the end of the last movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in c minor, op. 13, the cadence to the tonic is deflected to ♭VI and the opening motive of the movement is presented in A♭, it is not hard to hear (or feel, if you’re playing it) the register and spacing of that A♭ chord as identical to the opening of the second movement of the piece.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Mead

Andrew Mead is a member of the music theory faculty of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University. He has published on the music of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and others, as well as abstract twelve-tone theory. He has also written on the music of Max Reger and Kaikhosru Sorabji. His book, An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt, is published by Princeton University Press. He is also active as a composer.