Playing with Babbitt in the 1980s: Guest Appearances at the New York Philharmonic and Bang on a Can

Abstract

This essay examines the presence of Milton Babbitt at two important moments in new music in the late twentieth century: the New York Philharmonic’s 1984 Horizons festival, and the inaugural Bang on a Can marathon in 1987. In an era in which aesthetic movements like minimalism and neo-Romanticism increasingly represented the artistic vanguard, Babbitt was invited to these events to serve as a stand-in for academic modernism and the immediate musical past. But Babbitt had agency in these encounters: he purposefully took on the role of contrarian while also subtly subverting the expectations of those institutions who sought to render him a symbol of a bygone era. Playing into, but also prodding against, the clichés around his image, Babbitt clearly knew how to perform the identity that had become closely associated with his name.

Keywords:

• Downtown
• Minimalism
• Reich
• Vision and Prayer
• New York Philharmonic

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Sanders also suggested Benjamin Boretz, David Schiff, and David Hamilton as potential representatives of the academic perspective.

2 This was one of several ways in which printed programme was different from the actual marathon programme, as clarified by the archival audio: whereas the printed programme lists Jeffrey Brooks’s Chaconne as preceding Babbitt’s work, the actual concert was reshuffled so that the order of works preceding Vision and Prayer was Brooks’s Chaconne, Lois V Vierk’s Manhattan Cascade, and Gordon’s Strange Quiet.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Robin

William Robin is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music. His first book, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines the new-music festival Bang on a Can and their participation in major institutional shifts in contemporary music in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent publications include an exploration of the term ‘indie classical’ in the Journal of the Society for American Music, an article on new music and neoliberalism in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and an examination of patronage and politics at the New York Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival in Musical Quarterly. As a public musicologist, Robin contributes to The New York Times, hosts the podcast Sound Expertise, and tweets as @seatedovation.