Abstract
This article discusses the process of learning, performing, and recording Babbitt's Post-Partitions (1966), as well as Overtime (1987) and other Babbitt works, in the U.S. and in Japan. Issues discussed include: learning away from the instrument, pedalling, voicing, and body movement.
Acknowledgments
I thank C. F. Peters Publishers for permission to reprint score excerpts.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Performance of Post-Partitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMIad0VPni0.
2 Performance of Overtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGLzrDgIur4.
3 Mead (Citation1994, 175–77) discuses dynamics in Babbitt’s Post-Partitions and his music in general. He describes perceptual issues and conceiving dynamics in terms of contours and their transformations.
13 See Mead (Citation1994, 175–77).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mari Asakawa
Mari Asakawa has established herself internationally in many notable performances, with a concentration on contemporary music. Her recent activities comprise lectures, workshops and recitals focusing on the music of the great American composers Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. In 2012, she gave all-Carter Piano Recitals at Carnegie Hall in the presence of the composer. Her recording The Flow of Music: Piano Works of Carter & Babbitt was released on the Centaur Label in 2018, and was chosen as ‘specially selected CD’ by the Record Geijutsu Journal. She teaches piano performance at the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, and lectures on contemporary piano music at the Open University, in Tokyo. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Juilliard School and a Master’s degree from Yale University. Her teachers have included Gyorgy Sandor, Daniel Pollack, and Bruno Mezzena.