Shaping Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations

Abstract

This essay creates an interpretive map of Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations, focusing on the roles of ‘anti-events’ (rests, the sustained portions of notes, certain performance indications) in conjunction with other musical elements. The ‘anti-events’ play expressive roles—growing, resonating, hinging, and spacing—and help to shape a performative conception of the piece.

Keywords:

• Babbitt
• Semi-Simple Variations
• Form
• Theme
• Rest
• Dynamics
• Performance

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Joshua Mailman, Zachary Bernstein, and an anonymous editor for their astute comments.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 See Alegant (2013) on how analytical ‘road maps’ can be employed pedagogically.

2 I therefore include my playing of the piece with this essay—not as a model as it is downright stodgy in some respects—but as a working out of and raw data for my ideas. Audio files available in the online Supplemental Material.

3 These two notes occur in the passage's top voice; in the inner voices the D4 of bar 13 and the D♭3 of bar 15 also repeat across the boxed rests.

4 See Leong (2020) on interpretive assumptions based on a score's appearance. Robert Taub (1986) plays bar 16 softly, p.

5 According to Babbitt (quoted above), the second half of this melody continues the ‘“thematic” hexachord’ of the first half.

6 In an array block, such as that shown in Figure 2, every lyne (horizontal line) in the polyphony completes a row form.

7 Mailman (2019) also demonstrates a mirroring of interval classes <4, 3, 1> in the multi-voiced musical surface.

8 As further support for my Thematic designation: Wintle and O’Donnell treat Babbitt's theme and variation 1 (that is, my Theme) as a single unit in their analyses. This is because theme and variation 1 together form a single array block, as does each succeeding variation.

9 Each gesture also expresses a columnar trichordal aggregate.

10 The temporal shape of the last dynamic descent, from ff to p, differs, however. In Variation 5 the descent is compressed towards its beginning: ff, f, mp, and pp occur in rapid succession and the final p extends for more than two bars.

11 I use musical notation (adapting Wintle 1976), rather than Lewin's more elegant binary representation (1995), since traditional rhythmic notation is intuitively graspable at a glance, and because it more readily expresses the augmentation of Figure 7(b).

12 Babbitt's bar 24 pedal marking and bar 25 slur also suggest space at the barline.

13 For yet another type of non-attack, in Babbitt's None but the Lonely Flute, see Leong (2019, 269, note 11).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daphne Leong

Daphne Leong's book, Performing Knowledge: Twentieth-Century Music in Analysis and Performance, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Her work, which focuses on rhythm, analysis and performance, and music since 1900, also appears in journals such as Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, and Music Theory Online, as well as in edited collections. She is an active pianist and chamber musician, whose performances and recordings include premieres of current music. Her quartet Throw Down or Shut Up! presents new music in un/conventional venues and formats. Leong has served as Vice President of the Society for Music Theory. In 2013 she received the Excellence in Teaching Award of the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is Professor of Music Theory. http://www.colorado.edu/music/daphne-leong.