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Abstract
My composition Call It What You Will, in memoriam Milton Babbitt, is a piece of music that is itself about music. This essay illustrates some of the kinds of reference to other music made in the composition, all of which act to constrain as a cantus firmus might. Literal borrowing and quotation operate close to the surface, while use of Babbitt’s own compositional techniques and theoretic ideas works on a structural level. Every piece referred to in the composition was formative for Babbitt’s ‘thinking in and about music’, especially as manifested in his teaching. Babbitt likewise either developed or wrote about and taught nearly all of the compositional techniques used in the piece.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Indeed, his assessment of my freshman jury reads: ‘He is exceptionally well versed in the literature, which shows in the awareness of the compositions, and if he has spent more of the year thinking about music than thinking in music, the results in maturation should be apparent soon’.
2 A playlist with a scrolling score of Call It What You Will and excerpts from the figures in this article can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/49kytvbb.
3 I am using ‘tape’ colloquially to mean ‘fixed audio’. I have little to say about how I created the sounds; they are rather obviously based on the RCA synthesiser Milton used in his electronic works. I made the tape part using the digital audio synthesis environment Csound, with an ear towards emulating what I hear as vocal formants in the timbres he employed.
4 A similar formulation appears in Babbitt (Citation1991, 1).
5 It was a difficult decision for me, a person of no religious faith, to honour Milton Babbitt, who was a Jewish atheist, with a Lutheran chorale. Bach chorales featured heavily in how he taught Schenkerian theory, however, and my lessons with him on Bach chorales were particularly formative for me. For a taste of his general approach, see chapter 5 of Babbitt (Citation1987, 121–62).
6 Examples include Paraphrases (1979), Ars Combinatoria (1981), The Crowded Air (1981), among others.
7 The all-trichord rings are <01B45738A269-01>, <01B7369245A8-01>, <01B738A54269-01>, and <01BA57369248-01>. The first two and last two form pairs related by M5/M7. I used the last one in the piece, transposed up a semitone and reading in retrograde starting on the second pitch class: <21953A7486B0-21>. I learned later that these were already known to be the only four that contain all 12 pitch classes and all 12 trichords. See O’Connell (1968, 57) for an early reference to the concept, with one example (my thanks to Zachary Bernstein for pointing this out to me). There are many other all-trichord rings that have missing (thus repeating) pitch classes.
8 Milton tells the story in Babbitt and Zuckerman (Citation2011).
9 An example of this appears near the end of Robert Hilferty’s Milton Babbitt documentary, beginning 1:01:55 (Hilferty Citation2011).
10 All-nchord pitch-class chains/rings have been employed by Robert Morris in a number of his compositions, for example in his 2006 piano piece Each Time (Morris, 2010, 160–65) and in his outdoor pieces (259–300). Babbitt encouraged me to do my graduate studies with Bob, and I took his advice. The first eight pitch classes of A Passing Nepenthe’s ring embed the five all-combinatorial tetrachords, and constitute a row I used in my composition Diploid, which is the last piece I worked on with Milton and the first I worked on with Bob.
11 Cf. Joshua Banks Mailman’s (Citation2021) Reger-like harmonisation of the soprano and bass lines from Babbitt’s Duet in this volume. I suspect that nearly any tonally coherent harmonisation of a 12-tone melody will resemble Reger, because of sudden shifts in tonal region.
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Matt Barber
Matt Barber (b. 1980, Denver) is a composer and teacher residing in Rochester, New York. He has taught composition and computer music at The Eastman School of Music and Colgate University.