Hearing Compositional Play in Babbitt’s Arrays

Abstract

The assumptions listeners make about a compositional structure affect their perceptions of music that uses that structure. Accordingly, the commonplace assumption that Babbitt’s arrays reflect modernist formalism encourages listening to his music in formalist terms. This essay argues that this assumption is misplaced, and that Babbitt’s composition with arrays should instead be regarded—and therefore heard—as involving a spontaneity and independence of action associated with playfulness. Three strategies for such listening are proposed.

Keywords:

• Milton Babbitt
• play
• gesture
• allusion
• intentional fallacy

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 Babbitt’s arrays are composed of aggregate partitions, as discussed in Andrew Mead’s (2021) contribution to this volume. For technical information on Babbitt’s arrays, see Mead (1994).

2 Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946) hold that it is a fallacy to base the assessment of a poem on authorial intent. A poem is ‘detached from the author at birth’ (470).

3 As David Carson Berry (2017, 179n.120) notes, Babbitt was not only, and perhaps not even primarily, drawing from the New Criticism of Wimsatt and Beardsley in such statements. Babbitt’s reading of logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap, whom Babbitt (Babbitt 2003) names as a primary influence, led him to similar conclusions about the cognition of artworks and the kinds of evidence that should be adduced in their explanation.

4 See discussion in Kramer (2008, 367ff).

5 Such an imaginary discourse undergirds the rhetorical device of the imaginary composer, discussed in Monahan (2013, 329–332).

6 This gloss on Boretz’s thought appears in Dubiel (2005–06, 161).

7 The most thoroughgoing attempt to address this question is in Dubiel (1990, 1991, and 1992).

8 McClary (1989) provides one prominent, although somewhat qualified, example of such thinking.

9 See particularly Dubiel (1997; Dubiel 1990, 1991, and 1992 also engage this issue).

10 For more on how ‘serial structure plays out on the musical surface’ (emphasis original), see Alison Maggart’s (2021) contribution to this volume.

11 Huizinga (1949) is a pertinent canonical source on play. Maggart (2017, 352–358) discusses intersections between Babbitt, Huizinga, and other sources on play.

12 These applications of the principle of ‘maximal diversity’ are discussed in Mead (1994, 19–20); see also Mead (1994, passim) for further examples; and Dubiel (1992) for further discussion.

13 See Mead (1983) for a case study of this technique; and Mead (1994) provides many further examples.

14 Babbitt was known to be a Seinfeld fan. His favourite episode was, reportedly, ‘The Junior Mint’.

15 The latter explanation for such parallelisms is repeatedly suggested in Babbitt’s writings (although usually in reference to the work of other composers), particularly Babbitt (1987, see 145 and 159, for instance).

16 For more on the gestural aspect of Babbitt’s music, see Bernstein (2021, 231–268).

17 Martin Goldray’s performance of Emblems (Ars Emblematica) is available on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqFRJRpKAUk>. Figure 1 begins at 7:27; Figure 2 begins at 9:12.

18 Joseph Dubiel’s (1997, 45) comments on Bach—which appear within a discussion of Babbitt, albeit in reference to another aspect of his music—are apropos: ‘We are impressed because it isn’t simple to sound these notes together, because we feel that the conjunction has to be finagled, against the grain of something that does not conduce to it, that even works against it’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary Bernstein

Zachary Bernstein is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. His book Thinking In and About Music: Analytical Reflections on Milton Babbitt’s Music and Thought is published by Oxford University Press.