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Abstract
Vividly effervescing on the wit and whimsy in Babbitt’s compositions, lovers and listeners of Babbitt’s music often intimate that perception of play is vital for experiential pleasure. Indeed, ludic metaphors permeate the casual discourse on Babbitt’s music. Yet, within the academic literature Babbitt’s ‘play’ is regularly overshadowed by more emphatic pronouncements of his and his music’s ‘seriousness’. This article traces why this has been the case, arguing that contemporary understandings of play have been shaped by (outdated) postmodernist perspectives that preclude the ludic potential of formalist aesthetics. Then, it explores what an interpretation of Babbitt’s music as play might entail. Conceiving Babbitt’s music as play not only emphasises elements of the music that are often minimised (e.g. how structural ambiguities play out on the musical surface), but also focuses on the aspects that more readily lead to enjoyment.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the detailed feedback I have received on this article from the guest editors of this double issue and Alexandra Monchick.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by this author.
Notes
1 Babbitt, as is well known, demanded objective, ‘scientific’ language in theoretical discourse. I place ‘serious’ in quotation marks to emphasise that Babbitt counted his music’s ‘serious’ and ‘advanced’ musical language as its defining characteristic. He argued that it was because of these qualities that his music required refuge within academia (Babbitt Citation2003a).
2 It is important to stress that for Babbitt (Citation2003b), there are no rules of ‘music’ (his quotation marks), only rules of convention: ‘A musical rule is just the prescriptive, legislative formulation of an expression of the musical theory, cast in such a form so as to produce a “prediction,” rather than explanatory postdiction of the theory’ (301).
3 Situating play within these different ‘facets of listening’ (Mailman Citation2012)—emphasising ‘global’ and ‘focal’ attentions, the cognitive parsing of musical structure, and the temporal and responsive aspects of the listening experience—I mean to underline how the notion of ‘play’ can encourage a particular attitude towards Babbitt’s music (aimed at aesthetic pleasure) without delimiting other experiences and responses to it (such as those listeners, for example, who might find Babbitt’s music less playful than reflective of Cold War anxieties or overly self-serious intellectualisation).
4 Although many such intuitions may be unrelated to twelve-tone serialism, others might be ‘innocently’ intuited based on previous exposure to twelve-tone works, as Mead (Citation2021) explains.
5 See, for example, Maus (Citation1993).
6 Babbitt’s library at the time of his death included Graph, Groups, and Games by Augustus Fox; Games of Strategy: The Theory and Applications by Melvin Dresher; volumes 1 and 3 of Contributions to the Theory of Games, edited by Harold William Kuhn and Albert William Tucker; Chance, Skill, and Luck: The Psychology of Guessing and Gambling by John Cohen; Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect by Lawrence Slobodkin; The Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior by Howard Nigel; The Rules of the Game: Cross-disciplinary Essays on Models in Scholarly Thought by Teodor Shanin; Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev; Chess and Checkers: The Way to Mastership by Edward Lasker; Picking Winners: A Horseplayer’s Guide by Andrew Beyer; The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic by Richard Epstein; Inequalities for Stochastic Processes (How to Gamble If You Must) by Lester Dubins and Leonard Savage; The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco by Dennis Shasha; The Penguin Book of Comic and Curious Verse edited by J.M. Cohen; Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities by Kevin Jackson; Palindromes and Anagrams by Howard Bergerson; numerous books on cryptography, pattern recognition, and computer coding. One could contest that the books listed here, particularly those on game theory, are not about games as played. Yet, they reflect a ludic attitude or perspective on formal or rational structure that Moseley (Citation2016, 32) finds prominent in U.S. Cold War culture: ‘The Kantian discipline of ludus emphasises that structural beauty and complexity can be achieved despite and owing to strict constraints. Cultural artifacts that display such qualities include … mathematics, canons, puzzles, and computer code: they generally emerge from and represent systems that are both governable and circumscribable by rules that are at once logical and arbitrary. In this respect, the rationality of ludus is closely associated with the codification of game theory by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’.
7 Mead (Citation1999, 3) makes a similar point: ‘kinesthetic empathy’, Mead writes, is ‘a significant contributor to our musical understanding’.
8 Mead (Citation2021), for example, describes the knowing ‘wink’ of Babbitt’s music—a goading invitation to ‘play’ alongside him.
9 My reading draws on Hubbs’s observation that ‘in most discussions of organicism … the presence of both primary attributes, unity and growth, is treated as the necessary and adequate condition for the existence of organicism in a work. Taken together, unity and growth make up the organic principle, an abstract organisational principle that may operate entirely independently of any imagery involving plant or animal life’ (Citation1991, 144). The Gramophone reviewer’s organic framework, although subtle, is signalled by his use of the word ‘harvest’– invoking the seed–harvest metaphor often employed by Schenker in his discussions of organic musical development. See also Solie (Citation1980) and Berry (Citation2016, 167–68).
10 For more on this point, see Edwards (Citation1998).
11 These surface features can, however, direct listeners towards relevant features of the musical structure, if they are so inclined. In Whirled Series, for example, the surface-level rotating trichords reflect the construction of the underlying series, wherein trichords of the same set class are ordered in distinct, non-transmutable patterns that Mead describes as ‘rotational cycles’ (Citation1983, 96). See Maggart (Citation2020) for a longer elaboration.
12 Mailman (Citation2012) similarly encourages listeners to ‘actively pursue flexibility of listening’ in order to ‘maximize listening’s experiential value’.
13 See Maggart (Citation2017), Mailman (Citation2020), and Bernstein (Citation2021a, Citation2021b) for analytical discussions of how this play is composed into the music.
14 See Mead (Citation2021, this issue) for definitions of lyne, array, partition, all-partition, etc.
15 See Maggart (Citation2021) for a more detailed explanation of Pantun’s poeticity and play.
16 Thankfully, such binary thinking is no longer the order of the day. For example, see Guldbrandsen and Johnson (Citation2015). In this collection, the editors reject such dated theorizations of the postmodern and re-articulate the previously-understood ‘postmodern’ techniques and outlooks as reflective of merely another transformation of modernism: ‘After a brief but provocative currency in the early 1980s, [the term “postmodernism”] seems now to have been largely abandoned. What proponents of postmodernism suggested as contrary or even anti-modernist elements of cultural practice seem, from the longer view of a transformed modernism, simply part of its inherently contradictory nature’ (2–3).
17 For example, see McClary (Citation1989), Maus (Citation1993), and Horton (Citation2001).
18 Maus (Citation1993) makes a similar point regarding the kind of analytical perspectives promoted by Babbitt and Schenker.
19 I am not suggesting in this comparison that Babbitt was inspired by Gadamer; by all accounts, he was more influenced by analytic philosophy than phenomenology. Thus, certain aspects of Gadamer’s theory, such as art’s relationship to truth, for instance, would seem to have little connection to Babbitt’s musical philosophy.
20 For more comprehensive explanations of Gadamer’s aesthetic theory, see Nielsen (Citation2021) and Vilhauer (Citation2009, Citation2010, Citation2013).
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Alison Maggart
Alison Maggart is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on twentieth-century U.S. music and culture, in particular serial music and aesthetics, Cold War scientism and esotericism in music, and U.S. modernist identity. She is also interested in popular philosophies of vibration, the blurring of scientific and metaphysical language, and space- and time-travel in New Age and alternative spirituality communities.