INTRODUCTION

On Milton Babbitt: Progressive Artistic Research, Decorous Pranks, and Pig-Stand Jazz

If you have a very very high level of experience with a certain stream of new music and jazz (and maybe a particular disposition as well) Babbitt’s music can just roll into your ears like a monologue by an interesting and humorous old friend– you’re laughing, you’re crying, you’re nodding along to the truths.

  Patrick Zimmerli (quoted in Iverson 2015)

The man, the myth, the music: Who was Milton Babbitt? I don’t have any secrets to unveil, but I might be telling the untold story of Milton Babbitt, or one you probably haven’t heard before.¹ The old news is that Babbitt is known as a proponent and innovator of 12-tone serialism, and in historical terms as an icon of Cold War Modernism.² He’s been one of the most pivotal and contentious figures of twentieth century music composition, which led to a snowballing of reductive caricatures³, that now seem less and less relevant.

And the new news: What seems now, in the twenty-first century, more relevant is the idea of artistic research, simply put: that knowledge springs from artistic practice, and artistic creativity progresses through the development of such knowledge, which often entails specialised technical discourse.⁴ While this is now more or less accepted (at least in music-academic circles, which now include various technical specialties, each with their own version of technical discourse) it wasn’t always, and there was a time when it had to be vociferously articulated and exemplified.⁵ And thus, not out of ambition but rather because it was his burden, Milton Babbitt fits pivotally into this transformation we now enjoy.⁶ His own enjoyment shows in the charm that can be heard in his music, oration, and conversation. In tandem with some neglected examples of the latter, recentish literature (including in this journal) has shed new light on these subjects, which provide context for this double issue, showcasing some surprising ways that musicians and scholars have been engaging Babbitt’s music and ideas in recent decades.

Progressive Artistic Research

As Aaron Girard (2010) documents, in the mid-twentieth century Babbitt and his Princeton music colleagues pioneered a progressive programme of artistic research in a higher education setting, taking from scientific disciplines an emphasis on creative thinking and first-hand experience, rather than the historical method which dominated the humanities.⁷ For instance conservative composers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Randall Thompson, actually wished to remove creativity from academic training, and declared that ‘a composer’s first responsibility is, and always will be, to write music that will reach and move the hearts of his listeners in his own day’.⁸

Technology was brought to the heart of this struggle. As Martin Brody (2020, 777) explains, the 1950s RCA engineers’ development of the Mark I and II synthesisers suggested ‘new ways to quantify sound’s physical properties and link the results to the study of human cognition’ which could be put to widely divergent purposes—not all to the good though. The eminent music psychologist Carl Seashore envisioned such technologies as a way to advance a eugenics agenda based on racial stereotypes regarding innate talents in music: ‘I wish here especially to call attention to their availability in the study of racial differences as well as the study of individual differences in the experimental investigation of the inheritance of musical talent. The relation of these to eugenics is self-evident’ (1923, 234; see also 1942, 356–57 and 1915). In some ways this mid-twentieth century idea of using technology to map out the musically innate (an involuntary aspect of musical taste and response) forecasts today’s capitalistic, libertarian (conservative, or at least profit-driven) algorithmic prediction of musical tastes and preferences (cultivated by Spotify and other streaming-services), even though these are not explicitly racialized.⁹

Although Seashore’s program might have benefitted those of Thompson’s persuasion, it ran counter to Babbitt’s vision. As Brody (2020, 787, quoting Babbitt) explains it: Babbitt argued that creative musicians were compelled to explore a ‘variety of universes of diverse practice’, each with its own phenomenology, rather than dwelling ‘in a unitary musical universe of “common practice”’ (Babbitt 1958, 48–49).¹⁰ Like newly invented musical instruments (the piano, saxophone, theremin) always have, electronic machines could serve as tools of music composition, and to further our investigation of the possibilities of such creativity.¹¹ ‘[S]ince machines can produce ‘anything’, the only boundaries are the humanly meaningful … how do we hear? what do we hear … [in] all kinds of music, both electronic and non-electronic’ (Babbitt, quoted in Gagne and Caras 1982, 43) ‘The electrification of sound, [Babbitt] argued, had sparked a revolution in musical thought that was unending, but circumscribed by liberal values—principles of pluralism, critical speech, and intersubjective communication’ (Brody 2020, 787). Such progressive thinking of course ran counter to Thompson’s and Seashore’s prevailing conservatism.

Thus, besides investigating musical possibilities creatively, Babbitt proclaimed the need for new kinds of technical discourse about music, a need which seems superfluous today, outside of the conditions that pervaded then.¹² Besides the menace of Seashore’s music-focused eugenics and Thompson’s populist imperative, progressive composers of the time faced something even more formidable and elusive, which is the assumption on which these converged: the metaphysics of innate musical genius, the ultimate elitism.

The mysterious greatness of Mozart and Beethoven could imply that all music aspires to be like theirs or to emanate from theirs, thus feeding nationalist notions of unitary music-aesthetic value, whose serious debate might be rekindled at any moment.¹³ In a time when discourse about music could seriously be caught up with such quaint questions as whether ‘absolute music’ is superior, whether neo-classicism is valid, which music is truly American, which music has ‘truth-value’¹⁴, and other vague but rhetorically forceful speculations of what constitutes music-aesthetic value¹⁵, it is no wonder that an ambitious creative composer with other questions to pursue would want to change the subject, that is, by insisting that there were other musical questions to pursue, questions lying outside the prevailing conservative music-aesthetics and prevailingly historical music scholarship.¹⁶

It was in the realm of rhythm (especially ensemble rhythm) that Babbitt was particularly interested in furthering musical knowledge through technology, because: ‘[it] was in the temporal domain, above all, not only conceptually and from the performance point of view, but also in the realisation that there was one of most significant discrepancies between what you could discriminate aurally and that which could be controlled precisely by the performer.’¹⁷ One can’t help but wonder how much of Babbitt’s focus on rhythm (especially ensemble rhythm) emanates from the specifics of his musical roots, which are completely different from other composers of his generation with whom one is tempted to associate him stylistically or ideologically.

Musical Roots: ‘Pig-Stand Jazz’

When he was 13 years old, Babbitt’s song ‘That’s Why I’m Blue’ won him a popular song contest sponsored by Paul Specht, a big bandleader in the late 1920s.¹⁸ About his youth growing up in Jackson, Mississippi (the Deep South) Babbitt recounts:

I wrote a lot of pop tunes for school productions; I made lots of arrangements; but every once in a while I’d sneak in things I’d learned from looking at more serious scores … I’d write out lead sheets for pop tunes … we sometimes wrote ukulele indications; we all played ukulele. (Babbitt, in Duckworth 1995, 60)

I played clarinet; I played every reed instrument; I played in every jazz group; I played in the band; and I played in every pit orchestra that came to town; that’s how I got to know all these tunes … I grew up with pop; I grew up with jazz. I played on Saturday nights when I was ten years old with some musicians who had come up from New Orleans. And there was a kind of music —not that I played, but that I heard— called ‘pig stand jazz’. The pig stands were barbecue, pork barbecue. You’d drive up and you’d be waited curb service, as they used to call it. You’d eat in your car. They would have bands to attract people. Well those bands couldn’t have pianos by the very nature of the installation, so they would have very strange instrumentation. (They were mixed black and white. When it came to music, of course, nobody paid any attention.) And they would normally play a kind of Dixieland. (Babbitt, in Duckworth 1995, 56)

Several points stand out, especially if comparing to composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Carter, Cage—or Leonard Bernstein for that matter—all of whom were primarily pianists emerging in or near centres of relatively higher concentration of high-brow culture.¹⁹ Although Babbitt also played the violin (and at the age of six began composing an unaccompanied violin concerto inspired by Mendelssohn’s which he had learned) his primary initial experience with composing was in lead-sheet based pop songs, and his primary experience with live performance, as a player or listener, was with casual entertainment settings, whose textural-rhythmic intricacies were more likely to have arisen from vernacular improvisational flourishes (perhaps necessitated by ‘pig-stand’ instrumentation) than from schooled composed-out complexity.

Whatever music-aesthetically curious mindset the young Babbitt was developing (as compared to the greater exposure had by his peers in major cultural centres or through their classical keyboard-centred music education) Babbitt could not have had the benefit of as much conditioning in terms of directly hearing a symphony orchestra perform (or oneself playing on the piano) the dramatic sweeping suspense and climax of, say, a sonata-form retransition, which could easily become an unproclaimed touchstone for many sensitive budding musicians. Whether engaging with the legacy of the Second Viennese School or not, Babbitt’s youthful aurally manifested experience would have to have taken him more intimately inside the liveliness of witty lyrics, spontaneous rhythms, and improvised polyphony, than would be the case for any of the other major composers of his generation.²⁰

When listening to Babbitt’s music, this is very helpful to bear in mind: We might notice a lack of obvious long-range sweep, which, in Babbitt’s music, is traded for the almost unending ever-fresh liveliness of all of its momentary details, whose justification for being connected need not necessarily draw on the theatrics of symphonic narrative (or other tonal-suspense narrativity), but which might instead find alternative raisons d’être séquentiel ensemble (rationale for being configured as such).²¹ In terms of the relation of surface details to form, pop-tune lead sheets do not specify the often complex rhythm of accompaniment, which is instead extemporised by the rhythm-section players (whether piano, ukulele, banjo, tuba, and so forth) so that a variegated rhythmic aspect arises, which—as I’ll suggest below—might also be engineered through different means entirely.

Popular Music

Whereas Stockhausen more obviously influenced pop music (The Beatles, Miles Davis, and Bjork for instance), Babbitt, even past his youth, into adulthood, had a much more consistent connection to pop music than did any of his European contemporaries (Messiaen, Dutilleux, Xenakis, Ligeti, Boulez, as well as Stockhausen).²² Although Babbitt didn’t follow popular music past the 1930s or jazz past the 1950s, for him the connection to both was lifelong, formative, and complicated. Babbitt and many who knew him, touted his affinity for the three Bs of American vernacularism—baseball, beer, and Broadway musicals. He nevertheless deplored populism (or majoritarianism) generally, because of its associations with Totalitarian propaganda.²³ Yet he struck up a friendship with popular film composer John Williams after admiring his music performed in Obama’s first presidential inauguration.²⁴ Usually Babbitt gravitated toward complexity and sophistication in popular music where he could find it. That he deplored rock music for its rhythmic simplicity became apparent when he mocked cultural conservative Allen Bloom’s 1980s condemnation of rock on moral grounds.²⁵

Tin Pan Alley songs were right up Babbitt’s street, especially those of Jerome Kern. Where Boulez (1952, 21) declared ‘all composition other than twelve-tone is useless … the tone-row is an historical necessity’, Babbitt wrote Broadway-style showtunes²⁶ and became the primary composition teacher of the budding musical theatre composer and West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim²⁷, teaching the young Sondheim the art of Jerome Kern and other Tin Pan Alley songwriters.²⁸

Jazz elements are most overt in Babbitt’s 1957 All Set for jazz ensemble,²⁹ and his 2001 Gloss on ‘Round Midnight, whose relation to Thelonious Monk’s tune I previously analysed (Mailman 2020a). As I’ve also discussed (Mailman 2019, 2020a), the jazz influence is heard as well in the scat-infused Phonemena which ends with a quote of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, and the tertian jazz chords and fleeting blues progression in Whirled Series for sax and piano.³⁰ His use of puns for titles was a bebop tradition, as was his reuse of similar pitch-structure progressions for multiple compositions (like jazz contrafacts).³¹ Then there’s the variegated rhythmic aspect I mentioned. Babbitt’s use of ad hoc tuplets to squeeze in additional pitches landing between the points of his time-point grids seems somehow like a synthetic imitation of jazz rhythmic embellishment, that simultaneously solves a problem posed by his serial structures—thus a pragmatist’s ‘improvised’ handling of musical logistics alludes to this most sophisticated facet of American vernacular music.

The Princeton Hotbed and Musical Ultramoderns Prompt Babbitt’s Integral Serialism

The part of Babbitt’s story that is most often told is how, in the mid-twentieth century, he (1) discovered and codified mathematical properties (for instance hexachordal combinatoriality) of Schoenberg’s 12-tone system (2) invented integral serialism (integrating the organisation of rhythm and dynamics to the organisation of serial pitch structures)³²; and (3) declared that composers should be able to pursue their craft as research (as scientists do), including cultivating their own specialised discourse, without concern for popularity with mass audiences or non-specialist critics. How do these events fit in with what I’ve already explained, and where do they lead?

Babbitt was fascinated with Schoenberg’s music as soon as he heard it on one isolated occasion as a teenager on a family trip to Philadelphia. But how did this second musical inspiration fuse with Babbitt’s southern-grown musical roots, to blossom into the innovation that earned him his notoriety? I think of it like this: If you had a stylistically flexible aural imagination (at home in both classical music and jazz), a mastery of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic principles (through careful study of scores), an awareness of the latest trends of the musical ultramoderns (Cowell, Crawford Seeger, and Schillinger), rubbed elbows with the world’s most brilliantly inventive and prescient applied mathematicians (as Princeton colleagues), with the right talent and motivation it’s almost inevitable that you would invent integral serialism. And this is exactly how the stars aligned.

Although Babbitt, during WWII, merely taught math to military radar operators and did classified (presumably code-breaking) work for the government³³, through the entire mid-twentieth century he worked amid a hotbed of revolutionary thinking in applied mathematics at Princeton and nearby Bell Labs (Gödel, Einstein, von Neumann, Tukey, Shannon) which must have been at least a little bit contagious, providing a spark that enabled him to synthesise all his interests, into an immediate result and a long-term creative research trajectory lasting into the early 21st century.

By the mid-1940s, not only was Schoenberg already teaching in America but Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources (1930) was known, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1931 Quartet was heralded and circulating, and Joseph Schillinger’s mathematical system of music composition had already been circulating for two decades, including among Tin Pan Alley composers such as George Gershwin.³⁴ A significant breakthrough in Cowell’s book is the organisation of rhythm and dynamics by similar principles as organise pitch. Thus Cowell’s rhythmicon is a keyboard for polyrhythmic pulse ‘harmonies’, and he proposed a ‘dissonance’ of different dynamics ‘slides’, which was applied in the third movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet.³⁵ Her fourth movement, inspired partly by the middle movement of Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926), employs order rotation of a 10-tone series, as well as a melodic grouping (textural-switching) principle also at play in that Lyric Suite movement, as well as in the codetta of the opening movement of Bartok’s Fourth Quartet (1928),³⁶ but which she submits to more formalised patterning (although not patterning like that of a pitch series). Babbitt’s first integral serial composition, his Three Compositions for Piano (1947), ties together all these threads, and marries them to an additional one from Schoenberg.³⁷ The Three Compositions are based on a 12-tone row deployed with hexachordal combinatoriality, with the rhythmic structuring arising out of a similar grouping (switching) principle (as Crawford Seeger, Berg, and Bartok) but now coordinated with the structuring principles used for the pitch rows, and the dynamics are also thus coordinated. Thus integral serialism was born. And besides all this, Babbitt could explain the musical transformations (applying to pitch, rhythm, and dynamics) all in mathematical formalisation if and when he wanted to. More important though, is that it was probably by conceptualising all these diverse musical-stylistic cross-currents in both an aural as well as a mathematical way that Babbitt was able to synthesise them together into something altogether new. That is, if one could codify Schoenberg’s 12-tone system mathematically, and thus extend it in ways that didn’t depend on Schoenberg’s burnished music-aesthetic style, one could then compose more flexibly with it, to pursue the pluralist ideal, including creating music that while owing a debt to Schoenberg (a connection back to Europe), could also sound distinctively American by relating to aspects of vernacular music as well as sounding distinct from all previously existing music.

Olivier Messiaen composed his first integral serial piece two years later, in 1949, after having met Babbitt at Tanglewood in 1948, a year after Babbitt composed his Three Compositions (Andreatta 2020).³⁸ Despite their near convergence in chronology, the two versions of integral serialism radically differ, in that Messiaen rigidly used a duration series to control texture in a top-down fashion, whereas Babbitt’s serialised grouplets strategically allow enough freedom for the composer to use his own discretion to design note-by-note details that a careful listener will hear.³⁹ And Babbitt’s rhythms certainly sound jazzier than Messiaen’s (and Boulez’s).⁴⁰

But Babbitt didn’t create just one such integral serial system. This was only the beginning of a progressive parade of related systems roughly dividing into three phases of his career (mapped out and explained by Mead 1994). You can think of each system as instrumentalizing the materials of music (pitches, durations, timbres, and so forth), such that each system (or version of a system) serves as a kind of instrument on which to compositionally ‘improvise’.⁴¹ Thus Babbitt designed systems that do not compose music but rather set out fields of possibility where compositional imagination is played out.⁴²

Bitbop and Beyond

Babbitt’s colleagues John Tukey and John von Neumann were brilliant mathematicians whose practical sense and inventiveness far exceeded mathematics. Tukey invented the entire field of data visualisation and in 1948 coined the term bit (binary digit) whereas von Neumann founded mathematical game theory and pioneered the digital computer (extending from Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing).⁴³ It is intriguing that it was in 1948 that Babbitt first deployed his binary-state switching to affect game-like ensemble participation in his Composition for Four Instruments (which also more clearly serialises rhythms and dynamics than does his Three Compositions for Piano a year earlier) and eight years later that he extended the practice to forge jazzy bit-boppy rhythms—or shall we say bitbop—in his Semi-Simple Variations.⁴⁴ Here Babbitt essentially treats notes versus rests as binary digits, and comes up with a very irregular but propulsive syncopated rhythm. By exhausting all the permutations of attack-vs-rest ‘bits’, he cooks up syncopation from entropy, and thereby seems to find an alternative source (a synthetic derivation) for the off-kilter rhythms of bebop jazz (a quality of Semi-simple Variations alluded to in three of the articles in this volume).

Decorous Pranks

What to make of words like ‘determinant’ which pepper Babbitt’s mid-century theory writings? If there’s any truth to Mel Brooks’s comedic parody of the Cold War Get Smart, the primary value axis could be epitomised by the Western ‘free world’ as ‘Control’ versus the Soviets as ‘Kaos’. In that environment it would be much more strategic for a creative artist to stress the technocratic, deterministic aspects of his and colleagues’ activities (by emphasising words such as ‘determinant’ and ‘structure’) than it would be to stress the indeterminate, improvisational, jazz-like, ragged qualities, which are also obvious enough if one listens for them.⁴⁵

Far from being a sombre rigid persona, Babbitt was obsessed with the witty, paradoxical wordplay of Yoggi Berra (‘The future ain’t what it used to be’, ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again’, ‘If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be’, ‘When you see a fork in the road, take it’) and was quite a talker and prankster himself.⁴⁶ When travelling by air, Babbitt sometimes introduced himself as ‘Arnold Schoenberg’ to strangers seated next to him, just to see if it raised any eyebrows, and he made charming (sometimes self-deprecating) jokes about himself when speaking to a crowd.⁴⁷ Unsurprisingly, this sense of humour spills over into and all over the place in Babbitt’s musical aesthetics. As Paul Griffiths (1996) puts it: ‘[Babbitt] unites earnestness with a determination to have fun’.

Dodecaphonic Dixieland: How to Play (with) an Array

Although it’s tempting to group Babbitt’s integral serial practices with those of other mid-century innovators in Europe, the role that arrays play in Babbitt’s overall creative project shows this to be utterly mistaken and beside the point. Babbitt (1955, 55) strongly criticised Euro-serialism for refusing to celebrate and incorporate aspects of other past and present musical styles. (He might have had Dixieland and Bebop as well as Brahms and Schoenberg in mind.) Moreover, Babbitt objected to Euro-serialism’s deterministic top-down approach which applied the same numeric series independently and interchangeably to different musical dimensions, without any mitigating sensitivity regarding different modes of perception (pitch vs. rhythm vs. dynamics vs. timbre).⁴⁸ As Peles (2008, 509) explains ‘Americans [such as Babbitt] were inclined to see their formalisation of the system [their own version of integral serialism] as an effort to determine what was possible, not what was necessary, and were disinclined to use it to generate pieces in either an arbitrary or purely algorithmic fashion.’⁴⁹ Thus, without any help from Babbitt, it has recently become widely appreciated that Babbitt’s serial structures, rather than being deterministic, are better understood as akin to jazz-chord lead sheets, which merely regulate and inflect the sonic details chosen to be composed on the surface. As demonstrated by me previously (Mailman 2019, 2020a) and concurred by my co-editors (Bernstein 2021, 243; Mead 2021, note 5), although Babbitt’s classical compositions would never be mistaken for Tin Pan Alley pop tunes or bebop jazz based on these, Babbitt’s arrays function somewhat analogously to lead sheets used for these styles, regulating without determining the exact melodic, chordal, and rhythmic details—while Zimmerli (also in this volume) was ahead of the game in the 1990s, in intuiting at least this possibility, albeit for his own jazz-crossover improvisatory explorations.⁵⁰

Arrays (in this volume discussed primarily by Mead, Bernstein, Mailman, and Zimmerli) are nothing more than partial orderings of musical elements. Thus an array is itself another technology, one that embeds an assortment of constraints and freedoms of chronology. It’s a particular way of embedding polyphonized integral serialism. Like the ‘boundary conditions’ of baseball or the chord changes in straight-ahead jazz improvisation, this self-authored logic that Babbitt stitched together allows a freedom to play within a field of complexity that can dance alongside the detailed liveliness and wit of the Dixieland he grew up with, while also cultivating a humanistic connection to the legacy of European classical music. Thus the flexibility of arrays enable playing with individual notes as well as, somewhat, with stylistic allusions. But to understand how partial orderings (that feature that defines arrays) work in a technical sense, there is a video trilogy ‘Babbitt’s Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside’ (Mailman 2019), that illustrates it with colourful computer animations, including allusions to Gershwin, blues, and abstract painting.

Jumbled Repetitions and Percolating Pulses of the 1-minute Composition for One Instrument

Certain kinds of games accompanied by music ‘make obvious how listening to music can be playful (even outside games). When we listen for how music ‘plays out,’ we are engaging with the implied possibilities of the music, its ‘potential to be otherwise’; the music generates a field of potential sounding forms, only one of which is realised and fulfilled in performance.’ (Summers 2021) This game-like playfulness in Babbitt’s music,⁵¹ rather than depending on some timeless metaphysics of musical genius or a unitary musical universe of common practice, instead depends on this self-authored logic of his arrays. Such connections to games are chronicled and theorised by Alison Maggert in her essay in this volume. In the meantime consider, as an example, Babbitt’s 1999 Composition for One Instrument (celesta),⁵² which—based on Erik Carlson’s performance—I would describe as follows:

As we listen, almost as soon as we can feel its pulse, we can feel that pulse jumping outside itself, playfully bouncing against its own steadiness, in a cheeky dance of duplets and triplets, as the slow melody ambles, limps, and shuffles downward, in fits and starts—as if alternately rolling, dancing, and falling down some lumpy bumpy hill—hiding and poking out its head within a lively pitter-patter of pinball-machine paddles.⁵³ And then, without at all needing to, it begins to repeat itself (at the top of the hill again?), and then, after half a minute, suddenly sustains its tone longer after a euphonious pair of chords.

If you notice these features at all, you will either take them at expressive face value, or note that they are surprisingly unnecessary for and unexpected of the type of music you might presume Milton Babbitt’s to be (avant garde music supposedly ‘controlled’ by a numeric series to supplant pleasure with rationality). Either way, the sense of expressive agency deployed uncoercively shines through, which is the sort of spirited creative craftiness that draws performers and listeners into Babbitt’s music, as represented by the contributions that follow in this volume.

Recent Activities

Much of what prompted the articles here are new perspectives that have recently emerged, perhaps in response to Babbitt’s death (in 2011) and activities celebrating his centenary (in 2016). (For instance Robert Hilferty’s documentary film was released after Babbitt’s death, the Juilliard School mounted a week-long festival to celebrate Babbitt’s centenary, and Augustus Arnone, at Spectrum in NYC. performed, for the second time, the complete cycle of solo piano works.) Other perspectives have emerged as part of the inevitable, shifting musical intellectual landscape, for instance the surge of scholarly interest in improvisation and popular music. And this year’s Babbitt-themed book Thinking In and About Music by Zachary Bernstein (also a contributor and guest co-editor here) has set Babbitt studies on a new level of nuance and breadth, bringing Babbitt’s music and ideas into contact with a stimulating variety of relevant but previously neglected interpretive perspectives.

Playing (with) Babbitt in the Twenty-first Century

The reader of the essays and interviews collected here ought to be struck by numerous ironies, some of which I’ll point out. We have grouped and ordered the essays roughly by topic as follows:

Perspectives on Play and Playfulness: The first three essays (Maggart, Mead, and Bernstein), develop the idea of ‘play’ and ‘playfulness’ in Babbitt’s music. Alison Maggart not only traces the various ways that Babbitt’s listeners, performers, and critics have characterised this play and playfulness, but also in an unprecedented fashion grounds and weaves these observations into critical and philosophical theory about these concepts as they apply to music. It’s brimming with fresh ideas to stimulate thought and renew our motivations to listen. Andrew Mead provides an account of how Babbitt’s playful rendering of an array manifests in notes on the page as he hears them unfold. Zachary Bernstein considers how notions of intentionality are entailed by our interpretive hearing of such playfulness, and how this entailment interacts with Babbitt’s initiatives regarding specialised technical discourse about music.

Radical Plays, in Recomposition, Realization, and Improvisation: The next four essays (Mailman, Iverson, Zimmerli, and Jordan) consider how musicians stretch and apply Babbitt’s compositional materials and ideas far beyond their original stylistic context, and what can be learned from such practices. My own article (‘Babbaptations’) considers jazz reharmonization of a Babbitt flute melody, how tonality and hexachordal combinatoriality mutually relate, and how algorithmic recomposition can inform our understanding of the sonic experience of Babbitt’s all-partition superarrays, which are the culmination of Babbitt’s career-long, progressive artistic research project. Pianist Ethan Iverson’s essay describes his experience of creating and performing a relatively popular jazz trio arrangement of the classic Babbitt work from the 1950s, the ‘bitbop’ Semi-Simple Variations, infusing it with serious ‘rock-out’ drumming and more. Saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli discusses his pioneering jazz compositions and performances, which were as far as we know the first ever to realise Babbitt-type pitch arrays (partial orderings) through solo and group improvisations, including the re-interpretation of 12-tone pitch structures as tonal jazz-chord lead sheets. Guitarist Stanley Jordan (famous for inventing a two-hand-tapping electric guitar playing technique) systematizes for improvisation, the use of a favoured Babbitt hexachord, as demonstrated in both his own free jazz improvisation One for Milton and in numerous conventional jazz chord patterns.

Fresh Approaches to Texture and Authenticity in Realization: The unorthodox nature of Babbitt’s music has sometimes posed unique but rewarding challenges for recording and performance. The next three essays (Carlson, Dawe, and Glenn) chronicle three musicians’ involvement in addressing these. Erik Carlson discusses his unique ongoing recording project which, among other things, addresses how human performers can vividly render the complex ensemble rhythms that pervade most of Babbitt’s music (and which motivated and were motivated by his pioneering work with the RCA synthesiser). Jonathan Dawe’s essay delves into the tenuous history of a work whose creation, existence, and performance demands are so unusual that its posthumous world premiere (in 2016 at Juilliard) almost never was. Dawe’s discussion of this 1976 Concerti for Violin, Orchestra and Synthesized Sound weaves in connections to Babbitt’s more recent Concerti for Orchestra (2004). Violinist Julia Glenn who premiered Babbitt’s violin concerto explains some of the inner workings of her preparation and interpretation, with an intriguing display of how a human analyst uses a machine (phonetics software) to demonstrate the essential human element of violin performance that is paired contrapuntally with a machine-assisted (electronically prepared) tape part in Babbitt’s brilliant concoction which was almost lost.

Preparation and Interpretation for Performance: Although Babbitt ultimately taught at Juilliard he was not in any way a conservatory-trained musician, and thus had a temperament anathema to the guru culture prevalent in many music conservatories, as well as Darmstadt.⁵⁴ The relation of his compositions to performers and vice versa is incomparably intimate, in both frustrating and inspiring ways. The next few articles (Pearse & Arnold, McGinness & Taub, Nonken, Asakawa, and Leong) attest to this. The conversation between sopranos Liz Pearse and Tony Arnold provides a distinct glimpse into the thought processes of preparing and performing Babbitt’s most famous work for live performer and electronics: Philomel. Turning attention to pianism, the John McGinness and Robert Taub article unveils a previously unpublished conversation with Babbitt himself. He recounts numerous interactions with performers, issues of license in interpretation, performance and analysis, piano pedalling technique, perception of rhythm, and more. Drawing parallels Between Babbitt and Schoenberg, the essay by Marilyn Nonken, who commissioned, premiered, toured with, and recorded Babbitt’s Allegro Penseroso, vigorously excavates the problematics of Babbitt’s approach to composing for live musicians. Despite Babbitt’s light-hearted titles and mannerisms, performers should not lightly take on his compositions. Pianist Mari Asakawa provides an intimate portrait of how she mastered the rhythms of Babbitt’s most rhythmically dense solo work, Post-Partitions (written on four staves), along with well-earned insights on the nuances of voicing (execution of dynamics), pedal technique, and physical navigation of the instrument at virtuosic speed. With the piano also as her playing field, Daphne Leong interpretively ‘plays’ the bitbop landscape of Semi-Simple Variations with an independently minded approach to phrasing, guided by written dynamics, and other features.

Romantic Recomposition, Raconteurism, and Rhythm: The final four essays (Seo, Barber, Robin, and Dubiel) go in various directions, and suggest some ironies and near paradoxes of Babbitt’s creative career, personality, and legacy. Juri Seo takes the bitbop of Semi-Simple Variations in yet another direction. She discusses the elegant piano duet she composed, which playfully dismantles and reassembles the rhythms and melodic motives of Babbitt’s composition to forge music of an altogether different style, leaning into (neo-)Romanticism and quoting the Brahms intermezzo that Babbitt so adored. Intertextuality takes a different turn in Matt Barber’s essay, which also discusses his own recomposition of other composers’ material, although not Babbitt’s. While the articles by Seo, Zimmerli, and myself in this volume, draw tonality and other euphonies out of material Babbitt composed (or from Babbitt-like structures), Matt Barber’s curve-ball swerves toward tonality by throwing in the opposite direction: Playing out a fantasy of stylistic what-ifs, Barber rigorously applies Babbitt’s own compositional techniques (although not at all Babbitt’s style) to quotation and borrowing from compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schoenberg, Webern and Stravinsky, all of which Babbitt admired and used pedagogically when teaching at Juilliard. Barber also sneaks in references to Babbitt’s habitual, off-the-cuff playing of Broadway showtunes. Based on archival research, William Robin’s article chronicles how Babbitt amusingly ‘played a role’ and ‘played to the crowd’ when opportunity came calling, specifically in the New York Philharmonic Horizons festival and Bang-on-a-Can marathon in the 1980s. Despite his Mendelssohnian beginnings, Brahmsian admiration, and keen ear for Kern, in this context, Babbitt played (and played up) the anti-Romantic part expected of him. The less-than-amiable avoidance between Babbitt and Steve Reich at the Bang-on-a-Can marathon underscores the territorial claim that some minimalist (and post-minimalist) composers staked on their oppositional stance towards Babbitt, which is somewhat ironic given what might very well be a subcutaneous commonality in their approaches to rhythm, and possibly an unacknowledged common inspiration in the theories of Henry Cowell. The final essay, by Joseph Dubiel, indeed delves into Babbitt’s rhythmic practice; not the bitbopping practice heard in Semi-Simple Variations (which was relatively fleeting), but rather his time-point system, which, after inventing and deploying several other rhythmic systems, was, in the rhythmic domain, the culmination of his career-long progressive artistic research, and specifically the aspect so intertwined with his work with the RCA Mark II synthesiser from the ‘60s through the 70s, and which sets him apart from other electronic music composers of the time. Yet as Dubiel explains, Babbitt’s time-point system transformed what he asked of human performers (for instance in Post-Partitions, discussed by Asakawa in this volume). The flexibility with which Babbitt adapts the system when composing for instruments (for instance in Around the Horn, also discussed by Mead in this volume) enables him the choice to infuse fleeting regularity of pulse (or liminal periodicity) that would be impossible in Euro-style integral serialism. As he himself confesses, Dubiel doesn’t pin-down how we hear the ‘rhythmic aspect’, of Babbitt’s music, and neither do any of the rest of us pin down any of its other aspects. But we point toward how it has opened our ears, and possibly how it might open others.

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Notes on contributors

Joshua Banks Mailman

Joshua Banks Mailman has taught at Columbia University, NYU, U.C. Santa Barbara, and U. of Alabama. Notable performances include his audio-visual electro acoustic improvisational trio Material Soundscapes Collide (with Arthur Kampela and Rhonda Taylor) at the New York Philharmonic Biennial in 2016, John Cage's Ryoanji at the Miller Theatre in 2015, and the solo audio-visual Montreal Comprovisation No. 1 at Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) at McGill University in 2012. Besides presenting numerous times at the Society for Music Theory and European Music Analysis Conferences, has also lectured on gagaku at the Japan Society (NYC), on metaphor and temporality at the Society for Music Analysis (UK), on Grisey's Vortex Temporum at IRCAM (Paris), and on flux and form for the Symposium (SIMPOM) of Brazilian Studies in Music (Rio de Janeiro). He researches form from flux: dynamic form, creates interactive audio-visual computer music, and writes on Schoenberg, Crawford Seeger, Carter, Babbitt, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Lucier, Ashley, Grisey, Saariaho, and others, as well as metaphor, narrative, improvisation, and phenomenology. In 2015, he appeared on ABC News Nightline, TV segment Why Some Songs Make Us Sad explaining emotional response to pop songs. Besides contributing chapters to several scholarly books, such as the Oxford Handbook of Spectral and Post-Spectral Music, his writings appear in Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Sonic Studies, Tempo, Psychology of Music, Music Theory Online, Open Space Magazine, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, SMT-V, and Perspectives of New Music. www.joshuabanksmailman.com.

Notes

1 This is especially true if you know about Babbitt primarily through the secondary literature about his writings, as is often the case.

2 For instance Alex Ross’s Rest is Noise (2007), introduces him in this context.

3 We find accusations of ‘serial tyranny’ yelled as hyperbolically as antivaxxers are prone to demand ‘freedom’. For an account of one type of caricaturing of Babbitt, see Mailman (2019, note 8 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]).

4 Although the Ghent-based Orpheus Institute’s programme specifically named ‘Artistic Research’ might be included as one among many demonstrations of our current acceptance of this notion (in this case emerging decades later), I do not mean to refer to it any more than to IRCAM, CCRMA, the Computer Music Journal, Organized Sound, Perspectives of New Music and many other institutes and journals which have emerged.

5 For instance grants of the period in the U.S. tended to support less adventurous artistic practices. See Vandagriff (2015).

6 See Harker (2008), Girard (2010), Vandagriff (2015), and Berrnstein (2021) for fresh perspectives on the role of Babbitt and his colleagues in this phase of music-intellectual history. It’s beyond the scope of this preface to discuss all those who were pivotal in this transformation, especially as it includes many who were not tightly connected to Babbitt.

7 Babbitt’s colleague Edward T. Cone (1948, 177) called this the ‘virus of historical method’. Quoting Cone, Girard (2010) goes on to explain it as follows: In a 1948 paper on the role of the ‘creative artist’ in higher education, for example, Edward T. Cone expressed his own admiration of scientific disciplines: ‘[O]ne reason for the present-day advance of technology,’ he wrote, ‘[is] the fact that mathematics and the natural sciences have, almost alone among the branches of learning, remained healthy [and] retained their proper characters.’ [note 56] In Cone’s view, those disciplines’ vitality had been made possible through the absence of ‘the virus of the historical method’: whereas humanistic subjects were mired in the study of the past, the sciences recognised ‘the primary role of creative thinking’ and the importance of ‘first-hand experience … making, doing.’ To Cone, then, it was the structure of scientific training that music should emulate – not scientific disciplines per se but their participatory pedagogy and their lack of historicism.

8 See Harker (2008, 345; quoting Forbes 1949), regarding Thompson (1935).

9 I have previously (Mailman 2018) developed this distinction between two approaches to the use of music technology: an observational-stable-natural (resonant with commercial interests) and the more progressive pragmatist-ironist-experimental approach, the latter of which jibes with the progressive view of Babbitt, his protégé David Lewin, and others. Related, and in some ways paralleling this, I previously (Mailman 2007) distinguished between populist and progressive approaches to music perception and cognition.

10 Although he did exemplify an instance of it, Babbitt didn’t specifically articulate a pluralism of artistic research, and most of what we might call artistic research today probably wouldn’t meet his standard of progressivity (although a lot of it would). But Babbitt was clear that he endorsed plurality in composition, in commenting: ‘I love this variety of music’s that’s going on. What I resent is people who become parochial, in a sense which I never wanted to be. This tremendous variety of music is something that didn’t exist [in America] when I began’ (Babbitt, quoted in Duckworth 1995, 88).

11 ‘Adamantly opposed to moderating human creative sovereignty with cybernetic/mechanical processes, he concurred with [Otto] Luening in affirming the supremacy of creative Man over recreative Machine; … ’ (Brody 2020, 786–87). Regarding Babbitt’s idealistically ambitious aspirations, see Mailman (2019, note 3).

12 See Knouf (2013, 47–59), for a fascinating account of the connections between Babbitt’s proclamations regarding discourse, his integral serial practices, Claude Shannon’s work on Information Theory, and contemporanous wave of Cybernetics.

13 See Applegate (1998) for an account of how nationalism and music aesthetics intertwine in music criticism and scholarship. As an example of how these figured into music appreciation, Leonard Bernstein framed his concert season cycles on themes of the ‘Gallic Approach’ and the ‘Teutonic Approach’.

14 Adorno, for instance, rejected jazz for it being an artistic practice that subverts the truth. See Witkin (2000). Adorno based his rejection of jazz on a dichotomy between ‘dynamic-expressive music’ and ‘rhythmic-spatial music’ where jazz qualifies as the latter.

15 Consider Paul Henry Lang’s (1946, 301–02) simplistic reduction of music to ‘color and warmth’ rooted in ‘sentimental whirlpools’ and his bizarre insistence that theory- and philosophy-infused music analysis ‘lacks feeling’, ‘warmth’, and ‘poetry’. This is with the backdrop of Adolph Weissmann (1924, 5), writing about Schoenberg, that ‘the dialectic sharpness with which transformed this former Wagnerian [Schoenberg] into the reformer of music, rests on Jewish race feeling … His [Schoenberg’s] contempt for all that is consonant would of necessity lead to sterility. The German impulse must not be diluted into a paper music’. Even the eminent musicologist Carl Dahlhaus (1965 [1987], 252), although respectful of Schoenberg, was vocally unsympathetic to the mid-20th century avant garde composers’ discussions connecting musical form to compositional technique. These are examples of the kind of discourse that progressive composers had to contend with in the mid-20th century. No wonder Babbitt and others sought a safe space to engage in the discourse essential to their artistic progress and to articulate that need.

16 See Girard’s account of Edward T. Cone’s remarks disparaging the prevailing ‘virus of historicism’. In pushing against this virus of historicism, ‘Babbitt overturned the metaphysics of musical genius in the name of epistemological/artistic pluralism’ (Brody 2020, 790).

17 Babbitt (quoted in Gagne and Caras 1982, 42).

18 See Swartz and Babbitt (1985, 472). For more about Babbitt’s youth, including musical activities, see Raley (2017).

19 Although Babbitt habitually played showtunes on the piano, he ‘never really had any piano instruction’ (Babbitt, as quoted Duckworth 1995, 71). For more about Babbitt’s youth, including musical activities, see Raley (2017).

20 This is if we consider Duke Ellington (and others such as Thelonious Monk and Charlie Mingus) to be aspiring toward excellence in their own distinct art form. Stockhausen by contrast could more appropriately be compared to Babbitt in this regard. In contrast to Babbitt though, Stockhausen played jazz in nightclubs and for magic shows only during the brief period he was in Musikhochschule, where he trained as a pianist. (Swed 2007)

21 This quality might be likened to the playful pitter-patter of Tin Pan Alley songs, trafficking in clever winks rather than emotional coercion engineered by large-scale rhetorical sweep. What Berrnstein (2017 and 2021, 217–28) describes as something like a vertical time (sandwiched between opening and closing rhetoric) pervading much of Babbitt’s compositions also resonates with what I am describing here.

22 That’s not to say that these European composers didn’t successfully assimilate or synthesise elements of vernacular and popular music. On the contrary, besides the ambient cool-jazz style of Stockhausen’t Refrain, the Gershwinesque flourishes in Messiaen’s Turangalila and rambunctuous rhythms of Ligeti’s Hungarian Rock are all inspiring artful examples. But I hear them more as gestures reaching out (as Bach did with French, Italian, and English styles) to some tantalising stylistic ‘other’, as opposed to intuitively channelling formative youthful musical experiences, as Babbitt might have been. (For an analysis of the jazz, inderminate, serial, and graphic-score elements of Stockhausen’s Refrain, consult Mailman 2021 using password: smt.)

23 As Harker (2008, 363–64) explains, Babbitt was also presumably under threat to be persecuted by McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee as many prominent Jewish intellectuals were in the 1950s. On the topic of Babbitt and politics see also Brody (1993) and Mailman (2020a, note 72).

24 Ross (2020).

25 Babbitt (1989).

26 By some accounts (for instance Swartz and Babbitt 1985) Babbitt wrote a whole musical comedy (called Fabulous Voyage). The most entertaining, if unpolished, rendition of three surviving songs I have heard is from an informal gathering at California School of the Arts, in which jazz pianist (and one-time Benny Goodman sideman) Mel Powell played his own improvisationally adapted version of Babbitt’s chordal accompaniment while soprano Judith Bettina and Babbitt himself (!) sang the lyrics. The recording of this affable event will eventually be available for streaming from Yale's Oral History of American Music: https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/7.

27 With its stalk-like descending 5th, the ‘beanstalk’ motif of Sondheim’s Into the Woods (1986) seems to quote Babbitt’s Three Compositions for Piano, (G-Ab-)Bb-Eb-F-D-C, which was composed in the 1940s just before the time when Sondheim studied with Babbitt. (The melodic affinity was noticed by Max Grafe, former teaching assistant of Andrew Mead.)

28 See Mailman, 2020a, section 5, for a more extensive discussion of (and sources on) Sondheim’s studies with Babbitt, as well as of Babbitt students who went on to careers that shade into popular and commercial music, such as guitarist Stanley Jordan (a contributor to this volume) and film-and-TV composer Laura Karpman.

29 See Mailman (2019, note 24 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]; and 2020a, note 12).

30 Mailman (2019, video 2, 11:22–12:05 [https://vimeo.com/324224224#t=11m22m]; and 2020a).

31 Mailman (2019, note 30 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]; and 2020a [4.1.5] and note 58).

32 See Whittall (2008) and Mailman (2019, note 5, [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]).

33 Although we don’t know the details of Babbitt’s secret government work, the title of one of his works, Canonical Form, refers to a mathematical structure used in matrix algebra to decipher secret codes such as used by the German Enigma machine in WWII. The structure represents an incremental build-up of knowledge, and thus can be interpreted as a metaphor for epistemology, which can be very easily heard in the way Babbitt’s piece unfolds. See Mailman (2020b) for an explanation and musical analysis of this.

34 Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1931 Quartet was premiered in New York in 1933, and in 1941 Henry Cowell published all four movements in his New Music Quarterly in 1941.

35 See Rao (2005).

36 This is essentially a matter of switching between textural streams at differing time intervals, rather than at a constant pace. See Mailman (2015, 48–50) for an analysis of this in the codetta of the first movement of Bartok’s Fourth Quartet. Mailman (forthcoming) offers a more formalised approach for modelling varying durations prompted by such textural switching.

37 See Griffiths (2010, 64–68), for a brief but lucid analysis of Babbitt’s Three Compositions for Piano. See also Mead (2011), which offers an illustrated anallysis of the related but differing rhythmic procedures in all three movements.

38 It seems that Andreatta attributes the four-element duration rows of Babbitt’s Composition for Four Instruments (1948) mistakely to Babbitt’s Three Compositions (1947), which instead deploy four-element rows of different length grouplets of even 16th notes, a precursor to the duration rows used in Composition for Four Instruments. Nevertheless, this doesn’t affect Andreatta’s (2020, 250, note 6) remarks about historical chronology of Babbitt’s and Messiaen’s distinct innovations.

39 Rather than using serialised rhythm to define a static textural aura, as Messiaen does, Babbitt’s approach is inherently flexible on the note-by-note level. Although this flexibility is more pronounced later on with Babbitt’s time-point system, it is even true as early as in Babbitt’s Three Compositions, as Mead (2011) shows that in the third movement Babbitt deranges and disrupts would have been a merely mechanical unfolding of his rhythmic series in order to forge audible connections back to the first movement.

40 Besides Stockhausen’s 1959 Refrain (see note 22 above), his 1951 Kreuzspiel is apparently a nod to jazz (or at least some kind of vernacular dance-band genre) with its implied rhythm-section based texture and ongoing steady pulse. Though, to my ears, Kreuzspiel doesn’t very much conjure jazz—it’s too austere and controlled—it seems unlikely that it didn’t in some way goad Babbitt to compose his own jazzier All Set (1957).

41 See Mailman (2019), which demonstrates (visualises, sonifies, and verbally explains) this interpretation of Babbitt’s project.

42 In Mailman (2019) I posit that each such designed system is like a dynamic instrument where the available versus unavailable pitches (and rhythms) keep changing as you play.

43 Babbitt was also aware of Claude Shannon’s pioneering work (see Bernstein 2021, 45, 48) on mathematical theory of communication which, at Von Neumann’s suggestion, conceived of information as physicalized, thus translatable into on/off electric impulses, corresponding to what Tukey called bits. Tukey was also the only reader qualified enough to understand Babbitt’s highly mathematical 1946 Ph.D. dissertation in music, which, despite Tukey’s approval, was not granted approval by the music department until 1992. See Knouf (2013, 47–59) regarding the likely influence of Shannon’s work on Babbitt’s ideas and the way he chose to articulate them.

44 For an analysis, via binary-state operators, of Babbitt’s on/off switching of instruments in his Composition for Four Instruments and binary-state rhythm permutations in Semi-Simple Variations see David Lewin (1995). The binary-state derived rhythms are also discussed by Seo and Leong in this volume.

45 As Ross (2007, 439) describes it: ‘Six bars into the second of the Three Compositions for Piano there is, out of nowhere, a loud B-flat-major triad. Before you can come to terms with the psychological effects of such ‘tonal puns’, they disappear, like half familiar faces in a crowd. This rigorously organised music ends up feeling mysteriously prankish, antic, loosey-goosey; it shuffles and shimmies like jazz from another planet’.

46 For examples of Babbitt’s pranksterish behaviours see Mailman (2019, note 2; and 2020a, note 82).

47 See Mailman (2019, note 2 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]; and 2020a, note 82).

48 Babbitt’s reaction is clearly based on an early 1950s snapshot of Euro-serialism and is most instructive as a reflection of his attitude on these matters. Although after an initial focus of interest in integral serialism (or rather their more ‘totalized’ version of it) Europeans increasingly veered away from it. But they (especially Stockhausen, Pousseur, Nono, Boulez, Berio, and Maderna) all subtly (and with various degrees of overtness) continued developing and extending other serial-based compositional techniques throughout their careers. See Whittall (2008) and Griffiths (2010).

49 See Griffiths (2010, 88–89) for more on Babbitt-Europe connections. Mead 2011 in particular differentiates Babbitt’s attitutde toward integrated organisation of rhythm.

50 Refer especially to Mailman (2019, video 2, at 15:00–17:00 [https://vimeo.com/324224224#t=15m20s] as well note 24 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]). In Mailman (2020a), the entirety of section III discusses tertian chordal harmony as arising from the composing out of superarrays; see especially paragraphs [3.1.4.3] and [3.1.6.1], as well as note 53. See also Berrnstein (2021, 243) and Mead (2021, note 5).

51 See Mailman (2019, note 9 [https://tinyurl.com/s7dwxk4r]).

52 Erik Carlson’s performance can be heard here: https://erikcarlson.bandcamp.com/track/composition-for-one-instrument.

53 Such irregular but somewhat stead rhythm is related to what might be called ‘liminal periodicity’, discussed by Berrnstein (2021, 252), which he credits to me.

54 Milton Babbitt in describing his response to his father asking if he wanted to attend Curtis Conservatory in Philadelphia, says: ‘I was a virtuoso clarinet player. And I played a lot of saxophone, too. So I said to him, “No, I’ve seen this. I don’t want to be an orchestral clarinetist. Even if I can get a job, it’s no life. I’ve been playing all of my life. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of practicing and I’m tired of playing. I’m not interested in going to a conservatory. I just want to go to college”’ (Duckworth 1995, 59).