Cygnus pays tribute to Milton Babbitt
May 10, 1916--January 29, 2011
We are so grateful to Milton Babbitt for his heart-rending, earthy & visceral music. The Cygnus community misses him terribly.
At the bottom of this tribute page, please find a collection of musical memorials.
Cygnus & Milton Babbitt
Cygnus worked with Milton for over 20 years. We gave the Babbitt 80th birthday concert in 1996 at Christ & St. Stephen's Church in Manhattan.
Cygnus and NYNME contributed to the musical festivities surrounding the release of Babbitt's complete writings, a celebration that took place at Elebash Hall, at the CUNY Graduate Center. I no longer remember the year. Early aughts.
Cygnus did the Babbitt 90th birthday concert at Merkin Hall in 2006. The focus of that event was "Milton Babbitt at the Crux of the 20th Century." We programmed the Composition for 12 Instruments from 1949. Cygnus joined forces for the 90th birthday concert with the Second Instrumental Unit, which brought the energy and genius of violinist/composer David Fulmer into the project. Babbitt thought of David Fulmer as the next great hope for serious music, and he was right.
For May 19, 2011 at Elebash Hall, Cygnus is planning a concert that focuses on Milton Babbitt and the 21st Century, with new works by Babbitt students Peter Westergaard, Frank Brickle, Jonathan Dawe and David Fulmer. There is already much blog material about this concert on the Cygnus site. Babbitt recommended Dawe to Cygnus in the mid-nineties, and Cygnus took that advice, as did James Levine and a others.
As a tribute to Milton I will now try to summarize some of the points that Cygnus hoped to make through the 90th and 95th birthday concerts:
At the crux of the 20th Century (the focus of Cygnus' 90th birthday concert), Milton Babbitt was gradually giving up his early anti-natuaralism (think Varese; electronic music; Hamsun's wariness of telegraph wires; Louie Fuller's dances, with titles like *Radium*). Electronic music easily falls into anti-naturalism. This disposition gradually reversed itself in Milton's output. The crucial moment was when the Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio was sacked by vandals. After that, Milton never returned to electronic music. He thought he would eschew live performance in favor of the lonely, cloistered world of the electronic music studio, but fate interevened with the sacking of the Prentice Studio on 125th Street. Also, surprisingly people were asking him to write music. The human element won over the electronic mileau. One of the wonders of middle Babbitt is that a player can see how Babbitt's approach to rhythm is influenced by tape cutting and splicing techniques. The live players imitate the machine, but we could not execute those rhythms with machine accuracy, we humanize them.
We had a pre-concert discussion, with Frank Brickle moderating. It served as a prelude to the 90th birthday concert. Bethany Beardley explained how she releates Milton's music to scale degrees. Babbitt was ok with this heresy. It was clear to all who were there that Milton adored Bethany. He told the story of how she heard very fine inaccuracies in his notations of the tape parts of Philomel. The notated rhythms of the tape part were quanitzed somewhat for convenience, and Bethany heard those quantizations.
The conclusion I drew from my meditations about Milton Babbitt at the crux of the 20th Century was that Milton's positivism was an extreme form of naturalism--a naturalism that was the culmination of his early flirtations with its opposite. This naturalism is commonly mistaken for artificiality, for a cold mathematization of music. There was a hint of antinaturalism early on, but later his work shows great care for dealing with stark and simple musical truths. When he spoke about music his language was sometimes difficult, but what he was describing was not musical arcana, he was dealing with very essential musical principles.
Yet again, this flipping from antinaturalism to naturalism was not Milton's final transformation. In my notes for the upcoming 95th birthday concert I have been working on explaining how Milton has changed pitch class music from an order-intensive discipline to one of increasing freedom, showing great attention to the handling of collections, but allowing collections (of any size) to be meaningful even while unordered. This comes from his arpeggiation through the verticals in arrays. Also, each instrument has its own array, and the freedom that comes from this instrumental autonomy is considerable. This movement toward the freedom of unordered collections was Milton's lever into the the 21st Century.
This action continues to unfold through his students. Cygnus remains interested in the work of composers who can knowingly negotiate the pitch/pitch-class divide in ways that are not antipathetic to the 21st Century musical ethos. In short, Milton showed the way for pitch class music to co-exist with the 21st Century world of Adams and Reich. Much work is yet to be done, but to me it's clear that pitch class music can survive in the 21st Century, and we have Milton to thank for that. We care because we dont' feel the 20th Century has to be a write-off.
--William Anderson
Musical Memorials:
David Rakowski --- Piano Concerto No. 2
Milton Babbitt in Memoriam
Jeff Nichols -- Its Darkening Opposite --
for Cygnus tutti--
started a few years ago, this work became a memorial.
Ben Boretz--- in memory of all that -- a setting of the famous sonnet by Donne:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee..... 
Mohammed Fairouz -- Memorial for Milton (solo flue)
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|