Table Of Content

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF MILTON BABBITT This page intentionally left blank THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF MILTON BABBITT Edited by Stephen Peles with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus princeton university press princeton and oxford COPYRIGHT © 2003 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA BABBITT, MILTON, 1916– [ESSAYS] THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF MILTON BABBITT / EDITED BY STEPHEN PELES . . . [ET AL.]. P. CM. INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ISBN 0-691-08966-3 (ACID-FREE PAPER) 1. MUSIC—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. I. PELES, STEPHEN. II. TITLE. ML60.B12 2003 780—DC21 2003044496 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE THIS BOOK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED WITH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC. THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN SABON. PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. (cid:2) WWW.PUPRESS.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1 3 5 7 8 9 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Preface ix The String Quartets of Bartók (1949) 1 Review of Leibowitz, Schoenberg et son école(1950) 10 Review of Le Système Dodécaphonique(1950) 16 Review of Salzer, Structural Hearing(1952) 22 Tintinnabulation of the Crochets (Review of Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Bartók) (1953) 31 Musical America’s Several Generations (1954) 34 Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition (1955) 38 The Composer as Specialist (1958) 48 Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants (1960) 55 The Revolution in Sound: Electronic Music (1960) 70 Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music (1961) 78 Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant (1961) 86 Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium (1962) 109 Reply to George Perle’s “Babbitt, Lewin, and Schoenberg: A Critique” (1963) 141 Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky (1964) 147 The Synthesis, Perception, and Specification of Musical Time (1964) 172 An Introduction to the R.C.A. Synthesizer (1964) 178 The Structure and Function of Musical Theory (1965) 191 The Use of Computers in Musicological Research (1965) 202 Edgard Varèse: A Few Observations of His Music (1966) 213 vi CONTENTS Three Essays on Schoenberg (1968) 222 On Relata I (1970) 237 Contribution to “The Composer in Academia: Reflections on a Theme of Stravinsky” (1970) 259 Memorial for Mátyás Seiber (1970) 263 Stravinsky Memorial (1971) 264 Contemporary Music Composition and Musical Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History (1972) 270 Memorial for Stefan Wolpe (1972) 308 Since Schoenberg (1974) 310 Celebrative Speech for the Schoenberg Centennial (1976) 335 Responses: A First Approximation (1976) 341 Introduction to Marion Bauer, Twentieth Century Music(1978) 367 Foreword to David Epstein, Beyond Orpheus(1979) 371 Memorial for Ben Weber (1979) 377 Memorial for Robert Miller (1981) 380 The More than the Sounds of Music (1984) 383 I Remember Roger (1985) 388 “All the Things They Are”: Comments on Kern (1985) 395 Memorial for Hans Keller (1986) 399 Stravinsky’s Verticals and Schoenberg’s Diagonals: A Twist of Fate(1987) 404 On Having Been and Still Being an American Composer (1989) 428 A Life of Learning (1991) 437 Brave New Worlds (1994) 459 My Vienna Triangle (1999) 466 Index 489 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Relata By Milton Babbitt Copyright © 1965 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted By Permission. String Quartet No. 4 By Arnold Schoenberg Copyright © 1939 (Renewed) by G. Schirmer (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted By Permission. String Quartet No. 4 By Béla Bartók © Copyright 1929 for the USA by Boosey and Hawkes, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Reprinted by permission. String Quartet No. 5 By Béla Bartók © Copyright 1936 for the USA by Boosey and Hawkes, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Reprinted by permission. Movements By Igor Stravinsky © 1960 by Hawkes and Son (London) Ltd. Copyright Renewed. Reprinted by permission. Arnold Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon, used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers Pacific Palisades CA, 90272. Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Piece Op. 23, No. 3, © 1923 by Edition Wil- helm Hansen A/S, Copenhagen. Used by permission. “The String Quartets of Bartók,” Musical Quarterly 35: 377–85, 1949, and “Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants,” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2: 246–59, 1960. Used by permission of Oxford Uni- versity Press. “Past and Present Concepts of the Nature of Limits of Music,” Interna- tional Musicological Society: Report of the 8th Annual Congress (New viii COLLECTED ESSAYS OF MILTON BABBITT York, 1961), vol. 1, ed. Jan LaRue (Basel, London, and New York: Barenreiter, 1961, 398–403. Used by permission. “Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant” and “An Introduction to the RCA Synthesizer” reprinted by permission of the Journal for Mu- sic Theory. “Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium,” “Since Schoenberg,” “Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky,” contribution to “Stravinsky: A Composer’s Memorial,” “Responses: A First Approxima- tion,” reply to George Perle’s “Babbitt, Lewin, and Schoenberg: A Cri- tique,” “I Remember Roger,” “On Having Been and Still Being an Amer- ican Composer,” reprinted by permission of Perspectives of New Music. “The Synthesis, Perception, and Specification of Musical Time,” reprinted courtesy of the International Council for Traditional Music. “The Structure and Function of Music Theory,” © 1965 The College Music Society. Used by permission. Contribution to “The Composer in Academia: Reflections on a Theme of Stravinsky,” © 1970 the College Music Society. Used by permission. Contribution to “In Memoriam Mátyás Seiber” and “Brave New Worlds” reprinted by permission of The Musical Times Publications, Ltd. Introduction to Marion Bauer Twentieth Century Music, reprinted by permission of DaCapo Press. Preface to David Epstein Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structure, © 1979 MIT Press. Used by permission. “All the Things They Are: Comments on Kern,” © 1985 Institute for Studies in American Music. Used by permission. Contribution to “Memoirs. Hans Keller: A Memorial Symposium,” © 1986 Music Analysis, Blackwell Publications. Used by permission. “Stravinsky’s Verticals and Schoenberg’s Diagonals: A Twist of Fate,” in Stravinsky Retrospectives, © 1987 University of Nebraska Press. Used by permission. “‘My Vienna Triangle at Washington Square,’ Revisted and Dilated,” from Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press), 33–53. Used by permission. PREFACE Of American composers of the postwar era few have had a more profound influence on the course of the music of that time than Milton Babbitt. Surely none of equivalent musical stature has so consistently committed his thought to print, and the remarkable series of texts produced by Babbitt over that half-century rank among the most in- fluential, widely discussed, and often misunderstood of the period. As recognition of Babbitt’s prominence among the intellectuals of his generation has grown over the years, so has the interest of these essays ex- tended far beyond the boundaries of the community of composers and theorists who were their earliest readers. The present volume is thus in- tended to meet what has become a long-standing need, by making available to cultural historians, musicologists, music theorists, composers, and others the complete writings of this seminal American thinker. To that end we have excluded little, save such unavoidable but comparatively insignif- icant by-products of the composerly life as the humble program note, as well as those essays which have appeared in substantially identical form under different titles; neither have we included Babbitt’s unpublished 1946 dissertation “The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone Sys- tem” (Ph.D. dissertation: Princeton, 1992) or Words About Music: The Madison Lectures (Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus, eds., [Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987]). Apart from these we have included all that was available at the time we began the project, an average of almost one article for each of the fifty years of work represented. Not a few of the essays originally appeared in what some readers might think to be unlikely places, and most have long been out of print. Doubtless there will be something new here even for Babbitt scholars. In the pages to follow the reader will encounter Babbitt in the dual role of maker of history and witness to history, and a considerable history it has been. Schoenberg, Steuermann, Stravinsky, Weisse, Krenek, and a host of other Europeans share the stage with Babbitt’s American col- leagues too numerous to mention here; Babbitt knew them all, and woven through these often dauntingly theoretical texts is a unique eye- witness account of one of the most turbulent and exciting periods of American musical history, an account that emerges more poignantly as the essays are read ad seriatim. But there is more here than musical history, for many of the texts directly reflect Babbitt’s abiding interest (and not inconsiderable expertise) in analytical philosophy, linguistics, and lit- erature; along the way the reader thus will have as companions Rudolph Carnap, Noam Chomsky, Carl Hempel, and others, introduced either by