Milton Babbitt: Words About Music

by Stephen Dembski, Joseph N. Straus

Overview

Many consider Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt to be the preeminent figure in post-World War II American music. Beyond the extraordinary power of his music, he is also, as he says, "somewhat known as a talker." In fact, he is renowned as an energetic teacher and inspired lecturer.
In 1983 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Babbitt presented a concise summary of his most essential musical insights in a series of lectures and seminars. These are gathered here, presenting for the first time in book form a comprehensive overview of the subjects that have formed the core of his teaching for the past forty years.
Babbitt's central concern in these lectures is the twelve-tone tradition with which he is so closely identified. His discussion of this tradition ranges from close consideration of specific compositional problems to frank evaluation of his own position in that tradition. In his characteristically penetrating way, Babbitt discusses the most controversial issues in twentieth-century music, from serialism and atonality to the responsibility of the listener and the place of music in the university.
Until now, few have had direct exposure to Babbitt's ideas. In Madison, he spoke to a variety of audiences and, because of the pedagogical context, his presentation was direct and explanatory. This volume preserves the dazzling constructions and spontaneous excitement of his spoken language.
At the time of publication, Milton Babbitt was William Shubael Conant Professor of Music Emeritus at Princeton University. He has been showered with awards during his long and distinguished career, including the Pulitzer Prize (1982) and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (1986). He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299107949
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	04/15/1987
Series:	Madison Lectures
Edition description:	1
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	523,127
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Stephen Dembski is professor of composition and Composition Area Chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Joseph N. Straus is distinguished professor of music at City University of New York.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
Chapter 1	The Twelve-Tone Tradition	3
	The tradition from which Babbitt's music derives
	Early interest in Schoenberg and the twelve-tone idea
	Some common misapprehensions
	Contextuality and Schoenberg's search for a new communality
	A question of terminology: set, series, or row
	Schoenberg's difficulty in completing Jakobsleiter
	Collection and ordering in tonal and twelve-tone music
	Schoenberg and Webern
	Structural function of the series in Composition for Four Instruments and Second Quartet
	Some reminiscences
Chapter 2	Contextual Counterpoint	33
	Inversion and index number in Webern, Piano Variations, Opus 27 (second movement)
	Dallapiccola's gloss on Webern
	Harmony and counterpoint in Webern, Symphony, Opus 21
	Some properties of combinatorial hexachords
	A survey of the six all-combinatorial hexachords
	How to construct a Schoenbergian hexachord
	Some comments on retrograde and retrograde-inversion
Chapter 3	Large-Scale Harmonic Organization	63
	Tracing a contextual path through the first movement of Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet
	Set structure and set associations in Schoenberg, Opus 33a
	Long-range preparation and reinforcement in Moses and Aaron
Chapter 4	Questions of Partitioning	85
	The relationships between trichords and hexachords
	Various partionings of the aggregate
	Pitch-class operations applied to total sets
	About proving the hexachordal theorem
	All-trichordal and all-interval set
	Stravinsky's verticals
	Some aspects of All Set
	Inferring structural relations from the musical surface
Chapter 5	Professional Theorists and Their Influence	121
	Professional theorists
	The Schenker synthesis and a Bach chorale
	Erpf and the emergence of the contextual point of view
	Schenker's analysis of a Bach chorale and some additional parallelisms
	Diminution technique
	A contextual analysis of the Prelude to Tristan
	Eccentric but influential theorists
	Erpf's Kette, Klirrtone, etc.
	Contextual continuity techniques in Hindemith's Third String Quartet and Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 16 and Klavierstucke, Opus 23 No. 3
Chapter 6	The Unlikely Survival of Serious Music	163
	The intellectual and social reorientation of music in this century as a result of compositional contextuality
	Schoenberg's search for communality
	Electronic music and the human ear as the new source of boundary conditions
	Words about music
	The composer in academia and the attitude of his fellow academics towards composition
	The special problems of the American composer
	Notes	187
	Glossary	193
	Index	199