Brainy Litany Anoint Binary Albino Tyrant Nation Obtain Motion Tribal Airily Tartly
PREFACE: The title of this dodecaphonic-inspired work, "Brainy Litany Anoint Binary Albino Tyrant Nation Obtain Motion Tribal Airily Tartly," is a collection of twelve intelligibly ordered non-combinatorial contextual hexachords derived from the series "Milton Byron Babbitt."
1. What is your favorite Milton Babbitt CD? Mine is Philomel, which features the gigantic 60s-era RCA synthesiser at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center alongside relatively conventional performances. It's a classic record which must be owned by all fans of experimental music. Nothing will surpass it within the context of its particular genre: this sound is permanently avant-garde.
2. After Babbitt died, I poured myself a small single malt, dimmed the lights, and listened to the complete disc all the way through with my eyes closed. It was easy to do.
3. When saluting Babbitt, one must also salute the core group of selfless virtuosos who performed him comfortably. On Philomel, the pianist on "Post-Partitions," "Reflections," and one version of "Phonemena" is Robert Miller. The vocalist on "Philomel" is Bethany Beardslee, and on both versions of "Phenomena" it is Lynne Webber. There were many others who became part of the "Babbitt family players," especially the first person to record the complete piano music, Robert Taub.
4. When I was 20 or 21 I worked on the hefty Babbitt chamber piece "Whirled Series" with saxophonist Pat Zimmerli. It took us forever to learn, one gruelling bar at time, and I never played it well. Five years after getting through it/giving up, I bought the professional recording. After the first minute or so, it was utterly incomprehensible new music, like I'd never heard it before. This is pretty common, I believe: Intellectual 20-year-olds begin by devoting themselves to getting inside Babbitt, then quit after realizing that their ears will never be good enough to hear the kaleidoscope in a satisfying fashion.
5. To understand Milton Babbitt's music, you have to read his writing. His lecture "The Twelve-Tone Tradition" in Words About Music is highly recommended. Much of it is about Schoenberg: "He was a very honest man, a man desperately trying to write, in some sense, the greatest music ever. We all try to do that--most of us do, anyhow." An early essay "The Composer as Specialist" (unfortunately retitled "Who Cares If You Listen?") seems especially relevant in the internet era: with so little possibility of breaking through to a larger audience, it only makes sense to hunker down and write "the greatest music ever" for oneself and (possibly!) posterity.
6. Babbitt's essays and lectures about conventional repertoire are loved even by those who didn't appreciate Babbitt the composer. I own the score and recording of Schoenberg's 1934 "Suite in G Major for Orchestra (In Olden Style)" because Babbitt told a NYU assembly that it contained a systematic compilation of all the theroretical devices used by a certain era of tonal German composers from Reger to Hindemith. Sondheim has said that Babbitt's parsing of "All the Things You Are" was the most important teaching he ever got. The stunning Schenkerian-style analysis of the Bach chorale "Nun ruhen alle Wälder" in Words About Music concludes with rousing passion: "There is nothing else like this chorale, anywhere. What I suspect is that if any other composer did anything this far out and imaginative, the music was probably swept out when he died and we never heard about it, which is probably where most of the best music is."
7. Obits for Babbitt stress his generosity and love of living. Please read the heartfelt remembrance by David Rakowski, "As Ever, Milton." Many NYC new-music concerts I attended during the '90s had Babbitt in attendance even if Babbitt's music was not on the program. At one of them I shyly went up and said, "I just got the score to 'Three Compositions for Piano.'" Babbitt immediately gave me his phone number, and when I called him the next day he read off a few note corrections to the middle movement.
8. I gave up on "Three Compositions for Piano" after reading that ultra-heavyweight Charles Rosen considered it unplayable. And that wasn't a snap judgement: he toured it with Roger Sessions as (incompetent) page turner. Still, Rosen regards Babbitt as one of his generation's finest musicians. (See a volume of Perspectives of New Music from 1976.)
9. "All Set" remains the definitive melding of jazz and serial music. I know the other examples! But "All Set" is it. For a while I played it for everybody I knew. It usually went over like a lead balloon, but one time a celebrated bassist/composer called me the next day. "Hey! What was the name of that twelve-tone piece again? I want to keep listening to it." I've since realized how valuable "All Set" is at a practical level: whenever I'm confronted with some moderately obtuse college jazz composition that thinks it is really "out" or "advanced," I can just say to the perpretator: "Have you studied 'All Set'?" I grilled the original commissioner, Gunther Schuller, extensively about this unique work in our interview.
10. The night before that same interview, Schuller heard The Bad Plus play Babbitt's "Semi-Simple Variations" in the Boston jazz club The Regattabar. He told us afterwards that he didn't like our version, because Babbitt's serialized dynamic markings are crucial to the expression. He's certainly right! Our version brings out the beat, not the dynamics. The point of our arrangement is to suggest a future music that marries atonality and serious drumming. I still believe in this future, and remain proud of our lo-fi video with dancing girls choreographed by Julie Worden. We were told that Babbitt was shown this mild heresy on his 92nd birthday, and that it made it him happy. We sure hope so! (For comparison purposes, here is an upload of maestro Taub performing the correct version of "Semi-Simple Variations.")
11. There's a marvelous hour-long documentary by Robert Hilferty and Laura Karpman currently streamable online. In a few places Babbitt is shown playing what he called "cocktail piano." (In Words About Music he brags about doing this "better than Schoenberg.") My jaw is on floor. As much as I appreciated his integrity and his authenticity, at some point I wrote off Babbitt's non-intellectual connection to music as relatively slight. Now I'm not so sure. What a shame we don't have Milton Babbitt plays Cocktail Piano to file on the shelf next to Philomel.
12. There was only one. There were no "simultaneities" in this particular musical equation. Milton Byron Babbitt stands alone. He will never be popular. Nor will he cease to inspire.
02/04/2011
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