Milton Babbitt - 100 years, 1. Intro, Mass and Round (Madison)

"The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields." - Milton Babbitt

Listeners who overlooked Mr. Babbitt’s philosophical abstractions and thorny analyses — who simply sat back and listened, rather than trying to understand his harmonies and structural processes — often discovered works of great expressive variety.⁽¹⁾

Milton Babbitt (1916 - 2011) was an American composer, writer, and teacher who is called the 'Father of Serial Music in the United States.' Although trained in band and jazz music and possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the American songbook, he found his true calling as a composer when he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Expanding Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique to other musical aspects such as timbre, rhythm, etc., he created works incredibly difficult to perform and challenging for the listener trying to hear the underlying structure.

In 1993 the New York based journalist and filmmaker Robert Hilferty started work on a documentary about Milton Babbitt which reveals a different side of the composer:  he had many friends and was a dedicated teacher with an open mind. ⁽²⁾



There are many scholars who find delight in spelling out all the structural intricacies in Babbitt's works, and there is certainly a place and a need for those efforts.  I for one prefer to follow a more simple approach--sit back and listen--in a nonjudgmental way.  It leads to many pleasant discoveries and endless amazement at the constant sparkle in Babbitt's kaleidoscopic music.

In the next few posts I will peruse Babbitt's catalog by type of work:  piano, other solo instruments, small chamber ensemble, large chamber ensemble, and voice.  But let's first listen to Babbitt's five-part Mass from 1941, composed after the String Trio (1939-1941) proved difficult to perform:

I decided to write a work that would relieve Professor Welch of some of the stigma of having a composer of such a piece in his new ‘section.’ So I wrote this Mass, and it won a Bearns Prize, as awarded by Columbia University, whose music department was chaired by the then notorious musical reactionary Daniel Gregory Mason. - Milton Babbitt ⁽³⁾

The work lay dormant at Columbia for many decades.  It consists of a Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. There is no Credo--Babbitt quipped that he did not believe in Credos. There is no better proof that Babbitt could indeed compose in a most accessible idiom but deliberately chose a more difficult and often unpopular path. Here are the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei from this beautiful work. The entire sequence can be found here.





In 2004 Babbitt wrote another brief but very accessible choral work, Round to a text by James Madison.

Had ev'ry Athenian citizen been a Socrates, ev'ry Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. James Madison ⁽⁴⁾

It was part of the Mr. President project of Judith Clurman and can be found here.
________________________________________________________________________________
⁽¹⁾ Allan Kozinn, "Milton Babbitt, a Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94." New York Times, Obituary, 1/29/2011. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/arts/music/30babbitt.html?_r=1 (02/29/2016))
⁽²⁾ Hilferty left the documentary unfinished when he died in 2009. The composer and Babbitt student Laura Karpman completed the film.
⁽³⁾ Zane Fiala, "International Orange Chorale of San Francisco presents: Prewar to Postmodern; Music for the Mass(es)." Concert announcement, Choralnet.org, 11/6/2010. (http://www.choralnet.org/view/269991 (02/29/2016))
⁽⁴⁾ Tom Huizenga, "Sing Out, Mr. President: James Madison's Socratic Sarcasm." NPR.org, 2/10/2011. (http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2011/02/20/133570552/sing-out-mr-president-james-madisons-socratic-sarcasm (03/06/2016))