I.M. Milton Babbitt, 1916-2011
The world has been making do without Milton
Babbitt since 29 January this year. I came to Babbitt far too late: his music
first caught my attention little more than a year ago, which illustrates how
careless and unsystematic my listening has been. To some extent I can plead a
natural progression of interests: five or six years ago I realised that I had
the material capacity to explore and develop my longstanding fascination with
electronic and electroacoustic music; since then I’ve been attempting to train
myself in just about every aspect of music-making, and the study of serial
composition techniques came up along the way. From Reginald Smith Brindle’s
1966 text Serial Composition I eventually ended up at Milton Babbitt’s
critical writing and started to explore his musical language. I shouldn’t have
been surprised to discover how engaging, lively, and profoundly satisfying Babbitt’s
music is, but I was, because I had allowed myself to cultivate a relatively narrow
field of musical interests. I grew up listening to radio programmes hosted by
people who had been (as I can see in retrospect) profoundly influenced by the
neoclassical and nationalist strains of twentieth century music: who had ‘been
through the Boulangerie’, as Babbitt once put it. The notion that one could
describe serialism with words like ‘engaging’ and ‘lively’ never crossed my
mind until I began my own study of the stuff. This, too, ought not to be
surprising: most music tends to sound better once you become aware of what it’s
doing, either by long exposure, your own musical practice, or a certain amount
of specialised study.
Those familiar with Babbitt’s career – and
specifically with the aspect of it that was most visible to the general public
– will recall that he got into trouble over the notion of specialisation. Any
time someone offers a summing-up of his ideas about music, there’s always a
mention of the article he wrote under the title ‘The Composer as Specialist’
but that High Fidelity magazine published (in 1958) as ‘Who Cares if You
Listen?’ – a tag-line that followed him around for the rest of his life. The
point behind Babbitt’s preferred title was simple enough: why not look on
advanced musical composition as a specialised activity like advanced physics or
engineering – something that naturally requires a certain amount of familiarity
with the field on the part of a potential audience? His ultimate goal in the
essay was to argue for an ‘academic’ music based in the university system,
analogous to pure research in the physical sciences: something of little
obvious practical utility, which most people will find obscure and irrelevant
to their lives, but which contributes to the sum of knowledge in the field, and
without which no real innovation or development is possible. Babbitt’s
1958-vintage faith in the university system is probably no longer tenable (not
least because the university system as it was in 1958 no longer exists), but
the basic conception of specialised activity as being something one must
prepare both to perform and to receive is well worth remembering. It also
happens to be one possible way to conceive of taste and sensibility, neither of
which comes into being without effort.
In his 1958 essay, Babbitt wrote about
withdrawing from the arena of public performance: about pursuing the music
itself without being concerned about ‘the public and social aspects of musical
composition’. That said, he did not go so far as to suggest that advanced music
need not be performed at all: he simply located the ideal venue of performance
in a semi-private, cloistered space. Babbitt was forever being accused of being
an elitist, but to say he was by virtue of the nature of his work a member of a
more or less involuntary and beleaguered elite would be closer to the truth. By
writing deliberate, serious, and thoroughly composed music, he naturally fell
to the side of what a mass audience probably wants – or rather, what the people
who curate the idea of a mass audience chose to conceive as being the wants of
this audience: an audience in no small measure invented by the said curators as
the object of their own professional and commercial interests. The experience
of hearing Babbitt’s music is much like that of hearing Babbitt himself conduct
a conversation: not in terms of what he said, but in the structure of his
speech. He spoke in long, flowing sentences, branching and diverging, taking up
minor points and running them to ground before re-establishing what he
originally had to say. Babbitt sentences were, as he spoke them, intricate
structures that seemed to spread out beyond what one breath could contain, but
which ultimately demonstrated cohesion and direction. The past tense is a
concession to the tragedy that there will be no new Babbitt sentences, just as
there will be no new Babbitt compositions, to read or hear; but what he left
behind will remain a powerful evocation of the composer’s unique sensibility
and taste.
The same commercial media that give us easy
opportunities to write and publish blogs also make it very easy to write our
own music, and realise performances of it in electronic form, and people are
taking up writing and composing in droves. At the same time, neither writing nor
composing is as easy as it seems; and as the managers of our new media delight
in serving the markets they create, how-to publications and do-it-yourself kits
abound. In terms of music, much of this advice involves the latest versions of
common practice tonality; as well it might, because tonality is everywhere around
us, in popular music, in the music that serves as a soundtrack or background to
everyday life, and even in the chirruping of telephones and other electronic
gadgets. It’s always faster to plug into something ready-made than it is to
develop a language from scratch, and it sounds nice, too. In this respect,
tonality is like the super-glue that comes with a plastic model kit: given the
right bits and pieces, if you get the chord progressions right, you’re writing
music. The forms of electronic music that currently enjoy mass appeal can be
built up at home from an ever-expanding supply of made-to-order sounds meant to
ease the kit-building process: synthesisers and sample-based instruments
pre-programmed with timbres, rhythms, and fragments of melodies ready for use
in producing one’s own version of the most popular styles and genres. Here we
should recall that the early appeal of electronic music was not in the novelty and
timbral richness of the sounds it could produce, and certainly not in the
medium’s ease of use, but in the degree of control the technology allowed the
composer to have over the finished work. Such control was particularly
important in Babbitt’s approach to serial techniques, where every aspect of a composition
could be approached via a set of organizing principles that had been devised
uniquely and exclusively for that piece of music. The great achievement of this
form of serialism is the understanding that each work can be made utterly
unique, referring to nothing outside itself: that each musical composition
involves the creation of a new world. As distinct from music that relies on
traditional practice to support itself, his is a music that relies on its own
structure, its own underlying principles, to develop: music that is as much itself as it can possibly be, and that
contains as much of itself as it can. This kind of music demands exhaustive
work put in by the composer, so as to determine what a specific piece can be.
What are the possibilities inherent in a particular combination of intervallic
relationships? The composer’s role is to discover as much of this potential as
can be found, and to give the music as much development as possible.
Ultimately, the virtues of such music grow from the force of personality that
went into making it: the composer’s sensibility has been brought to bear on
every aspect of every sound. Babbitt’s sentences are difficult to understand if
one only half listens to them, and his music is difficult to understand in much
the same way. This is music that should be experienced in toto: to allow its
systems of internal relationships to unfold and draw us in; and to listen for
what the music has to say about itself. Each piece is an essay in being,
expressing its own intrinsic shape, which is itself a reflection of the mind
that created it: a very pure form of minority pursuit, in that the composition
pursues the mind of the composer, as the composer pursues the composition; and
the listener’s own experience as the composition unfolds becomes the best
possible guide to interpreting the music. As we listen, as we read, as with all
experience, only a constant process of refining our own taste and sensibility
can help us to bring a sense of order to what we perceive, as each of us become
minorities of one.
I wager that it’s fairly rare for people to actively
seek out the minority position: most of us end up stumbling into it, and being
by degrees surprised and dismayed by what we find here. Interviews with Milton
Babbitt conducted in the past ten or twenty years present us with a man who
always worked passionately for what he understood to be the things most worthy
of commanding his interest and attention – and he was passionately interested
in a very wide range of things indeed, including beer and baseball, popular
songs of the 1920s, and the combinatorial potential of tone rows. He was a
thoroughly grown-up intellectual, who had the misfortune to grow older in the
context of a culture that had come to value youthful instincts more highly than
mature refinement. But that, of course, is just what happens to people – not to
all people, and perhaps not even to most people, but to the fascinating and
endlessly stimulating minority that until 29 January of this year included
Milton Babbitt as a living eminence. He seemed to accept the minority position
more or less gracefully, while being a clear-eyed and properly strict critic of
the sillier things the majority gets up to. All in all, his was a condition to
admire and to aspire to.
