Relata 1 for orchestra with a collection of photos of the composer who died at the weekend 29/01/11 aged 94.
Babbitt has said of Relata 1 - Although the work has no familiar pattern of dimensionally synchronous repetitions and there are no extended recurrences, the main body of the piece is perhaps heard as consisting of six broadly parallel sections.
Milton Babbitt, who has died aged 94, was one of the most eminent, and controversial, American composers of the 20th century. Deeply influenced by the 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, whom he met in New York in the 1930s, Babbitt extend- ed Schoenberg's serial organisation of pitch structure to other parameters, including rhythm, dynamics and instrumentation, an approach that came to be known as "integral serialism". With his Three Compositions for Piano of 1947, Babbitt slightly preceded his European contemporaries Olivier Messaien, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez in producing the first work in this new and stricter manner.
Babbitt wanted "a piece of music to be literally as much as possible", meaning that it should possess as many related internal associations as it could. He was thus often viewed as a cerebral composer, someone who approached music as if solving a problem. In a 1987 article in the New York Times Magazine, he was paired with "chance" composer John Cage as representing The Two Extremes of Avant-Garde Music. But for those who listened carefully, Babbitt's music had an unmistakably "American" quality that seemed to give the lie to his own aesthetic pronouncements.
Most of Babbitt's music was written for small resources: solo piano, voice and chamber ensembles, including six string quartets. But he also composed orchestral works, the most recent being his Piano Concerto No 2, premiered in 1998 in New York's Carnegie Hall by Robert Taub and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, with James Levine conducting, and his Concerti for orchestra (2004), commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the premiere again conducted by Levine. Notable in his output are Composition for Twelve Instruments (1948), Sextets, for violin and piano (1966), Reflections, for piano and tape (1975), and Quintet, for clarinet and string quartet (1997). The titles of other works show the pleasure he took in puns: Four Play (for four instruments), It Takes Twelve to Tango, The Joy of More Sextets and Sheer Pluck (for guitar).
Babbitt was a flamboyant and scintillating lecturer, much admired for his delivery even by those (and there are those who claimed this included almost everyone) who had little idea what he was talking about; and he was frequently invited to speak outside the classroom. His talks were full of personal asides, jokes and barely veiled references to prominent figures both within and outside the field. His ability to pursue a line of thought relentlessly, often spinning off into unexpected byways, letting words, sentences and paragraphs follow one another without break, never failed to impress. (A singer once came up to him after a lecture and told him how much she admired his breath control.)
Though viewed by most as simply a composer of extraordinary intellect, who wrote music of staggering difficulty, Babbitt was, to those who knew him, also a wonderfully gregarious figure, who seemed to enjoy conversation with all, including those least drawn to his own compositional philosophy. His encyclopedic knowledge spread into unlikely areas, for example, beer: he seemed to know, have tasted, and developed a decided opinion about every brand available. His love of sports, above all baseball, and knowledge of sports statistics was legendary. As one who grew up playing the clarinet, Babbitt had a deep and abiding interest in jazz and musical comedy. In his younger years he wrote a Broadway musical (the unproduced Fabulous Voyage, based on the Ulysses legend), numbers from which were performed to great acclaim on various celebratory occasions in the composer's later years. Babbitt's love of jazz is also evident in his concert piece All Set (1957) for small jazz ensemble: tenor saxophone, trumpet, trombone, double bass, drums, vibraphone and piano.
Babbitt was a prominent composition teacher, and a number of his students achieved prominence of their own -- most notably Stephen Sondheim. Blessed with a remarkable gift for friendship, he was generous almost to a fault with his time. Anyone could call him up with a request for advice or help and be met for coffee or lunch the next day. To see Babbitt after an absence, even for those who knew him only moderately, was to be greeted as a long-lost friend. He had the uncanny ability when addressing someone, on no matter what arcane topic, to make his listener feel as if he or she were one of only two people in the world -- the other being of course Babbitt himself -- who really understood what he was talking about.
Milton Byron Babbitt, composer, born 10 May 1916; died 29 January 2011
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Milton Babbitt - Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964)by superAJ715,899 views
Relata 2. as yet unperformed?
japanesesweet 1 year ago
@japanesesweet In a letter I have from Babbitt he mentions how Relata 2 had been performed about four times but not recorded unfortunately. I hope oneday that will be sorted out.
AndrewToovey 1 year ago
@AndrewToovey Thanks for posting. Do you happen to know whether Babbit's piece called Music for the Mass ever been performed or recorded?
LesbianStraightGay 1 year ago
@LesbianStraightGay Hello - I don't know about this - but you could check one of his publishers Peters Edition.
AndrewToovey 1 year ago