Milton Babbitt- Lagniappe (1985)

Lagniappe by Milton Babbitt, for solo piano. Babbitt is one of the most important composers of the Serialist movement, and, along with Carter (and to a lesser extent Wuorinen), represents what basically amounts to America's response to what Boulez was doing over in Europe. Just a little piano piece, but it's one I really like, so I thought I'd share. It was written specifically for the performer here, who is Robert Taub. This recording comes from a set of complete piano works, and this particular piece is a juxtaposition of his earlier, more rigid 12-tone style, and his later contrapuntal style.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Babbitt
• Piano
• Serialist

[Treefingrs]

The theories behind this stuff are really interesting, but the music produced is boring as fuck. Hear one composition, you've heard them all.

[John11inch]

@Treefingrs

Then you are clearly not listening closely enough, which certainly isn't Mr. Babbitt's fault. If you want to be able to appreciate music like this, you must train yourself to detect more subtle aspects in the writing, and you must also train yourself to not expect there to be the tools and tricks present in earlier music. You are no different than Beethoven's detractors, who called his music "noise" when they heard his first symphony.

[John11inch]

Is it that your cat is that rhythmically inclined, or that you can't tell the difference?

[DonBeegles]

Perhaps rather than attempting to prove your intellectual superiority to people who are really justified in being initially repulsed by serialism and contemporary classical music, you could try to win a few converts and give a sympathetic and reasonable explanation of why you like it and what there is in it to like.

Of course, if more people liked it, you would lose the aesthetic high ground you hold by being a member of the elite. Then you would have to find real grounds for pretentiousness.

[bungleminge]

@Nick0783 But they are not random dollops of noise. There is an organisation to it, a lot more than most pre-dodecaphonic compositions, and the 'sociological nonsense' is not necessary for composing such music. Look at it two ways, one is that it is, as someone else put it, a well-constructed combination of notes. Another is that there is a brand of composer who writes this to access a realm of emotion untapped by previous forms.

[MaestroTJS]

@Fichtezxc How could it have been "exhausted" when Beethoven continually found new things to do with it up until the day he died? That suggests that the problem was not with the genre but with the people who followed (and explaining THAT would take a lot more than 500 characters). But even they often managed to innovate within the forms, just not necessarily as creatively, powerfully, or, sometimes, successfully (the failures are interesting in their own right, though).

[Fichtezxc]

@John11inch It's probably a bit of both, I do agree with what you're saying. But at the same time, the classical genre was exhausted. Many composers feared to write in the style because of Beethoven and someone always comes along and has to do something different. There will always be an avant garde, especially in music.

[John11inch]

@Fichtezxc

I don't think it has anything to do with "doing something different." People after Beethoven were simply interested in expressing things in their music that were inexpressible in Beethoven's writing style. For instance, aspects of modern society, technology or psychology. Attempts to subtly define some of these things would be impossible in classical form, and therefore the repertoire of compositional techniques expanded to accommodate them.

[Fichtezxc]

@nyc11104 Think about it from the composer's point of view. What the hell do you even do after Beethoven? He was like the second coming of christ among composers. There had to be something different, people had to push the envelope. Hence the decline of tonality and rise of atonality and serialism.

That being said, I still think it's incredibly interesting.

[John11inch]

@nyc11104

So the use of music to humans is that it is an object to which one can "latch onto any sort of pulse, pitch center, or constant interval"? Your life sounds boring.

[Treefingrs]

@John11inch Perhaps. I certainly appreciate it in a theoretical sense, just not in the listening.