Babbitt: "Composition for Guitar"

Milton Babbitt: "Composition for Guitar" (1984)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• dodecaphonic
• classical
• guitar
• new
• music
• 20th
• century

[dcrepino]

Is this Starobin?

[NewMusicXX]

I believe I used William Anderson's performance for this

[patrickpowermusic]

Kitten person: clearly the tablature is better because it's better suited towards to post-Pendereckian, hyper-mixophyrgilocrilydian, 9 note scales of Schenkerian inverted fugue retrograde stretto processes. Any fool could see that. And by the way, don't you know the guitar is the most post modal instrument and therefore unsuited to post-Rappoportian rational micro awareness tonality.

[gkorein]

i don't know if i'm just guitar-centric, but i find this much more accessible than most babbitt.

[fireasdf1]

@KhagarBalugrak oh yes, atonal music is harmful, where's that written?

[DarkZekeX]

@KhagarBalugrak My composition teacher doesn't force me to write only music with serialist technique, or with heavy use of dissonance. Besides, its not anti-music. Dissonance isn't a bad thing.

[KhagarBalugrak]

Pieces like this are the reason that classical music is dying. At the music schools, they force all the composers to exclusively write this type of anti-music or else be kicked out of school. I know this because I went to conservatory. They have no new ideas at the music schools; they only have one - write music that is about as dissonant as is possible, do not bother about the fact that atonal music is harmful to living things, conform to this ugliness or be thrown out of school.

[jh0314]

@Yourenigma He was being sarcastic. What he said is a bunch of nonsense (and I don't mean that subjectively). It's a joke--that's why his comment has so many likes.

[Garoosh99]

mas mierda

[Yourenigma]

@patrickpowermusic You are the reason I hate music. Thank you for that revelation, you bastard.

[zachbernst]

@GiovanniMariaTommaso The modern harp is too limited to diatonic scales for this kind of music, unfortunately. As far as I know, Babbitt only used harp in Ars Combinatoria and Composition for 12 (actually only because he couldn't find a guitarist who could read music in the early '50s)

[MRDURDENDOOM]

The mentality of "sounds good" is one hell of a subjective comment, with little to no verifiable basis other than personal opinion. I would recommend investigating some non-Western music. In regard to the "laziness" comment, have you ever worked with a matrix or atonality? I would say writing a four-chord progression in verse-chorus form is far lazier than writing an atonal piece, but still both can be deserving of respect.

[bathotic]

@regcom Yes! It opened up to me about 2/3 of the way through! It is really wonderful. I think this was a bit of a transformational listen for me.

[regcom]

Great piece. Its unfortunate that many commenters are (heavily) confused concerning it. All I can contribute towards explaining it (now) is that it has a clear melody running throughout. Try and listen for it before dismissing it out of hand.