Milton Babbitt, String Quartet No 4 1970 Part One

"Listen, don't worry about whether or not the music sounds coherent to you the first time you hear it. What about the first time you hear a sentence in Hungarian? -- assuming youre interested in listening to and learning Hungarian." Milton Babbitt

Although Babbitt is disinclined to discuss his music in terms of aural or aesthetic pleasure, it undoubtedly provides both. And no work better proves this than the String Quartet No. 4, composed in 1970 and dedicated to the Julliard Quartet. Cast in a single movement, the quartets musical surface is filled with widely-spaced, pointillistic gestures, some of bleak austerity, some of ferocious intensity. Textures are constantly in flux, but always possess a luminous transparency redolent of Webern. Individual voices and embroidered by an ornate filigree of dynamics, timbres, articulations, and performing techniques, all of which change from note to note. Lines are fragmented, leaping precipitously from one register to another, dislocated by the absence of metrical pulse. Never doctrinaire in his employment of 12-tone theory, Babbitt turns repeated pitches into a recurring motive, and uses an increasing amount of doubling as the quartet progresses.

Like his teacher, the great composer Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt also reinterpreted Schoenbergs legacy, but he was more interested in systematizing the method than in imitating the language. Babbitt, who was introduced to Schoenberg shortly after the latters arrival in New York in 1933, developed an intimate understanding of the12-tone system at a time when the method was mostly unknown. Beginning in 1935, Babbitt studied privately with Sessions, and profited from the masters rich European experience. From 1938 to the present day, Babbitt has been almost continuously connected with Princeton University whether on the music faculty, the math faculty, or (from 1959, as co-director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic music center.

What attracted Babbitt to serialism was its potential for mathematical systematization. Webern, more than Schoenberg, provided guidance, for it was Webern who extended serialism to parameters other than pitch, and it was Webern who stripped away the lush Expressionistic rhetoric that still characterized the works of Schoenberg. By the late 19402, Babbitt created the first example of integral or total serialism, in which the durational series, the dynamic series, and the vertical simultaneities were all determined by the pitch-set itself.




[Milton Babbitt is clearly one of the two or great figures in modern music. Anything we might add would be both disrespectful and redundant.]

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Milton
• Babbitt
• Quartet
• Schoenberg
• Sessions
• serialism
• 12-tone
• Princeton
• Webern

[posquint]

Just want to mention, in his Madison lectures, Babbitt said he was much more a Schoenbergite than a Webernite.

[lendallpitts]

Yes, an extremely interesting comment. However one must balance it with his statement that Schoenberg did not fully appreciate the implications of his own "discovery" -- meaning that he did not realize that a piece could be made more fully integrated or organic (my terms, obviously, not Babbitt's) by applying row structure to other elements: For example, to rhythm, the "poor stepchild" (I believe that was Babbitt's expression). So one might imagine that would make him Webernian.

[kristopaivinen]

@lendallpitts The answer is quite simply: combinatoriality. This kinda thwarts the interestingness of the comment; it's just so darn obvious, considering the presence of hexachordal combinatoriality in Schoenberg's music, which Babbitt just then developed further into trichordal combinatoriality, allowing Babbitt to project 4 rows simultaneously instead of just 2 as Schoenberg did. Webern's music exhibited no combinatoriality of any kind; only row-derivation, superficially related to Babbitt's.

[StevenGomezMusic]

if this was dedicated to the juliard quartet then i dont know what good music is anymore..

[toneeeeeee]

Analyzing this music is amazingly fun in the mathematical sense, and it fills the intellectual side of your soul with a sort of satisfaction that other music simply cannot match. However, when aching for expression and truth, I simply cannot see how the complexities of feeling can conform to a rigid twelve pitch pattern. It is this odd juxtaposition, the act of brain over heart that alienates this music from the masses. A soul simply will not remain healthy in this aural environment for long.

[Videoboy45]

I wonder what the sheet music looks like for this LOL.

[orthoman1000]

After two centuries of "enlightenment," then the Fascist and Communist revolutions, and then two fratricidal world wars, Western Christian Civlilization is dead. The Milton Babbitts are part of the decomposition.

[Nick0783]

@aculturemind You too mate, all the best

[aculturemind]

@Nick0783

I'm glad. Rock on, man.

[Nick0783]

...Joking aside, in visiting this page to have this discussion I have started to find that Babbitt's random droplets of noise have grown on me a bit. I can certainly see more worth in it than I did at first.

I recently really got stuck into Beethoven's Pastoral symphony. I think it is an amazingly joyful work. To me it evokes the vast beauty and symmetry of nature, reminding me I am part of it and in doing so strengthens my own spritual convictions.

[Nick0783]

@aculturemind I don't really understand your point about morals being illusory.

I'm surprised to read a human saying they are not concerned with human things.

I would say that "space and movement and form" are human things anyway, at the very least one has to be human to perceive and delight in them. If you are in fact an alien I apologise for any offence caused by my anthropocentrism, and congratulate you on your grasp of west coast slang. Dude.