Thursday, 3/3/11
You have no idea one moment what’s going to happen the next (assuming, that is, you’re not following the score).
This can be disorienting, or exhilarating, or both.
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011), Composition for Four Instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, cello; 1948)
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here.
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Babbit was not quite as difficult as he seemed. He may have been dealing in abstruse relationships among myriad elements, but his listeners didn’t have to digest too many at once. From Webern, Babbit learned the art of deriving a set from successive transformations of a group of just three notes (“trichord”), which becomes a microcosm of the series. With these tiny motives in play, the texture tends to be less complicated than in the average post-Schoenbergian work. Composition for Four Instruments gives the impression of economy, delicacy, and extreme clarity; flute, clarinet, violin, and cello play solos, duets, and trios, coming together as a quartet only in the final section, and even there the ensemble dissolves into softly questing solo voices at the end. Thick dissonances are rare; like Japanese drawings, Babbitt’s scores are full of empty space.
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (2007)
***
There was only one. There were no “simultaneities” in this particular musical equation. Milton Byron Babbitt stands alone. He will never be popular. Nor will he cease to inspire.
