Notes on Mead’s “An Introduction to the Music of MILTON BABBITT”

p. 6 – Listening habits formed from listening to tonal music are not helpful for Babbitt, or even Schoenberg…thought Babbitt goes further then SCH…While some notions of large-scale form adapted from tonal practice help to hear Sch,Web,Ber, not so much w/ Babbitt. The heart of the difference is Babbitt’s full embrace of SCH 12-ton system…

Mead: 12-tone no more prescriptive than tonality

p. 7 – Babbitt is unique in that he devotes himself to one compositional process.

p. 8 – “In a very real sense, Babbitt’s while body of work can be heard as a single gigantic composition, emerging intermittently and in different guises like an intricate shoreline seen through mist.”

p. 9 – Virtually every aspect of Babbitt’s music derives from SCH’s 12-tone procedures…SCH interested in harnessing the syntactical power of Mozart and Brahms…not Babbit.

Babbitt notes (in Babbitt 1987) the origins of his aggregate treatment…Schoenberg and Webern…

p. 22 “At the heart of virually all [Babbitt’s] compositions is Schoenberg’s hexachordal combinatoriality.

p. 22-23 All-combinatorial hexachords, Babbitt leaves the last one for the French (1987-1)

p. 26 – Trichordal Arrays…Webern lineage…

…In each of three simultaneous aggregates (lyne,hex pair, and column) all four traditional operations are ideally present for each trichord (T,I,R,RI)

…This 3-way, 4-transformation-including aggregation may often be reflected at the ROW level too, so that two full blocks (where a block’s length = ROW length) will include all 4 types of the ROW and the second DERIVED ROW

…Babbit wished to use the hexochord’s missing interval to signal the boundary, which isn’t possible if all lynes were members of the same row class, so he created “derived rows” in which four lynes contain two different row classes, allowing him the desired boundary signal.

…due to the generative quality of many trichords in the formation of hexachords, many combinations exist for the birth and rebirth of hexachords and rows in a piece, so that a trichord may be introduced as part of one hexachord, and later contribute to the reformation of a different hexachord later in the piece…much of (see below)

28 – Much of Babbitt’s first period explored the various relationships between trichords and all-combinatorial hexachords (trichordal arrays)…

…Babbitt’s pitch classes are proximally fixed only with respect to the lyne itself, not to other lynes in the array…so, PCs may occur in a variety of orders via differing methodologies, which vary from piece to piece in Babbitt’s early music.

31 – All-partition arrays (see also Babbit_Words): All possible partitions of an aggregate into some number of parts, or fewer. …ALSO, unlike most trichordal arrays, these use the same form of a row class

…It is difficult to construct such an array, thus Babbitt tends to reuse them in his works…they are referred to my Mead as array types. (SECOND PERIOD)

Recurring theme: MAXIMAL DIVERSITY

34 – Hyperaggregate: the complete presentation of all members of a ROW class…this is a step removed from the chromatic aggregate, realized by each ROW.

36 – Changing the degree to which one may distinguish combinatorial lyne pairs over the span of a piece frequently generates the long-range dramatic structure in Babbit’s compositions.

36 – Changes in the lyne articulation (switch to higher/lower register, change of instrument or articulation, etc.) usually correspond to the completion of a block of the array.

48 – Babbitt’s interest in projecting the properties of the 12-note ordered aggregate onto the time domain reflects his more general interest in carrying out various kinds of distrubtions of elements across many levels of time and space. His “mature use of the time point system coincided with his first uses of the all-partition array”

“In short, the most powerful aspect of the anology between the pitch and the temporal domain arises from the ways events of different sorts may be distributed in like manners. These, in turn, are dependent on the structure of the array, and the structure of the array is fundamentally dependent of the structure of its underlying row class. Using the same abstract interval pattern for both time point and pitch class rows provides Babbitt with the necessary tools for pursuing his desired compositional ends.”

49 – Mead says that Babbitt ensures the perceivability of the time-point rows by relating the modulus to the meter in a regular manner…argued against by Lester 76.

51 – For a complete analysis of Semi-Simple Variations take a look at Wimtle, Christopher…1976 perspectives