The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt (review)

This volume of Milton Babbitt's collected essays makes readily available the writings of one of the most original and influential musicians of the twentieth century. When Babbitt's music and its underlying ideas gained prominence in the 1950s, they were closely attuned to the artistic spirit of that decade. His essays quickly became among the most characteristic documents of the post-war period in music. Babbitt's emphasis on musical form, the complex style of much of his writing, his use of mathematical language to discuss music, and his doctrinaire tone concerning artistic issues were all widely shared in modern music circles in the 1950s and 1960s. His influence on the discipline of music theory in America can scarcely be overestimated: his essays single-handedly laid the conceptual groundwork and set the tone for the entire discipline as it emerged in American universities in the 1960s. The theoretical writings of Allen Forte, David Lewin, and George Perle were, in different ways, directly influenced by Babbitt. His authority has also been keenly felt in technical discourse on modern music in Britain.

The present volume contains the most important of Babbitt's previously published writings. Only interviews, some programme notes, early articles for the Chicago journal The Musical Leader, the 1983 lectures published as Words about Music, and his 1946 study 'The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System' (for which he received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1992) are absent. The editors have added brief headnotes to each essay, a few explanatory annotations, and a very helpful index for the entire volume. Babbitt's most often reprinted article, 'Who Cares if You Listen?' (1958), is given with its original title, 'The Composer as Specialist', but otherwise the texts remain as they were when first published.

The central subject in Babbitt's writings is the structure of twelve-note music, which he approaches in a systematic rather than practical way. His other principal topics are the nature of music theory and the serial music of Stravinsky. Throughout his writings Babbitt returns to the subject of American culture, which he finds threatened by populism. It has produced little meaningful understanding of or dialogue about music, he argues, and it has forced the 'serious' and 'advanced' composer into a state of isolation.

In contrast to the evolution in thought seen in the oeuvre of most major theorists, Babbitt's fundamental ideas concerning twelve-note music have remained essentially unchanged, although he has expanded them to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of Stravinsky's serial works and his own compositional applications. His earliest published statements concerning the twelve-note idea appeared in two reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1950. In these he refers summarily to his theory of a twelve-note musical system, which even then was apparently well formed. He alludes to it by using terms—combinatoriality, derivation, secondary set, source set, aggregate—that could only have mystified his earliest readers. The meaning of such terms was at first explained by other writers. For example, George Perle—who evidently had consulted Babbitt's 'Function of Set Structure in the Twelve Tone System'—discusses combinatoriality and aggregate formation in his article 'The Harmonic Problem in Twelve-Tone Music' (Music Review, 15 (1954)). Babbitt himself began to explain his theory in essays appearing in the early 1960s.

When Babbitt first sketched his ideas in print in 1950, the theory of twelve-note music was in its infancy. Schoenberg's principal statement on the subject, the 1941 lecture 'Composition with Twelve Tones', had just appeared in the French journal Polyphonie and in Schoenberg's own Style and Idea. René Leibowitz's Schšnberg et son Žcole (1946; Eng. edn., 1949) continued pre-war conceptions of the twelve-note method by adopting the interpretation of it espoused by the Viennese composers, who stressed its congruity with traditional forms and compositional principles. The most...