The Seam in Babbitt's Compositional Development: Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments, Its Precedents, and Its Consequences

THE SEAM IN BABBITT’S COMPOSITIONAL DEVELOPMENT: COMPOSITION FOR TENOR AND SIX INSTRUMENTS, ITS PRECEDENTS, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ZACHARY BERNSTEIN “MY MOST DIFFICULT PIECE” HE YEARS JUST AROUND 1960—approximately from the 1957 composition of Partitions to the 1965 composition of Relata I—were transformative years for Milton Babbitt in three important respects. The search for a coherent mapping between pitch and rhythmic intervals led to the invention of the time-point system. A deepening frustration with performative limitations, especially given the new rhythmic difficulties of his time-point music, led to the adoption of electronic synthesis in the 1961 Composition for Synthesizer, following some four years spent mastering the R.C.A. Mark II Electronic Sound Synthesizer. And, finally, and arguably most consequentially, an interest in a more varied T 192 Perspectives of New Music and ramified contrapuntal practice gradually led him away from the foursquare (34) partitioning of the trichordal array, a process that ultimately culminated in the all-partition array of Relata I.1 Balancing this increase in contrapuntal complexity is a simplification of the lines forming each array. While in the 1940s and ’50s the lines of Babbitt’s arrays are almost always derived series, generated from the various segments (most often, trichords) of an underlying series, the lines of Babbitt’s arrays henceforth would present straightforward, concatenated iterations of series forms with identical hexachordal content.2 Standing at the intersection of all of these developments is Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments (hereafter, CT6), of 1960. As will be shown, this piece represented something of an endpoint for Babbitt. Certain considerations had evidently led him along a path that he felt his current practice could no longer support, necessitating a change. In his only two significant published comments about the work, he appears to regard CT6 as a failure, describing it in an almost apologetic tone that he used for no other piece of his. These comments reveal much about the creative struggle surrounding the work. When, in perhaps the last of my instrumental works in which trichords appear in a foreground role, Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments, I again employed an explicit unfolding of the set content, but the work is so much more complex than the Second Quartet, the instrumental lines are so rarely generatively univocal, and the sections so sharply contrasted in so many respects, that— although there might be those who would judge its proportions more nearly divine than those of others of my works—convincing continuity depends crucially on invariants of order embedded in invariants of content.3 The piece of mine that Stefan [Wolpe] pressed me most about, and obviously delighted him for rather esoteric personal reasons, was one that never made it quite to the top of the charts. It was a piece called Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments. He heard a performance which the Group for Contemporary Music did up at McMillin and professed to love it. Now I must confess to you, I think the reason he felt that was because in many ways it was my most difficult piece both to perform and to hear. It was a piece that made many people very angry. It had long, long, long periods of unchanging notes, or very, very slow-changing pitch combinations , which was not like my usual music and which intrigued Stefan. There was another reason, too. It was conducted by Harvey Sollberger, and Harvey and Charles both sort of latched onto that The Seam in Babbitt’s Compositional Development 193 piece. It was then repeated at a large concert at Town Hall, and I remember walking out with Stefan after that, and he expressed this great, great enthusiasm for this piece, which has never been performed since. Now that piece we did go over in enormous detail, for two reasons, the first being the tempo organization. It’s not the only piece of mine in which I’ve done this, but it’s the most extreme piece. I decided after that piece that I would have to find some sort of way of writing music that was not as difficult. It was just too much. We also had the problem of the...