MILTON BABBITT AND THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

- 357 From THE NATION: MAY 5, 1964: How it looked then, from there MILTON BABBITT AND THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM Benjamin Boretz THE FUNDAMENTAL conceptual problem confronting the twentieth-century composer is the fundamental intellectual dilemma of every contemporary thinker: how to reconstruct the possibility of meaningful order in the relativistic anarchy following upon the disintegration of traditional absolutes and traditional absolutism. Tonality, in this sense, was the metaphysical certainty of music, both metaphorically and materially. Its disestablishment as the universal ground of musical language, following the discovery, in the Wagnerian aftermath, that its resources were not infinitely extensible (notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the latter Mahler and the earlier Schoenberg to prolong their validity) produced a commensurately metaphysical crisis for those who urgently needed a musical language in which to speak. To this crisis, the first twentieth-century generation of composers, the generation of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Varèse, responded by searching for new absolutes rooted in what they perceived as universal or “natural” principles. But to the generation following theirs it was painfully evident that musical qualities could be “universal” only within the output of the composer who had formulated them. This second, post-World War II generation faced the full implications of the metaphysical impasse, and was forced to recognize that the magnificent exterior of early twentieth-century music was more a final insight into the resources of traditional ways of thinking than a genuinely new musical medium for consolidation and extension of new, urgently needed, structures and ideas. Part of this generation simply refused to acknowledge the existence of the dilemma, and retreated into ritual reproductions of the literal surfaces of early twentieth-century stylistic models. Another part has (with a certain curious alacrity) declared all hope abandoned, justifying its despair by the strange practice of first constructing artifacts according to manifestly absurd procedures and then declaring that the absurdity of the result proves the futility of further efforts to cultivate coherence. Such escapist attitudes have not, however, gained much currency among American musical thinkers, in part undoubtedly because of the profound impress of the tradition carried here in the persons of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Hindemith, but certainly as much because of the American intellectual environment in which their development has taken place. Rather than embracing existential despair, they have preferred the paths of rational retrenchment offered by philosophical empiricism, struggling to create meaning and coherence on purely relativistic grounds. To do so, they have explored beneath the surface of twentieth-century tradition to determine what might be made perceivable in existing music. In this way, a new compositional hypothesis could be “tested”, not against absolutes, but in terms of the already acquired experience of a composer himself and of his experienced listeners. Surely the significance of exploring the extent of which human-rational control can be extended over situations of extreme complexity is as crucial for survival in our century as was the discovery and investigation of the individual consciousness for the last. Of all the composers in the postwar generation, Milton Babbitt has most fully envisioned and articulated this world of responsibilities, and most wholeheartedly accepted its consequences along with its opportunities. Babbitt’s practice has been to extend the properties that give internal coherence to “classical” twelve-tone music to every dimension of presentation and sound. Thus - 358 Benjamin Boretz he creates a fascinating new contrapuntal environment in which polyphonic threads are traced not only though lines of pitches, as in traditional music, but also through “lines” of register, tone color, volume level, mode of attack, and time-position. Every musical event is infused with multiple functions, and the resulting syntax is so “efficient” that a single sound may convey as much information as, say, a whole section of a Mozart symphony — with predictable perceptual consequences for a listener whose conceptual framework remains unadjusted. The correspondence with Webern’s practices is evident; but whereas Webern maintained clarity in a concentrated framework by severely limiting the number and complexity of event and relations, Babbitt, departing from Schoenberg’s richer and more suggestive polyphony, populates the same articulative space with a much greater concentration of occurrences and associations. Babbitt’s Composition for Twelve Instruments...