This year Milton Babbitt celebrates his 90th birthday. Few 20th-century American composers have been as vital, productive, combative, and controversial. Babbitt has succeeded in achieving prominence and notoriety within not only the world of music but the university as well.
His music, however, remains less present in the repertory than his fame implies. The celebration of a milestone birthday should lead to more performances and recordings, but Babbitt’s legendary brilliance has inspired a mix of awe and fear that has helped deepen the notion that his music, in its recalcitrant modernism, is difficult, complex, and inaccessible. As Babbitt might be the first to argue, all great music, even that which seems immediately comprehensible, is at its core rigorous, coherent, and profoundly subtle in its complexity. Although the Juilliard School, where Babbitt has taught composition for 35 years, gave a concert in late March commemorating his birthday and his work, the occasion is not likely to resonate much further — the way Mozart’s anniversary is and that’s a shame because hearing Babbitt’s work is both pleasurable and rewarding. The music has a surface of surprise, angularity, variation, color, and drama. Its modernity is unmistakable.
Taking stock of a career and life inevitably involves the search for consistency, the identification of a distinctive and resilient project within an artist’s work. Babbitt has worked with uncommon brilliance throughout his career to achieve two ends that at first glance might appear contradictory. His first project is to write new music adequate to the conditions and character of modernity, music that takes into account the historically unique aspects of contemporary existence. Babbitt rigorously adheres to the scientific and logical possibilities of musical sound and time. Serious music cannot be composed either arbitrarily or in response to the manipulation of inherited cultural correspondences between music and meaning the way, for example, Hollywood film scores are constructed. For Babbitt music is an autonomous and rigorous form of life.
Babbitt’s second life project is to advocate for a larger place for music in the university and in the culture as a whole. Like others of his generation, he has recognized the paradoxical predicament of music in the 20th and 21st centuries. On one hand, technology has enabled more music to be written, played, and heard by a much larger audience, real and potential. On the other hand, parallel to the expansion of the audience, genuine connoisseurship has eroded, standards have been debased, and resistance to the new in musical composition has grown. In an era marked by rapid scientific and technological progress, not to speak of increased literacy and education, a regressive conservatism in musical taste has become apparent, marked by a rejection of innovation and change.
Babbitt was born in Philadelphia in 1916 and grew up in Jackson, Miss. By high school, he had distinguished himself as a jazz musician and tried his hand at writing popular songs. Though he went to the University of Pennsylvania to study mathematics, he switched his primary focus to music and transferred to New York University, where he worked with Marion Bauer, a composer and eminent writer on new music who was the first American pupil of the famed French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.
After finishing college in 1935, Babbitt studied privately with Roger Sessions. Through Sessions, Babbitt developed a lifelong association with Princeton University, where he taught music briefly in the 1930s and mathematics from 1943 to 1945, before rejoining the music faculty in 1948. As Princeton’s William Shubael Conant professor of music and one of its most distinguished faculty members, he helped propel the university’s music program into the first rank in the latter 20th century.
Early in his career, Babbitt became fascinated by the potential of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone method of composition, which offered a chromatic alternative to conventional notions of harmony that had amazing combinatorial possibilities. Babbitt was equally influenced by Schoenberg’s disciple Anton von Webern, who experimented with the novel and systematic use of silence and sonority, so that a radically new and vital approach to pitch could be extended to rhythm and to sound character as well.
Babbitt was influential as a composer, teacher, and writer in the decades after World War II. A pioneer in electronic composition, he created music that could bypass the unreliable and vulnerable skills of live performers and accurately reproduce in detail his compositional intent. For those accustomed to thinking of Babbitt only as a composer of seemingly counterintuitive modernist music, it may be surprising to note that in the 1940s Babbitt wrote a film score and a musical-comedy version of Homer’s Odyssey, called Fabulous Voyage. Though the musical was never produced, its tunes, like the rhythmically catchy “Now You See It,” are still performed. Stephen Sondheim, who studied composition with Babbitt, has said that he once asked to learn 12-tone technique, but Babbitt refused to teach him, saying that he hadn’t yet exhausted his tonal resources.
Babbitt also has taught composition at Juilliard School since 1971, lectured all over the world, and received practically every award and honor imaginable. He is legendary as a sharp-tongued speaker and brilliant essayist. (In a 2001 interview, on the topic of conservatory students, he said: “They’re not interested in music. They’re interested in careers in music.”) His music, however, like that of his mentor, Sessions, has suffered from an ironic combination of critical esteem and polite rejection by performers and listeners, on the grounds that it is too difficult to understand or perform. But there is a new generation of young players and listeners who can approach his music without preconceptions and will, in my opinion, embrace his music. So there is hope.
From the start, Babbitt has sought to write music that redeems the logical and therefore aesthetic possibilities peculiar to music. Insofar as music is made up of not only sound but also interruptions of sound, constructed without any direct imitation of nature, and is, unlike language, not an instrument of representation or correspondence, he saw that it was possible to construe even the tonal music of the classical and romantic eras as inhabiting a self-contained logical framework. Babbitt remains loyal to that notion.
One of the legacies of the late 19th century that disturbed 20th-century modernists, particularly Schoenberg (one of Babbitt’s lifelong models), was the development of a type of music appreciation, and therefore judgment, that relied on visceral or emotional responses to music, not on the function and structure of music itself. Clichés of emotional illustration, a form of cheapened musical expressiveness, triumphed at the end of the 19th century, spearheaded in part by the compositional strategies employed by Liszt, Wagner, and their followers to serve the aesthetic agendas of programmatic and dramatic music.
Like Sessions, Babbitt was determined to adapt and extend Schoenberg’s principle of composition with 12 tones to redeem the autonomous qualities unique to music. If composition involved the manifold possibilities inherent in combinations of sound involving pitch, the same idea could be applied to silence and the substance of sound itself, the kind of sound produced. The composer Edgard Varèse, who sought to generate a new vocabulary of sound, was therefore another of Babbitt’s inspirations. For Babbitt, in music (as in mathematics and science), logical complexity yields elegance and simplicity. But recognizing the beauty in his music requires expertise and understanding that may be daunting to acquire.
What distinguishes Babbitt’s career is not only the wide, impressively consistent range of his music, but also his articulate explanation and defense of it. Babbitt has never been a day-to-day music critic in the way Schumann and Debussy were. Nor has he engaged in the kind of self-promotion in prose that we associate with Wagner. As his collected essays suggest, Babbitt’s published writings range from theory to analyses of others’ works to personal reminiscences and appreciations. What comes through in his writing is his subtlety of thought and an extensive learning that includes a command of mathematics and physics. Not surprisingly, Babbitt is also literate in philosophy, particularly the logical-empiricist philosophical tradition of the so-called Vienna Circle.
B abbitt disdains any cheapening of music’s possibilities, particularly the way it is understood. He is not a snob in the ordinary sense of the word, as his admiration for the music of Jerome Kern attests. For Babbitt the issue is that music has long suffered from undisciplined amateurism even among composers, performers, and ardent listeners. The problem, he says in a 1994 essay, lies in music education. At the general level, it “takes the form of formlessness, of improvisational fun and games”; at the professional level, it produces “amateur critics rather than professional listeners” and “populate[s] musical society with unbred abecedarian composers.” Writing and teaching music — and about music — have been part of Babbitt’s second life goal: the furthering of a musical culture in the contemporary world that actually redeems the unique power and character of music.
Babbitt came of age when the making of art could not easily be divorced from politics. In the 1930s, the debate over the proper direction of modern art, including music, was intense. On one side were those with strong populist sympathies who argued for a simple, direct music, accessible to a mass audience, that could help in the political struggle against oppression and exploitation. Radical modernism was charged with being too complex, abstract, insensitive, formalist, and obscurantist.
But Babbitt and Sessions took from Schoenberg’s example the notion that music should not be judged by standards of accessibility or popularity. Injustice and conformity are linked in the age of mass communication. Music should, therefore, resist through its nature. Babbitt’s criteria of truth-value for music in that sense derive from the nonutilitarian, recalcitrant, and logically consequential character of music. Precisely because it was unlike language or the visual arts, music was capable of real autonomy and independence. In an age dominated by half-truths, journalistic spin, and the corruption of standards that accompany facile democratization, the composer, using modernism, could do more than hold a mirror of self-recognition to the contemporary world. Music’s autonomy could provide an aesthetic experience that contained an indictment and a reassertion of freedom and individuality.
Listening to Babbitt’s musicor, more important, trying to learn and perform itis therefore a reminder of the distance between the shoddy and the genuine, between compromise and principle. “I question that morality,” he wrote in 1989, “which suggests that it is more virtuous to stoop to attempt to conquer the masses than to attempt to create a standard to which they might aspire.”
If Babbitt’s commentary has often been dismissive and harsh, it is because he does not regard himself as an aesthete, but rather as an artist who speaks with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet. Babbitt fearlessly and unapologetically sees himself as speaking a truth through music that is not arbitrary or revealed but verifiable if one cares enough to learn and understand.
The major misunderstanding of Babbitt’s work and point of view stems from the catchy but improper title of an article published in High Fidelity in 1958. Babbitt wanted the title to be “The Composer as Specialist,” but the editors instead called the essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” There is a double irony in that title change. Early in his career, in 1940, Babbitt was alleged to have written a piece called “Music for the Masses,” which suggested plausibly that, like many of his contemporaries, he sought, as a commitment to socialism and communism, to write simplistically for a wide audience. But the actual title was “Music for the Mass” (perhaps viewed as an unlikely choice for a young composer of Jewish origin). The piece was a setting of a traditional text from the Catholic mass.
But the confusion about the title of this early composition was not nearly as damaging as the consequence of the High Fidelity title, which identified Babbitt as a proponent of an arcane and incomprehensible musical modernism that sported mechanically derived combinations of sounds bereft of emotional or aesthetic significance. Worse, it appeared as if Babbitt was articulating the modernist composer’s contempt for the middle-class concert audience and the so-called music lover. Though he tried many times to correct the record about “that offensively vulgar title,” 30 years later, he wrote that he was “far more likely to be known as the author of ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ than as the composer of music to which you may or may not care to listen.” But what he had been trying to get across was the unfairness of a double standard. We are willing to concede to the physician and scientist the status of specialist without anger because we need their skills. But in music, we resist conceding the necessity of specialization.
In a 1991 lecture titled “A Life of Learning,” Babbitt lamented that as a child in Jackson, he was given a perfectly respectable and rudimentary introduction to musical literacy. He asserted that in 1974 in New York City, there were 2,200 music teachers for 920,000 pupils. By 1984 there were only 793 teachers for the same number of pupils. It was Babbitt’s hope to raise the standard of musical literacy as a teacher and to find himself living, at age 90 perhaps, in a culture where the development of music as a contemporary phenomenon would be a widely shared public responsibility.
Throughout his career he has witnessed retreat rather than progress on that front. That makes his music, writing, and legacy as a teacher all the more important. They survive as beacons of confidence in music as a part of contemporary democratic life that places freedom alongside learning in an incorruptible and intellectually virtuosic manner.
Leon Botstein is president of Bard College, where he is also a professor in the arts and humanities, and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 32, Page B8
