Milton Babbitt Total Serialism

• Milton Babbitt Total Serialism

Search Pytheas use Pytheas SiteSearch Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) Revered for his pioneering work in serial organization and in musical electronics, Milton Babbitt is a major American composer, theorist, and teacher. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Jackson, MS, he began his study of the violin at age 4. He later learned to play clarinet and saxophone, exhibiting an early interest in jazz and popular song.

Despite his gift for music, he attended the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a career in mathematics. He then decided to attend New York University to study music.

Babbitt was attracted to the epochal discoveries of Schoenberg, at a time when 12-tone and serial techniques were still relatively new. In 1935 he began studies with Roger Sessions, at first privately, and then later at Princeton University. During World War II Babbitt worked as a mathematical researcher and taught mathematics at Princeton. At this time he developed the complex ramifications of Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositional method into what came to be known as total serialism.

In a nutshell, what this meant was that he expanded Schoenberg's twelve-tone system (wherein compositional structure is determined by manipulation of a constant sequence of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale) to other aspects of music - rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc. Babbitt's important early works in his rigorously organized serial style include the first two string quartets (1948, 1954), the jazz-influenced All Set (1957) and Partitions (1957). Babbitt is also responsible for developing and classifying such important serialist concepts as combinatoriality, partitioning, arrays, pitch class, pitch set, and the time-point system. In extending the challenging language of Schoenberg, Babbitt's 'new complexity' continually met with incomprehension from audiences and musicians alike. This led Babbitt to seek means of composing and performing outside of traditional settings and formats. He found what he was looking for in the emerging analog technology of the RCA Mark II synthesizer and the Columbia-Princeton recording studio, which he co-founded with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky in 1959. One year later, Babbitt completed his first entirely synthesized work, Vision and Prayer.

Milton Babbitt Total Serialism

Philomel (1964) shows his use of the human voice as an essential part of his conception; it was one of the earliest pieces to combine tape playback with live performance. Later works likes Post-Partitions (1966) and Relata II (1968), show Babbitt's increasingly dense modes of musical significance, achieved through close connections between pitch and rhythmic organization, and through the use of every possible musical parameter in delineating structure. String Quartet No. 3 (1970) includes metronomic stability, changes of velocity engineered by changes in metrical density, sectional form, and the use of many other musical parameters - including the distinction between arco and pizzicato string playing - to integrate the polyphony. Babbitt has received a lifetime Pulitzer Prize in composition for his contributions to twelve-tone and electronic music.

All Music Guide COMPOSITIONS Generatrix, orchestra (1935, unfinished) String Trio (1939-41) Composition for String Orchestra (1940, unfinished) Symphony, orchestra (1941, unfinished) Music for the Mass I, chorus (1941) Music for the Mass II, chorus (1942) Three Theatrical Songs, voice and piano (1946) Three Compositions for Piano (1947) Composition for Four Instruments (1948) String Quartet No. 1 (1948, withdrawn) Composition for Twelve Instruments (1948/1954) Into the Good Ground, film score (1949, withdrawn) Composition for Viola and Piano (1950) The Widow’s Lament in Springtime, soprano and piano (1951) Du, soprano and piano (1951) Woodwind Quartet (1953) String Quartet No.

The ending of Schoenberg's ' Op. 15/1 presents what would be an in tonal music, without the harmonic-contrapuntal constraints of tonal music (, 1). Atonality in its broadest sense is that lacks a,. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, is not used, and the notes of the function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of hierarchies that characterized European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

'The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments' (, 1). More narrowly still, the term is sometimes used to describe music that is neither tonal nor, especially the pre- music of the, principally, and. However, 'as a categorical label, 'atonal' generally means only that the piece is in the Western tradition and is not 'tonal ' (, 1), although there are longer periods, e.g., medieval, renaissance, and modern modal musics to which this definition does not apply. 'Serialism arose partly as a means of organizing more coherently the relations used in the preserial 'free atonal' music. Thus many useful and crucial insights about even strictly serial music depend only on such basic atonal theory' (, 2).

Late 19th- and early 20th-century composers such as, and have written music that has been described, in full or in part, as atonal (;;;;;;;;;;; ). Contents.

History While music without a tonal center had been written previously, for example 's of 1885, it is with the twentieth century that the term atonality began to be applied to pieces, particularly those written by Arnold Schoenberg and The Second Viennese School. The term 'atonality' was coined in 1907 by in a scholarly study of tonality, which was later expanded into his doctoral thesis. Their music arose from what was described as the 'crisis of tonality' between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in.

This situation had come about historically through the increasing use over the course of the nineteenth century of ambiguous, less probable inflections, and the more unusual melodic and rhythmic inflections possible within the styles of tonal music. The distinction between the exceptional and the normal became more and more blurred; and, as a result, there was a concomitant loosening of the syntactical bonds through which tones and harmonies had been related to one another. The connections between harmonies were uncertain even on the lowest—chord-to-chord—level. On higher levels, long-range harmonic relationships and implications became so tenuous that they hardly functioned at all.

At best, the felt probabilities of the style system had become obscure; at worst, they were approaching a uniformity which provided few guides for either composition or listening. (, 241) The first phase, known as 'free atonality' or 'free chromaticism', involved a conscious attempt to avoid traditional diatonic harmony. Works of this period include the opera (1917–1922) by Alban Berg and (1912) by Schoenberg.

The second phase, begun after, was exemplified by attempts to create a systematic means of composing without tonality, most famously the method of composing with 12 tones or the twelve-tone technique. This period included Berg's and, Schoenberg's, his oratorio and numerous smaller pieces, as well as his last two string quartets. Schoenberg was the major innovator of the system, but his student, Anton Webern, is anecdotally claimed to have begun linking dynamics and tone color to the primary row, making rows not only of pitches but of other aspects of music as well (, 272). However, actual analysis of Webern's twelve-tone works has so far failed to demonstrate the truth of this assertion. One analyst concluded, following a minute examination of the Piano Variations, op. 27, that while the texture of this music may superficially resemble that of some serial music.

Its structure does not. None of the patterns within separate nonpitch characteristics makes audible (or even numerical) sense in itself. The point is that these characteristics are still playing their traditional role of differentiation. (, 109) Twelve-tone technique, combined with the (separate organization of four: pitch, attack character, intensity, and duration) of, would be taken as the inspiration for serialism (, 272).

Atonality emerged as a pejorative term to condemn music in which chords were organized seemingly with no apparent coherence. In, atonal music was attacked as ' and labeled as ( Entartete Musik) along with other music produced by enemies of the Nazi regime. Many composers had their works banned by the regime, not to be played until after its collapse at the end of. After Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky used the twelve-tone technique (, 271). Generated pitch sets from mathematical formulae, and also saw the expansion of tonal possibilities as part of a synthesis between the hierarchical principle and the theory of numbers, principles which have dominated music since at least the time of (, 204). Free atonality The twelve-tone technique was preceded by Schoenberg's freely atonal pieces of 1908–1923, which, though free, often have as an 'integrative element.a minute intervallic ' that in addition to expansion may be transformed as with a tone row, and in which individual notes may 'function as pivotal elements, to permit overlapping statements of a basic cell or the linking of two or more basic cells' (, 2). The twelve-tone technique was also preceded by nondodecaphonic serial composition used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, and others (, 37).

'Essentially, Schoenberg and Hauer systematized and defined for their own dodecaphonic purposes a pervasive technical feature of 'modern' musical practice, the ' (, 37) Composing atonal music Setting out to compose atonal music may seem complicated because of both the vagueness and generality of the term. Additionally explains that, 'the 'free' atonality that preceded dodecaphony precludes by definition the possibility of self-consistent, generally applicable compositional procedures' (, 9).

However, he provides one example as a way to compose atonal pieces, a pre-twelve-tone technique piece by Anton Webern, which rigorously avoids anything that suggests tonality, to choose pitches that do not imply tonality. In other words, reverse the rules of the so that what was not allowed is required and what was required is not allowed.

This is what was done by in his explanation of, which is a way to write atonal counterpoint.