Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt is known in the contemporary music community as the one who “started” the 12-tone music phase. I’m not one to argue because I am not an authority on 12-tone music/serialism or Babbitt. His career has spanned 71 years and wrote in many genres including jazz, theater, electronic, and serialism. I always find it fascinating because many composers in the Romantic Era would have never done that. So was the reason he wrote many different styles because he was talented and liked many different styles? Was it to keep up with the times? Or was he just following the money? Just some of the many questions I had when researching him.
His first piece was written in 1935 at 19 years old. Some of his works from 1935–1947 were left unfinished so It was difficult to find some examples of what I was reading about. But there are however many articles about his work. One, in particular, stood out to me.
Written by Joeseph Dubiel in a journal called Music Theory Spectrum.
It’s mostly an opinion piece, and he has a few specific things to say about Babbitt’s music and a few notes he used to create them. But what I liked about it was this:
A few thoughts that I had: what does empiricism mean? And how does this relate to Babbitt’s music? It means, “The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science.” Thank you, Wiki! Sense experience?? How can we relate that to music? We are obviously using our hearing as a sense, but is there another sense that Babbitt is trying to get us to use? Perhaps it’s taste or smell? Did you know that memory can be triggered by smells? Maybe in a backward way, listening can make us “smell” the memory too? Now, is this really something he thought of…maybe it was just Joseph and his fan club banner swinging about. But when I listened to a few pieces, thinking of the the12-tone style, it did provide a few memories. I’ll show you what I mean.
Milton wrote Three Compositions for Piano №1 in 1947, and it definitely felt like 12-tone was used, if not serialism at the very least. It’s confusing and fast, but if you listen to what I would consider the baseline, he has maybe three notes that he plunks out below middle C before his left-hand joins the chaos. It reminded me of the time I experienced the Subway in Italy for the first time…there were slow walkers, there were fast-paced people and there were pick-pocketers. All of which I could make out individually in the music. This triggered what I remember of the smell…not good! And because of that, at first, I really hated the piece. But as I write this it’s more apparent that perhaps he did mean to evoke some empiricism or “sense-experience.” And if that is the case…what a BRILLIANT man! Take a listen to this piece, it’s about 1:30, and let me know if you can understand what I’m talking about!
