Milton Babbitt assessed

Why you should listen to - and care about - his music, by Philip Clark

Milton Babbitt: worth caring about (photo: Tully Potter Collection)

When Milton Babbitt died in January of this year, I speculated in my Gramophone obituary that if only Babbitt-the-man had kept mum about his theories, Babbitt-the-composer might have had an easier time of it.

Whether Babbitt wanted an easy time, or even whether his music deserves wider recognition, are imponderables that are guaranteed to run and run. But I never expected to hear my friend Tom, admittedly a man who talks as much about Ray Davies and Bob Dylan as about his academic interest in atonal music, fess up shortly after Babbitt’s death 'Phil, you know, I just don’t like listening to atonal music these days.' I’ve spent many hours talking to Tom about Babbitt over many years. But have we been deluding ourselves? Is Babbitt’s music more a talking, and reading, point than a canon of work worth listening to?

Doubts dogged Babbitt throughout his long career, not helped by an article he wrote for High Fidelity magazine in 1958, which he called 'The Composer As Specialist', but the magazine provocatively ran as 'Who Cares If You Listen?' The very name ‘Babbitt’ came to encapsulate everything that was allegedly wrong with contemporary music – a scene dominated by fusty academic composer types who held audiences in distain, who relished being photographed against a backdrop of tone rows chalked onto blackboards, who wrote pieces so damn impractical that only five people could play them which, actually, was fine because only three people wanted to hear them. As Elliott Carter morphed into the Queen Mother of Atonality, Babbitt became a dumping ground for frustration and despair at the state of modern composition – scapegoat or villain, depending on your point of view.

Most criticism of Babbitt was/is predicated on the notion that he misread music history – that his particular view of atonal music severed any link to the ‘grand tradition’ which, for all his faults, Schoenberg managed to retain; Babbitt’s music was self-contained and had abdicated its responsibility to communicate. Anybody whose working assumption is indeed that Babbitt was a geeky boffin lacking depth in the history department, could do worse than read Words about Music, his book culled from a 1983 lecture series hosted by the University of Wisconsin, which gives the most penetrating insight I’ve read into the functionality of atonal music; and, guess what, context is everything, just like in tonal music.

Schoenberg, naturally, is Babbitt’s point of departure, but he is not uncritical. He picks holes in the inconsistencies of Schoenberg’s early atonal technique, asserting that Die Jakobsleiter remained unfinished because he (Schoenberg) failed to recognise his system could generate aggregate note choices; so he ran out of juice. But this critical edge lets his advocacy of a later masterwork like the String Quartet No 4, in Babbitt-speak a central text, resonate all the more eloquently. With a canny turn-of-phrase, he demolishes the misnomer that writing serial music was your fail-safe passport to success and relevance: 'Schoenberg wasn’t saying that if you do this (i.e write atonal music), you will therefore create great or coherent or marvellous music. But he was saying that if you don’t do this, your music will be worthless.'

And throughout Words about Music, Babbitt shows no mercy towards those who would muddle the technical nuts-and-bolts of 12 tone theory with music itself. He mocks the common misunderstanding that a 12 tone row is a 'kind of theme' that to produce music 'you do funny things to…(without) skill, continuity, structure, imitation'. Lampooning the idea of, as he puts it, 'one note, one vote' – 12-tone music as somehow managing to defy harmonic gravity, making each note ‘equal’ – he asks 'how can any 12 notes be all equal? One’s going to be longer, one’s going to be higher, one’s going to be first, one’s going to be last.'

Moreover, as he meticulously illuminates the ins-and-outs (and the retrogrades and inversions) of atonal theory, he invokes base tonal alchemy obsessively, like an experimental scientist who must always have his/her control. Discussing modulation, Babbitt explains that the Eroica Symphony is in E flat, and its second theme is in B flat – but 'is the B flat of that second theme the same B flat of the first theme of the Fourth Symphony of Beethoven?' 'Obviously not' comes his quick reply.