Babbitt's Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside, Part 1: Freedoms (original) (raw)

Babbitt's Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside, Part 2: Diversities

SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 2019

Babbitt’s pre-compositional structures (partial orderings) serve as a series of game-like rules affecting the composition of surface details we hear. Especially in Babbitt’s late works (post-1980) these partial ordering rules vary drastically in terms of how much freedom they allow. This variance can be modeled mathematically (a computational formula is explained and visualized). This video (the second of a three-part video essay) reveals, in an excerpt from Babbitt’s 1987 sax and piano work Whirled Series, an intricate web of referential details (serial and tonal) that are improvised from the trillions of possibilities enabled by its background structure (partial ordering). The advantages of this peculiar improvisatory compositional situation in which Babbitt places himself are compared to visual art, chord-based bebop jazz improvisation, and to current ethics-infused philosophies of improvisation. http://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.5.2

Babbitt’s Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside; Part 3: Opportunities

SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 2019

Babbitt’s relatively early composition Semi-Simple Variations (1956) presents intriguing surface patterns that are not determined by its pre-compositional plan, but rather result from subsequent “improvised” decisions that are strategic. This video (the third of a three-part video essay) considers Babbitt’s own conversational pronouncements (in radio interviews) together with some particulars of his life-long musical activities, that together suggest uncanny affiliations to jazz improvisation. As a result of Babbitt’s creative reconceptualizing of planning and spontaneity in music, his pre-compositional structures (partial orderings) fit in an unexpected way into (or reformulate) the ecosystem relating music composition to the physical means of its performance. http://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.5.3

Babbitt's Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside

SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal, 2019

This video essay trilogy explores the surprising indeterminacy between pre- compositional structures and composed surfaces in Milton Babbitt’s music, and in doing so identifies significant affiliations with music (such as jazz) that is predominantly improvised. It thereby suggests a different way of understanding and appreciating the nature of Babbitt’s creativity. http://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.5.1

The Composer's Mind Through the Looking Glass Can Bilir

Dissertation, 2019

This dissertation argues that the structural methods of pitch analysis remain inadequate for the task of explaining what composers are actually doing in their minds. In this work, I address the following questions: where the structural unit appears, does ‘pitch,’ as an isolated term, still affect the contemporary composer’s mind; what is the nature of the composer’s mind; and where does pitch fit into the context of the assemblage of Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide and Chaya Czernowin’s second opera Zaide /Adama? What is pitch and what does it have to do with contemporary music compositions? What is the true nature of the musical idea and what is the source of this idea? Furthermore, how can a person understand the subjective experience of this musical idea in a composer’s mind? Composition is not the mere imitation of previously experienced contexts. Performativity as practicality and abstract thinking in the forms of the objects and rules of the mind as distinct from the subjective experience and syntax recognition provide complex incompatible mediums for composers. Syntactic structuralism is identical neither to the sensations nor to the ideas of the contemporary composer. As a composer, I believe that the reduction of the complexity of composition erodes the nature of the composer’s creative ideas. In this text, I argue for the impossibility of generative processes to reduce sounds that we create into immediate simpler entities and the inability of larger entities to be made explicitly recognizable or reproducible. Chaya Czernowin’s music in general, in my opinion, represents an excellent example of this non-reducibility.

Part II (Stereoscope): Improvisation/Composition in the Nature of the Beast

After overviewing that political-psychological location, but before "peopling" it with FMP in the chapters to come, we survey yet another site on the discursive map: the literature (mostly musicological, some anthropological and other) on improvisation. Like the German discourse on German free jazz, albeit larger, this body of literature is new and small enough to consider almost comprehensively, and to seek from it a role for this study as informed as possible by the whole of the discourse. "Improvisation," as both a practical and theoretical issue, has the potential to kindle and anchor a full-blown interdisciplinary discourse. As mentioned in Chapter Four, it has begun to engage English-language scholars (as has, again, the concept of "performance" that moved from theater to cultural studies) beyond its identity as an aspect of an art form; it has begun to do so concurrently, naturally enough, with the increase of English-language literature on post-free-improvisational issues in music (also mentioned, in Chapter Three, and identified as an international, rather than American, discourse—the most interesting parts of which, from Australia, we will glimpse here). Improvisation has gone far toward demonstrating the human capacity to constructively engage cultural situations of turmoil and change, and to make the best of—even redirect and overcome—oppressive and repressive conditions. Its role in the jazz tradition has been both challenging and restorative: it has helped both African- and European American cultures negotiate an American balance between their two situations (Peretti 1992); and it has bridged the gap between the literacy of Western European and the orality of West African cultures (Schuller 1968; Murray 1973, 1976; Sidran 1981; Berliner 1994). A glance at the more recent studies of improvisation that themselves have summary overviews and updates of the literature on it will best serve here future research and discussion. I present the pith of those and briefly relate their relevance to my approach to FMP (they were selected for that relevance, after my fieldwork); I glance at other works and lines of interest in passing; I end the survey on a work (Hall 1992) that speaks most to my own relationship with my subject, to pick up on my opening pages' glances at childhood and musical time. We end the Introduction as a whole with a short muse on current ethnographic methodological thinking and practice, within which I situate my own; and with a synopsis of Part II's chapters for their breakdown and organization of information about FMP and its artists.