Making Connections: Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music

Abstract

- 378 Making Connections Some Thoughts about Milton Babbitt and His Music Andrew Mead The last time I saw Milton was at the premiere of Concerti for Orchestra at Boston Symphony Hall in 2004. I had picked up Bob Morris in Rochester, and we had driven into Boston for the concert. The performance had been riveting; one of America’s finest orchestras under James Levine had given the work loving attention, and the players’ affection for the composer during his curtain call was undisguised. When Bob and I caught up with Babbitt at the end of the concert, he was surrounded by admirers and seemed happy and slightly dazed by the event. I remember he was startled to see us, and said something like, “Oh, the big guys are here.” The first time I saw Milton was nearly 30 years earlier, when he was a guest composer at SUNY Stony Brook. He gave a lecture, and that evening there was a performance of Reflections. I had been casting about for graduate schools, and that was the deciding moment for me. His lecture was, no surprise, a tour-de-force, but what hooked me deep was the music. While on a single hearing I couldn’t have begun to tell you what got to me, but I felt a connection with the work that made me want to hear more from the man who had made it. It is hard for me, given my age and background, to think of Babbitt as anything but at the center of things musical. When I first went to study with him, Perspectives of New Music had just published its famous double issue, 14/15, in celebration of his 60th birthday, which was packed with articles about his music and his ideas. In my undergraduate days he had been a figure who was both raised in admiration and waved as a warning flag depending on whom you talked to, and for someone who was interested in Schoenberg, as I had been since the ninth grade, he was the writer who would probably be able to tell you the most about twelve-tone music, if you could only decode his syntax. Around New York City in those years Babbitt was a regular fixture at concerts, and seemed to know everyone. Along with “My dear boy,” his most frequently heard phrase was “One of my oldest and dearest friends.” And he knew a vast amount of music. He seemed as comfortable talking about the Reger clarinet sonatas or Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony as he was about Brahms’s music, and he could speak with knowledge about Krenek’s opera Karl V almost as readily as he could about Moses und Aron. And the stories were endless: Joel Krosnick some years ago told of studying the score of Dual on the subway, preparing for its premiere, when a hand appeared over his shoulder pointing to a passage and a readily recognizable voice said, “I think that’s a misprint.” A story going around Stony Brook about the same time Babbitt visited involved a graduate student, a singer who loved contemporary opera and who had been to an open rehearsal of the first production of the complete three-act Lulu at the Met. The student had not recognized the two older gentlemen sitting behind her, but had been annoyed by their complaints throughout – “that doesn’t sound right; you can’t - 379 Making Connections hear the vibraphone” and so forth. As the story went, the singer was incensed, saying, “If they don’t like modern music they shouldn’t have been there.” The punch line was that the two proved to be Babbitt and Elliott Carter. But for all this sense of centrality, and for all the acclaim he received in later years, it is important to remember in what extraordinary ways Babbitt was an outlier, and how his outlier status helped inform his development as a composer and a thinker about music. I was reminded of this a little over a decade ago when I participated in a conference in Belgium on the origins of serialism. As we tend to tell the history on this side of the...