Playing with Babbitt in the 1980s: Guest Appearances at the New York Philharmonic and Bang on a Can

Abstract

This essay examines the presence of Milton Babbitt at two important moments in new music in the late twentieth century: the New York Philharmonic’s 1984 Horizons festival, and the inaugural Bang on a Can marathon in 1987. In an era in which aesthetic movements like minimalism and neo-Romanticism increasingly represented the artistic vanguard, Babbitt was invited to these events to serve as a stand-in for academic modernism and the immediate musical past. But Babbitt had agency in these encounters: he purposefully took on the role of contrarian while also subtly subverting the expectations of those institutions who sought to render him a symbol of a bygone era. Playing into, but also prodding against, the clichés around his image, Babbitt clearly knew how to perform the identity that had become closely associated with his name.