Pulling a Fast More-Than-One: Milton Babbitt’s Time-point Practice

Abstract

Milton Babbitt’s employment of the rhythmic techniques known as the time-point system appears well-designed to obscure the premise on which the system is built, namely the maintenance of a steady pulse in modular organisation. In a variety of ways, Babbitt’s music brings any such pulse into contact, even conflict, with other pulses; and the timepoints of the system come more consistently to delineate spans filled with other activity than themselves to specify the times of events. Curiously, Babbitt’s theoretical presentation of the system comes in an article about the resources of the electronic medium, resources that appear to include the ease with which the machine can contribute to this obscuring of it. All this suggests some new thoughts about the relation of construction and result in Babbitt: that the alignment of the two may be even less close in rhythm than in pitch; that the usual definition of time-point technique may emphasise aspects of it that are not most important in Babbitt’s use of it, including its putative analogy to the pitch-class system; that Babbitt’s working method may in these respects have involved resisting the system to a degree not previously accounted for; and that the implications of this practice for listening are thus far very little articulated.