Thinking In and About Music
Analytical Reflections on Milton Babbitt’s Music and Thought
ZACHARY BERNSTEIN
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernstein, Zachary, 1987– author.
Title: Thinking in and about music : analytical reflections on Milton Babbitt’s music and thought / by Zachary Bernstein. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042599 (print) | LCCN 2020042600 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190949235 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190949259 (epub) | ISBN 9780190949242 | ISBN 9780190949266
Subjects: LCSH: Babbitt, Milton, 1916–2011—Criticism and interpretation. | Music—20th century—History and criticism. | Schenker, Heinrich, 1868–1935—Influence. Classification: LCC ML410.B066 B47 2021 (print) | LCC ML410.B066 (ebook) | DDC 780.92 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042599
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042600
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949235.001.0001
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to Jeffrey Bernstein and Andrew Sessler, in love and gratitude
Preface
After all, the way you think about music is the way you hear music. You can’t possibly separate knowing how and knowing that or thinking about and thinking that and thinking in.
Milton Babbitt, interview with Charles Amirkhanian
Milton Babbitt was, at once, one of the twentieth century’s foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life, “thinking in” and “thinking about” music, nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. But the relationship between Babbitt’s writings and his music is neither simple nor direct. It is the purpose of this volume to look into Babbitt’s theoretical and compositional work side by side—to evaluate ways in which the ideas developed in his writings illuminate his music and ways in which his music goes beyond those ideas.
I first arrived in New York City as an impressionable teenager—in fact, at almost exactly the same age Babbitt had come to New York some seventy years earlier. It was 2005. Babbitt’s ninetieth birthday was that coming spring, and throughout the year there were many concerts celebrating his work. It was by attending quite a number of these that I first encountered Babbitt’s music, and I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate that my introduction to Babbitt’s music was through direct experience of live performances, unencumbered by ideology, by misplaced suppositions about his elitism, or by any sense of what I was supposed to be listening for. Although I have since acquired an interest in Babbitt’s intellectual background and find his writing a continually enriching source of speculation and puzzlement, it is my original fascination with the experience of his music that has sustained this project.
I eventually came to recognize that Babbitt’s writings suggested a compelling story about his music, but that his music itself was richer, less tidily formalistic, and simply more interesting than his writings suggest. His writings establish the principles behind his serial arrays, but as Joseph Dubiel has
long argued, an array is not a composition; analysts must not conflate the two. There is more in Babbitt’s music than a succession of series forms and aggregates. I found the relationship between Babbitt’s systems and his music, to put it as Babbitt might have, to be problematical it posed interesting questions I wanted to explore. It was through this realization that I came to feel that the simultaneous consideration of Babbitt’s writings and his music was a worthwhile standpoint for an analyst to adopt.
The book opens with two chapters primarily concerned with Babbitt’s prose and the compositional procedures that reflect principles he theorizes. Chapter 1 excavates the influence of Heinrich Schenker on Babbitt. I discuss how Babbitt’s compositional arrays build upon his interest in Schenkerian hierarchy. Schenkerian organicism, in turn, provides expectations— hierarchical development, the surface of the music reflecting its presumed source, and so forth—that prove fruitful analytically when approaching his music: one can interpret his music on the basis of expectations met or subverted. Chapter 2 focuses on Babbitt’s philosophical and cognitive interests, which lead via other routes to a similar set of principles. In both chapters, although historical and intellectual context is given as necessary, Babbitt’s writings are examined with the greedy eye of an analyst—a reader concerned above all with enriching and clarifying his own encounters with Babbitt’s music.1 Within these chapters, I review the most important elements of Babbitt’s compositional procedures: trichordal arrays, all-partition arrays, the time-point system, and cross-references. I do not provide a full-scale exposition of his compositional techniques—there already exists an excellent book, Andrew Mead’s An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt, that does just that. But enough information is provided in these chapters that a reader unacquainted with prior scholarship on Babbitt will be introduced to the main features of his approach. (The book’s glossary should also aid the uninitiated.) Moreover, the overview of his compositional procedures is illuminated by the newly available Milton Babbitt Collection at the Library of Congress, a stunning resource likely to keep Babbitt scholars busy for years.
Chapter 3 expands on prior discussions of Babbitt’s compositional procedures with a close examination of a pivotal period in his compositional
1 Accordingly, I do not address Babbitt’s views on academia or society, much as these are important aspects of his thought. Readers interested in these subjects will find valuable treatments in Brody 1993, Harker 2008, and Girard 2007 and 2010.
development, the years around 1960. The various transformations of Babbitt’s technique in those years are revealing about certain lifelong concerns of his, particularly regarding perception.
The remaining chapters shift the focus to Babbitt’s music itself, although I continually return to his writings and compositional procedures when they prove relevant or enlightening. In general, Chapters 4 to 7 gradually transition from an analytical stance focused on serialism to one that views serial analysis from a greater distance. While Babbitt’s writings and compositional techniques offer insight to analysts, there is uncertainty about the implementation of those insights and, more importantly, much going on in his music that is not directly attributable to serialism and in some cases is even in conflict with serial principles. Four topics almost wholly unaccounted for in Babbitt’s writings guide these chapters: rhetoric, gesture, temporality, and text setting, each of which is shown to supplement and in some cases supplant serial considerations. Chapter 4 examines Composition for Four Instruments (1948), a prominent early work, noting both the challenges in identifying its series and the value in doing so. In particular, it is shown that identifying the work’s series helps isolate aspects of the work that are not explainable by reference to the series; these aspects are shown to have rhetorical significance. Chapter 5 discusses text-music relations in five of Babbitt’s early texted pieces, highlighting the techniques he developed for the projection of poetic form and meaning. In several of these works, his typical serial procedures are altered or even abandoned for the sake of text setting. Chapter 6 focuses on the issue of syntactical completeness and its link to temporality. While Babbitt’s techniques create expectations for when his arrays, and thus his compositions, will be completed, his compositions often deviate from these expectations. This inspires a reflection on just what the temporal experience of Babbitt’s music is like. Local rhetorical devices are shown to be more responsible for the perception of closure than serial hierarchy. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on the gestural characteristics of Babbitt’s music. Babbitt’s music is shown to inspire embodied sensation, more in spite of than because of serial hierarchy. At times, he breaks from serial expectations in order to heighten his music’s gestural impact.
The analytical results of Chapters 4–7 challenge the theoretical vision outlined in Chapters 1–2. How should Babbitt’s writing be taken as a guide to his music given the many ways in which his music goes beyond his theories? A brief Afterword meditates on the problematic picture that remains.
Acknowledgments
Research can feel like a solitary exercise, but no author writes alone. This book is the result of a lifetime of good fortune and the contributions of more people than I can count.
Several hundred students at the Eastman School of Music provided unwitting feedback on the book’s arguments in the form of class discussion. (There is no more helpful audience than a skeptical classroom!) The students in my 2016 PhD seminar—Alyssa Barna, David Hier, Catrina Kim, Samuel Reenan, and Tobias Tschiedl—proved especially insightful. Eastman has also repeatedly provided crucial material support. Professional Development Committee Grants enabled me to air out the book’s ideas at numerous conferences and supported indexing expenses, and a Spring 2019 Academic Leave saw the book to its conclusion.
The ideas presented here first began to take shape during my time at the CUNY Graduate Center, and I remain indebted to the mentorship I received there. Joseph Straus’s encouragement has buoyed my work since its earliest stages, and I can hardly imagine how my career would have unfolded without the opportunities he provided for me. William Rothstein continues to represent an ideal of clear writing and clear thought. And Jeff Nichols has provided a constant reminder that one should seek truth rather than simplicity. My time at CUNY was also enriched by a brilliant circle of classmates. Ellen Bakulina, Steven Beck, Daniel Colson, Edward Klorman, Drew Nobile, and Andrew Wilson deserve particular mention. Loretta Terrigno was a vital part of this circle, too, but more on her in a moment.
The contents of this book were informed by many conversations and exchanges over a very long period of time. I’d like to thank in particular Matthew BaileyShea, Joseph Dubiel, Edward Klorman, Scott Gleason, Harold and Sharon Krebs, Alison Maggart, Joshua Banks Mailman, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Stephen Peles, Claudio Spies, Philip Stoecker, and above all Daniel Colson, who was an invaluable companion in the early stages of my thinking on Babbitt. As I was writing, Matt, Scott, Ed, and Phil lent their careful eyes to several draft chapters. You can blame any remaining errors on them.
Betty Ann Duggan has generously enabled me to access and reproduce her father’s sketch materials. Librarians, as ever, are the heroes behind the scenes; I’m particularly indebted to those at the Library of Congress, Sibley Music Library, New York Public Library, Juilliard, and the CUNY Graduate Center. A Subvention Award from the Society for Music Theory offset the cost of copyright permissions. Susan Monahan provided terrific help with indexing. And the keen-eyed staff at Oxford University Press and Newgen Knowledge Works, including Sean Decker, Norman Hirschy, Joseph Matson, Ayshwarya Ramakrishnan, and Suzanne Ryan could not have been more helpful, efficient, or pleasant to work with.
My family has given me unquestioning (if occasionally bemused) support as I pursued this most unlikely of career paths. My wife, Loretta, is a constant sounding board, reality check, and source of comfort. She’s more patient than I deserve. Andrew Sessler, my grandfather, showed me the value of relentless curiosity. My father, Jeffrey Bernstein, gave me his warmth and loving confidence. While neither lived to see this book completed, it would have been unthinkable without their guidance and example. I dedicate it to them.
Permissions
The following permissions to reproduce text and score excerpts are gratefully acknowledged.
Portions of Chapter 1 and much of Chapter 6
First appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 38, no. 2. Used by permission.
Much of Chapter 3
Copyright 2018. Perspectives of New Music. Used by permission. First appeared in Perspectives of New Music, vol. 56, no. 1, 2018.
About Time
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1982 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“As Long as It Isn’t Love,” from Three Theatrical Songs
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1981 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Canonical Form
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1983 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Composition for Four Instruments
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1949 by Merion Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. A wholly owned subsidiary of Theodore Presser Company. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1960 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc (BMI)
All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reprinted by permission.
Du By Milton Babbitt
I am grateful to the European American Music Distributors Company for granting permissions for the reproduction of excerpts.
Emblems (Ars Emblematica)
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1989 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Glosses
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1988 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Homily
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright Sonic Arts Editions. Used by permission of Smith Publications, 54 Lent Road, Sharon, Vermont USA.
None but the Lonely Flute
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1991 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“Now Evening after Evening”
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 2002 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Philomel
Words by John Hollander
Music by Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1964 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc (BMI)
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Post-Partitions
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1966 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Septet but Equal
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1992 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
A Solo Requiem
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1977 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
String Quartet No. 6
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1993 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Tutte le Corde
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1994 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Two Sonnets
By Milton Babbitt
Copyright © 1955 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
xviii Permissions
Vision and Prayer
By Milton Babbitt
Text by Dylan Thomas
Copyright © 1961 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc (BMI)
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Vision and Prayer”
By Dylan Thomas
First published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 53, no. 3, Summer 1945.
Reprinted with permission.
“A Waltzer in the House”
Copyright © 2003 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
By Milton Babbitt
I am grateful to European American Music Distributors Company for granting permissions for the reproduction of excerpts.
“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
By William Carlos Williams (The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–39)
Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corps
Reprinted here by kind permission of New Directions Publishing Corps and Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK
1 On Milton Babbitt, Schenkerian
Introduction
The late writings of Milton Babbitt sing with nostalgia. Gifted with long life and a steel-trap memory, thrilled to have come of age in the vertiginous turbulence of the 1930s, proud of his acquaintance with a long list of musical giants, and well aware that the story of his development was central to the story of the development of American music and musical thought, Babbitt wrote and spoke again and again in his later years about his own musical and intellectual formation. In these reminiscences, the galvanizing event that made the man was not the hearing of any particular composition, the reading of any particular book, or the meeting of any particular inspiring personage—although music, books, and people certainly do figure in these stories—but his arrival in New York City in 1934. Drawn to New York by the discovery of a volume—Marion Bauer’s Twentieth Century Music (1933) that offered tantalizing glimpses of recent European music still so little heard in the United States, and that suggested to the young musician, flush with “curiosity and appetite for contemporary music” (Babbitt [1991b] 2003, 439), that New York was the place to encounter this music, Babbitt discovered not only music, but an intellectual environment he scarcely could have predicted.1
The rise of Nazi Germany had already loosed a trickle of what would soon become a flood of refugees from Europe’s cultural and intellectual classes. New York City would be the arrival point, and often permanent home, of a vast number of European musicians and scholars of every stripe. Arnold Schoenberg, among the first of these musical exiles, arrived in New York just three months before Babbitt (Babbitt [1991b] 2003, 439). Although arriving at different times and via different routes, the remnants of old intellectual
1 Babbitt recounted the story of his early years in New York dozens of times in his last several decades. The fullest treatments are Babbitt (1991b) 2003 and (1999) 2003; see also Hilferty 2011. On music theory in the New York City of Babbitt’s youth, see Girard 2007, 111–84.
Thinking In and About Music. Zachary Bernstein, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949235.003.0001
circles were quick to find each other, and by the late 1930s had reconstituted to a substantial degree (see Peles 2012, esp. 22). With broad talents and broader interests, Babbitt moved easily among these groups, coming into contact at an early age—his late teens and early twenties—with first-rank intellectuals from an exceptional variety of disciplines and subdisciplines. As Stanley Cavell recollects, the young Babbitt “seemed to know every musician in the world and every writer and painter in New York” (2010, 297; see also Beardslee with Proctor 2017, 96). While he may have been on the “fringes” of the circles formed by acolytes of Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker, as Aaron Robert Girard (2007, 170) has it, he moved among the fringes of many groups. The heterogeneous thought with which he surrounded himself in those early, formative years would mark him for life. Although his reflections on that time express full awareness of the tragedies of the 1930s and ’40s— the tragedies that brought European intellectuals to New York and that kept so many of them in poverty and humiliating anonymity—they crackle with delight for his having been a witness to the “jagged edges of abruption”2 of a transforming world.
In Babbitt’s telling, his primary influences from those years—or at least those whose influence would have the longest effects—were Viennese, by choice if not by birth. In a geometric twist on the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists, Babbitt came to refer to these influences as his “Vienna Triangle.” It was a shape whose vertices included the twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg, the tonal theorist Heinrich Schenker, and the logicalempiricist philosopher Rudolf Carnap.3 It is, in many respects, a curious pantheon: Schoenberg, Schenker, and Carnap were all born in the late nineteenth century and, at some point in their lives, all lived in Vienna; but they shared very little else.4 Nonetheless, the influence of all three of these figures seeps out of nearly every page of Babbitt’s writings and compositions. Rather than adopting any of their philosophies in full, Babbitt’s thought can
2 This lovely phrase appears in Babbitt (1960) 2003, 55.
3 Babbitt (1999) 2003, (1991b) 2003, and 1987, 17. The membership of the triangle changes somewhat in different tellings: two of the vertices are always Schenker and Schoenberg; the third is sometimes the Vienna Circle as a whole and sometimes just Carnap, Babbitt’s favorite philosopher from that school.
4 Babbitt was fond of noting the proximity of Schoenberg, Schenker, and Carnap (e.g., Babbitt [1976a] 2003, 339; [1999] 2003, 480), typically to lament that they seem not to have learned from one another, but it should be noted that their time in Vienna scarcely overlapped. Schoenberg accepted a position in Berlin in 1926, the same year Carnap moved to Vienna. The philosophers who constituted the Vienna Circle began meeting in 1924, but the publications and conferences that defined the group in public consciousness only began in 1928, after Schoenberg had left Vienna for good and only seven years from the end of Schenker’s life.
be characterized as an idiosyncratic selection of various aspects of each of these thinkers’ work, chosen and refined in service of Babbitt’s own ends.
The name of Schenker is ubiquitous in Babbitt’s writings. Nonetheless, in many ways the influences of Schoenberg and the tradition of logical empiricism of which Carnap is a part are more obviously pertinent to Babbitt’s work than the influence of Schenker, and the scholarly literature reflects this. Babbitt is typically introduced as one who “extended” Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique (Morris [2000] 2010, 5), perhaps even as a “disciple” of Schoenberg himself (Harker 2008, 347).5 While explicit discussions of the philosophical sources of Babbitt’s thought have been somewhat less frequent, at least until recently,6 Babbitt’s Carnapian concern for a “scientific” (Babbitt [1961a] 2003, 78) understanding of meaning and discourse has been much remarked on (e.g., Guck 1994 and Parkhurst 2013). These are, undoubtedly, profoundly important aspects of Babbitt’s thought. While Babbitt’s Schoenbergian inheritance will not be lingered on in this volume—it has already been addressed thoroughly by Andrew Mead (1994, esp. 5–25)—the influence of Carnap will be taken up at length in Chapter 2.
But if Schenker is, at first sight, harder to account for in Babbitt’s Vienna Triangle than Schoenberg or Carnap, he is no less central. Babbitt (1991a, 129) himself admits as much: “No influence has caused a greater transformation of our thinking about music than Schenker’s, be it in reaction to or in reaction with.” Schenker’s influence can be seen in Babbitt’s views on a whole range of issues, including his understanding of the tonal and twelve-tone systems, his analyses of the work of a number of distinct composers, his view of music perception, and even his use of metaphor in analytical prose. Most importantly, Babbitt’s compositional technique is based to a significant extent on his reading of Schenker. Given the depth of this influence, I believe that to understand Babbitt one must come to terms with the ways in which he is, indeed, a Schenkerian, although a rather peculiar one.
Furthermore, Babbitt’s absorption of Schenker’s hierarchical organicism defines an ideological and aesthetic frame within which his other influences may be understood. His philosophical influences, for instance, may manifest most visibly in Babbitt’s concerns about music-theoretical discourse,7
5 Although he was certainly an intellectual “disciple” of Schoenberg, as Harker says, Babbitt was not one of Schoenberg’s students. They met only a few times (see Babbitt 1995, 63–65).
6 See Andreatta 2012, Brackett 2003, Derkert 2008, Gleason 2013, and Peles 2012.
7 Although Babbitt’s critique of music-theoretical methodology and language are often explicitly linked to his reading in philosophy (e.g., Babbitt [1961a] 2003; [1972] 2003), as noted in Cook 1995,
but also lead him to appropriate the logic of axiomatic deductive systems toward the understanding of Schenker and, thus, toward the creation of new, Schenker-inspired musical hierarchies. Although Babbitt draws the twelvetone system from Schoenberg, both his descriptions of it and his compositional handling of it are deeply indebted to Schenker—significant aspects of his compositional practice can be roughly characterized as the animation of Schoenbergian technology by Schenkerian ideology. Therefore, given the centrality of Schenker in Babbitt’s thought, an examination focused on that particular influence is revealing about other facets of his thought as well.
Babbitt was, in so many respects, an innovator. An unrepentant radical. His music is jarring, rhythmically uneven, off-balance, dissonant, chockablock with new techniques. An avatar of high modernism, Babbitt was convinced that composition exemplified a form of research—that novel compositions could extend human knowledge (see Babbitt [1962] 2003, 109; 1987, 182–83). What to make, then, of the inspiration he found in Schenkerian organicism— a conservative, even reactionary, aesthetic? Perhaps there is a tension, but it is a tension characteristic of modernism, even modernity. As Michael Levenson (2011, 2) has it, “Modernity remains haunted both by a search for novelty and by the recollection of precursors.” Or in Babbitt’s ([1979a] 2003, 371) words, “in music, at least, what . . . characterizes a revolutionary period is that it reexamines its past.” Like his musical heroes Schoenberg, Schenker, and Brahms (on the latter, see Shields 2012, 353–54)—or, for that matter, his literary idols James Joyce and William Faulkner (see Babbitt 1979b, 44; also Peles 1998, 498–99; Maggart 2017a, 152–60)—innovation for Babbitt was never a matter of destroying the past or even progressing beyond it.8 The achievements of composers and theorists past were to be reexamined and mined for their ability to contribute to his own personal aesthetic ends.
Musical analysis reveals that some of these ends are concordant with organicism and some are not. As the later chapters of this book explore various
91, there are strong resonances between Babbitt’s complaints and Schenker’s polemics against hermeneutic critics. Yet while Babbitt may have found some of his acid tongue in Schenker, one need not impute direct influence in this regard. Among other things, Babbitt also found much of Schenker’s methodology lacking, complaining, for instance, about Schenker’s invocation of the overtone system and the metaphysical significance he attributed to the number five (Babbitt [1961a] 2003, 80–81). More likely, both Babbitt and Schenker are responding to what Stephen Peles (2012, 22) describes as the “broader Austrian project of Sprachkritik”—the critique of language that preoccupied fin-desiécle Vienna, including many of Babbitt’s influences.
8 In Babbitt’s words, “I never think of my music . . . as representing progress” (quoted in Bortz 2005, 94).
facets of his compositions, complications with the organicist model will arise—pieces or situations that, in one way or another, contest the expectations engendered by hierarchical organicism. The picture that emerges will suggest a more limited and nuanced view of the role of organicism in Babbitt’s music.
Goethe, Schenker, and Hierarchical Organicism
The notion that a piece of art might be profitably described as having characteristics of a living organism has deep roots in Romantic and even preRomantic aesthetics. Depending on how one defines the term “organicism,” one can find it stretching back deep into the eighteenth century or even earlier.9 Although it reached full bloom in German Romanticism, it was not an exclusively German phenomenon: M. H. Abrams (1953, 156–225), in a classic history of literary organicism, focuses largely on England. But the touchstone organicist for many of the musicians who drew inspiration from the concept, including Babbitt’s primary musical influences, was Goethe.10 Goethe’s scientific writings, and particularly his writings on the development and typology of plants—although intended as natural philosophy—furnished an aesthetic paradigm in which a piece of music could be understood as organic—as representing or embodying, in an idealized form, characteristics of a living being. “The linear progression,” Schenker (1979, 44) writes of the essential contrapuntal prolongation of his mature theory, “shows the eternal shape of life—birth to death. The linear progression begins, lives its
9 The term “organicism” also commonly denotes an outlook on metaphysics—the belief that the universe, or constituent substances of it, has properties of an organism, such as properties of mind. This belief long predates organicist aesthetics. As Babbitt did not share this metaphysical outlook, it will not be discussed here, but many organicist music theorists, including Schenker, also subscribed to organicist metaphysics. Likewise, organicist political theory, while central to the general history of organicism (and, again, to Schenker’s own organicist views), is not a part of Babbitt’s outlook. On Schenker’s metaphysics, see Pastille 1995a; on his politics, see Clarke 2007, Ewell 2020, and Schachter 2001.
10 On Schoenberg and Goethe, see Neff 1993. On Webern and Goethe, see Cox 2004, Moseley 2017, and Webern 1963. Schenker’s organicism and its antecedents have received much discussion in recent years, including in Cherlin 1988, Duerksen 2008, Hubbs 1991, Keiler 1989, Korsyn 1993, Morgan 2014, Parkhurst 2017, Pastille 1984, 1990, Snarrenberg 1994, and Solie 1980. The complex debates regarding what organicism meant for Schenker, what aspects of his thought it affects, how it intersects with his many other influences, how or whether the concept developed for him over the course of his career, and from whom he got the idea are well beyond the scope of this study. But as Peles 2001, 187 points out, it would be a mistake to reduce Schenker to a “cartoonish . . . cultural throwback to a Goethean Naturphilosophie,” even if Goethe is unquestionably one of his influences. As with Babbitt, Schenker’s organicism was infused with more contemporary concerns.
own existence in the passing tones, ceases when it has reached its goal—all as organic as life itself.”
One of the essential insights of Goethean organicism concerns the relation of parts and wholes. Goethe (1962, 366) describes, “From first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot think of one without the other.” The original conception— the leaf—grows outward, “repeating, recreating / In infinite variety” as “each leaf elaborates the last,” until “at length attaining preordained fulfillment” (Goethe 2009, 2). As the leaf develops into infinite variety, it takes on the characteristics of the many distinct organs of a mature plant. But the original conception remains: “the various plant parts developed in sequence are intrinsically identical despite their manifold differences in outer form” (56).
A significant aesthetic consequence for musicians and music theorists who subscribe to organicist views is therefore a conception of the interrelatedness of the whole composition and its parts: a search for an explanation of what Goethe calls “the harmony of the organic whole,” or its realization in music (quoted and translated in Pastille 1990, 32).
The plot here involves not only a finished whole composed of self-similar parts but also a story about how the whole developed. As self-evident as this temporal aspect may be in a theory of plant formation, when translated into the realm of music, it means that an organicist account of a piece is to a significant degree an ontology: a fictionalized reconstruction of how a piece came to be, conceptually.11 Furthermore, there are ascriptions of agency here: the initial impulse is not a passive element that is “repeated and recreated” by an exterior force; it is actively recreating itself. It contains characteristics that motivate its own development.
Musical organicism involves the identification of an initial impulse that can stand in for Goethe’s leaf. For many authors—including a number significant to Babbitt, such as Schoenberg (see Neff 1993, 414–18), Anton Webern,12 Robert Handke, and Reinhard Oppel13 the organic source is a theme
11 Monahan 2013, 364n.74 points out the agency ascribed to a “fictional composer” in much Schenkerian analytical prose. Babbitt’s analyses also frequently rely on this device. For a vivid example, see Babbitt 1987, 137–43.
12 Webern 1963 cites Goethe repeatedly, linking his organicist theories not only to general thematic or motivic conceptions but also to the twelve-tone series specifically; see esp. 40–41 and 53.
13 Babbitt reports that his first encounter with analytical prose was an accidental stumble across Handke 1909, discovered left on a table at the New York Public Library in early 1934. This led him shortly to Oppel 1921. These articles “change[d] the course of [his] life”: “They made it possible for me to realize that thinking about music can transmute into thinking in music” (Babbitt 1991a, 126, emphasis original). And the consequences for his own music were profound: “We became convinced that the coherence of [new, atonal] music was very sensitive to, and dependent on, its initial conditions. And
or a motive.14 The theme or motive is generally introduced early in a piece, and the remainder of the piece can thus be understood as the theme or motive’s unfurling. This version of organicism can also be found in Schenker’s earlier writings. In Harmony, for instance, he proposes an equation: “In Nature: procreative urge → repetition → individual kind; in music, analogously: procreative urge → repetition → individual motif” (1954, 6–7). Although motivic association was generally not granted the same prominence in Schenker’s later writings as it received in Harmony, it would continue to be critically important to his analytical technique for the rest of his life. As will be discussed, Babbitt was not immune to motivic organicism: he uses the framework to discuss motivically based music such as that of Béla Bartók and Edgard Varèse.
But the dominant organicist paradigm of Schenker’s last decade—the theory of Free Composition, the theory that influenced Babbitt’s compositional technique—was not the temporal development of an unfolding motive but the hierarchical development of a background through successive elaborations. A piece of music is said to begin with an initial tone and its Naturklang the “chord of nature” defined by the tone and its first five harmonic partials. The Naturklang unfolds into one of the three forms of the Ursatz and from there, through a long sequence of nested voiceleading transformations, the piece gradually comes into view. In this version of organicism, the temporal and agential metaphors remain. “Earlier” levels appear earlier in the presumed hierarchical process—closer to the Naturklang and the Ursatz while “later” levels appear relatively shortly before the realization (Ausführung) of the completed composition.15 Later
what in traditional terms is a more explicit statement of initial conditions than a fugue subject? This view is exactly what Handke and Oppel were adumbrating in very restricting and restrictive terms” (126). The first sentence of Oppel 1921 demonstrates the thematic organicism of these articles: “Das Lebensfähigkeit einer Fuge ist von der Gestalt ihres Themas abhängig” (10) (“A fugue’s ability to live depends on the shape of its subject,” translation my own). Handke’s focus on the “linear principle” (“Das Linearprinzip”) is especially interesting in light of Babbitt’s interest in Schenker, to whose work he was introduced just a few months later. Handke uses this (vaguely defined) principle to describe not only thematic development but also harmonic succession and the organization of subject entries.
14 This thematic conception of organicism proved remarkably durable. Reti 1951 is a prominent, extended example.
15 Many modern Schenkerians replace the temporal metaphors with spatial metaphors: levels closer to the Ursatz are “higher” or “deeper,” farther from the “surface” (see Snarrenberg 1994, 45–49). As Arndt 2016, 92–93 notes, even the term “hierarchy,” with its connotations of a fixed and static structure, is a term native to American Schenkerian practice. Babbitt uses temporal metaphors in his discussion of Schenkerian hierarchy and other, analogous hierarchies more frequently than most American commentators, although he does use the term “surface” to refer to the completed composition and the more immediately available relationships contained within it. This usage of “surface” will be retained in the present volume.
levels are described as motivated by earlier levels: as Carl Schachter (1981, 122) describes, “Schenker often writes about the levels as if they were animated by kinetic impulses that travel from one level to another; thus the foreground contains the ‘goals’ to which the earlier levels lead” (see also Schenker 1979, 5). The result, in Schenker’s (1996, 18) formulation, is that “Originating in the background, marching forward through the middleground, the strata of composing-out multiply all the way to the diminutions of the lower order in the foreground.”
In addition to the hierarchical reorientation, a critical difference between Schenker’s understanding of organicism and that of the aforementioned thematic organicists is the source of the initiating organic impulse. Schenker’s hierarchy begins with a natural given—which is to say, with the universal and, therefore, the generic. All pieces share the Naturklang, and most share one of two common Ursätze. For a thematic organicist, the organic impulse is composed and is therefore a distinguishing aspect of the piece of which it is a part. Roger Sessions ([1938] 1979, 258), writing during a time in which he was mentoring Babbitt, criticized Schenker’s concept of a generic Ursatz, finding that “the interest of these or any other works begins precisely at the point where their individual qualities begin to appear and to grow in an inevitable manner. It is only at this point that organic life may be said to begin.” Babbitt also criticized an aspect of this model: he vigorously rejected Schenker’s appeal to natural phenomena such as the overtone series (see Babbitt [1961a] 2003, 80–81). But Babbitt, unlike Sessions, could support a generic hierarchical source, such as an Ursatz or a twelve-tone series, that can be construed as the earliest layer of any number of different compositions.
Before diving into the organicist claims in Babbitt’s own writings, a point about the function of such rhetoric should be clarified. For Babbitt, as for most Americans who have adopted organicist rhetoric, organicist claims about temporal development, agency, holistic unity, and coherence are metaphors. Using the form for the categorization of conceptual metaphors introduced in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), some of his more common tropes can be characterized as elaboration is growth (simpler, prototypical stages of a work develop into more complex ones through a dynamic process), association reflects genealogy (similar events arise from a common source), and the commonplace states are locations (e.g., there are “points of structural origin”). Metaphors such as these, all typical of the organicist tradition, are widespread in Babbitt’s prose and speech.
For Schenker, though, such claims are conceivably not metaphorical, and this constitutes a significant difference between the thinkers. Bryan Parkhurst (2017, 73) argues that Schenker’s organicism is “methodological rather than rhetorical” (emphasis original). Much nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury continental European organicism can be understood similarly, and the transference of organicist concepts from an ideological environment that fostered their interpretation as methodological to a twentieth-century Anglo-American culture in which they could, at most, be applied metaphorically, is a critical juncture in the history of musical thought.16
But to label Babbitt’s organic rhetoric metaphorical is not to thereby diminish it. Indeed, it raises perhaps even more urgently the questions of what organicist metaphors accomplish for Babbitt: what he intended by them, what he learned from them, and the ways in which they guided him. Furthermore, because Babbitt’s Schenkerian metaphors are of a piece with distinctly non-rhetorical borrowings from Schenker—such as the construction of serial arrays on the model of Schenker’s vision of tonality—taking Babbitt’s metaphors seriously provides a way toward understanding these other facets of Schenker’s influence.
Principally, Babbitt’s organicism can be understood as working toward two complementary aims, one explanatory and one aesthetic. Regarding the explanatory aspect, Babbitt’s invocation of organicism resembles Kendall Walton’s ([1993] 2015) conception of “prop oriented make-believe.” Prop oriented make-believe is an imaginative exercise undertaken to help illuminate aspects of “props”—any real-world items—under consideration. One of Walton’s examples involves using the familiar visualization of Italy as a boot to facilitate locating the city of Crotone, which appears in the boot’s arch (176–78). The act of imagining Italy as a boot, or the description of it as such, is undertaken not because one has any particular interest in visualizing footwear. Rather, the metaphor—the “make-believe” of imagining Italy as a boot—is a descriptive aid. The metaphor’s value lies in its heuristic usefulness.
Similarly, Babbitt’s use of organicist metaphor serves, in part, a heuristic purpose. Organicism provides an explanatory shorthand for the part-part and part-whole relationships he found necessary for musical composition
16 For assorted perspectives on this transference, see Derkert 2008, Rothstein 1986, and Snarrenberg 1994.
and comprehension. But there is a further, aesthetic component to this imaginative exercise. While musical value judgments rarely appear in Babbitt’s prose, it is clear from the examples he chooses to analyze, the features he draws attention to within them, and above all the compositional consequences he derived from his theorizing and analysis that he also sought to promote organicism as an aesthetic ideal. An organicist analysis, thus, is a sort of test. Although the act of listening remains the final arbiter (Babbitt 1998a, 25), organicist analysis guides investigation into a piece’s comprehensibility and aesthetic richness. Accordingly, Babbitt’s youthful encounter with Schenker’s writings and students gave him more than a suggestive method for analyzing the tonal masterworks. It framed his sense of what music had achieved and what possibilities were yet to be explored.17
Babbitt and Schenker
Babbitt appears to have first encountered Schenker’s work in 1935, at the age of nineteen, in his first composition lesson with Roger Sessions. They examined the analysis of Beethoven’s Sonata in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 1 in Der Tonwille (Babbitt [1985b] 2003, 391).18 As the decade wore on, the emigration of many of Schenker’s pupils and disciples—particularly Ernst Oster and Oswald Jonas—gave Babbitt further contact with the Schenkerian tradition.19 By the time of Babbitt’s first published musical essays, in the late 1940s and ’50s, the influence of Schenkerian thought is fully in evidence. Babbitt’s review of Felix Salzer’s Structural Hearing (1952) provides his most explicit early appraisal of Schenker’s achievement. The following passage is indicative of his thinking at the time:
17 A comparison might be drawn to Schenker’s own aesthetic judgments, which similarly, and much more explicitly, conflate organicism and value. But one should resist pushing this analogy too far. As discussed in Pastille 1995b, Schenker’s value judgments are inextricable from his theory of genius, which Babbitt did not share. Moreover, while Babbitt’s writings suggest an organicist system of valuation, as a teacher Babbitt was ideologically welcoming. Consider the music of students of his as diverse as Stephen Sondheim, Stanley Jordan, Donald Martino, Paul Lanksy, Laura Karpman, and Tobias Picker (see Hilferty 2011 for interviews with several of them).
18 Although this seems to have been Babbitt’s first direct encounter with Schenker’s writings, his interest had already been piqued by Citkowitz (1933) 1985, Sessions (1935) 1979, and Weisse (1935) 1985; see Babbitt (1985) 2003, 391 and (1999) 2003, 476. Schenker’s analysis of Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 1 appears in translation in Schenker 2004.
19 Oster and Jonas both emigrated shortly after the Anschluss. On Babbitt’s contact with them, see particularly Babbitt (1999) 2003, 478–80.
Schenker’s analysis originated in aural experience, and the Urlinie is, at least indirectly, of empirical origins. On the other hand, it is (and this is merely an additional merit) completely acceptable as an axiomatic statement (not necessarily the axiomatic statement) of the dynamic nature of structural tonality. Stated in such terms, it becomes the assertion that the triadic principle must be realized linearly as well as vertically; that the points of structural origin and eventuation must be stabilized by a form of, or a representation of, the sole element of both structural and functional stability: the tonic triad. It asserts that melodic motion is, triadically, purely diatonic (of necessity, since any other triadic motion is, at least relatively, triad-defining, and thus establishes multiple levels of linear motion, rather than a single, directed motion); that a work of music ends organically, not merely temporally. (Babbitt [1952] 2003, 23)
This passage has been cited as representing the vast gulf between Babbitt and Schenker’s philosophical orientations, and indeed it does that.20 The definition of the Urlinie as an axiom in a logical system, rather than the natural or even spiritual ideal Schenker intended it to be, is a stark difference indeed. It is reflective of Babbitt’s general theoretical project at the time, which was in large part concerned with the rational reconstruction of another musical system; namely, the twelve-tone system, as will be discussed shortly. It is a signal that Babbitt intends to bring the explanatory power of philosophical logic to Schenkerian theory. But this statement also represents more than that: it reveals a deeper continuity underlying the new rhetoric.
Notable among the extended list of “assertions” of the Urlinie-axiom is the claim that “a work of music ends organically, not merely temporally.” This claim is distinct from the rhetoric of axiomatic logic, but it is not an outlier in Babbitt’s discourse. Direct references to “organisms,” “kernels,” and other traditional organicist substantives appear only occasionally in Babbitt’s writings, but the general concepts underlying those characterizations—most notably, an attribution of agency to initial musical assumptions that has determining force over later developments—remain. What has changed is the source of the initial assumptions. By de-naturalizing the source of the Urlinie by making it a chosen axiom rather than a natural given—Babbitt opens the way for this model to be transferred to systems besides tonality.
20 See Muhkerji 2014, 160; Schuijer 2008, 252; and Snarrenberg 1994, 50; also Berry 2016, 174–77 for broader context.
