The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt, Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, Joseph N. Straus, Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, Joseph Straus

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691155401, 9780691089669
• eBook ISBN: 9781400841226
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della musica

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has grappled profoundly with central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. In the history of music theory, there has been only a small handful of figures who have produced work of comparable stature. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a priceless primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right.


Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete, authoritative, and fully accessible--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• The String Quartets of Bartók (1949)
• Review of Leibowitz, Schoenberg et son école (1950)
• Review of Le Système Dodécaphonique (1950)
• Review of Salzer, Structural Hearing (1952)
• Tintinnabulation of the Crochets (Review of Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Bartók) (1953)
• Musical America’s Several Generations (1954)
• Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition (1955)
• The Composer as Specialist (1958)
• Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants (1960)
• The Revolution in Sound: Electronic Music (1960)
• Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music (1961)
• Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant (1961)
• Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium (1962)
• Reply to George Perle’s “Babbitt, Lewin, and Schoenberg: A Critique” (1963)
• Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky (1964)
• The Synthesis, Perception, and Specification of Musical Time (1964)
• An Introduction to the R.C.A. Synthesizer (1964)
• The Structure and Function of Musical Theory (1965)
• The Use of Computers in Musicological Research (1965)
• Edgard Varèse: A Few Observations of His Music (1966)
• Three Essays on Schoenberg (1968)
• On Relata I (1970)
• Contribution to “The Composer in Academia: Reflections on a Theme of Stravinsky” (1970)
• Memorial for Mátyás Seiber (1970)
• Stravinsky Memorial (1971)
• Contemporary Music Composition and Musical Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History (1972)
• Memorial for Stefan Wolpe (1972)
• Since Schoenberg (1974)
• Celebrative Speech for the Schoenberg Centennial (1976)
• Responses: A First Approximation (1976)
• Introduction to Marion Bauer, Twentieth Century Music (1978)
• Foreword to David Epstein, Beyond Orpheus (1979)
• Memorial for Ben Weber (1979)
• Memorial for Robert Miller (1981)
• The More than the Sounds of Music (1984)
• I Remember Roger (1985)
• “All the Things They Are”: Comments on Kern (1985)
• Memorial for Hans Keller (1986)
• Stravinsky’s Verticals and Schoenberg’s Diagonals: A Twist of Fate (1987)
• On Having Been and Still Being an American Composer (1989)
• A Life of Learning (1991)
• Brave New Worlds (1994)
• My Vienna Triangle (1999)
• Index