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Thank you!

@@augarno People don’t give enough love to babbitt as a composer, so it always makes me smile whenever I see someone performing his works!

Hey, it's a tough gig.

@@augarno he he he! Looking forward to hearing the rest of your Babbitt's!! All Best, Eduard Laurel

I think that "urban" is a very good descriptor for this music. Certainly the rapid pace, and continually emergence of new materials and musical events are distinguishing features.

Really glad to hear this, thanks for listening.

Thanks man, find me on Facebook if you want to keep track of musical stuff. I'm working on recording his complete piano works.

Thanks, I think so too.

It's a written out score, the realization of it by the performer isn't aleatoric. The composition of it was aleatoric, so it's not surprising that it sounds like theirs an element of chance in the performance. What's unusual is that he notated it with a fine ruler, and it's very much a spatial notation. But it's not spatial like Etudes Australes, where it's all just note heads with no metric reference point. MOC uses what looks like traditional rhythms sometimes, and grace notes too, but they're not situated within a consistent meter even though there are barlines and tempo markings, quarter=132, accelerando, etc. There are fractions written in, which are supposed to show you the subdivisions of bests but it's all very obscure and confusing. I basically made a finer resolution of the barlines by using a ruler myself and marking in where the quarter notes are, in space.

This is Book I of 4. It's the shortest one. I play the whole thing, which takes an hour, but this is just the first movement, the shortest by far.

This is irrelevant, not to mention incoherent.

preeeeeeee

may natutunan ka pre

How do you feel after hearing this music? Hhaahhahaha. Pls help, I need answers☹️

hahaha oo nga eh

Chance music to diba? Tanong may chance ka ba sakanya?

Thanks very much, that's very kind. It's a dazzling piece.

Thank you, it's one of my favorites among his piano works.

+Augustus Arnone I was talking to the other guy, but if you want to get technical, in Babbitt's late works the instruments individually through their subdivision of a duration between two time-points (or a fixed duration) and the precise points of this subdivision that they articulate articulate something about the partitional structure of some other point of the piece, and these are things happening within instruments generally and not between them- and indeed his treatment of the piano in this piece especially is really as one whole (as opposed to what happens in canonical forms for example), and not seperate instruments. Also if one considers this whole thing of projecting two lynes in one register, which is clearly a question Joe Dubiel raised, it can be seen as an obscuring of the underlying array, it can also be seen as a reinforcement of the hexachordal nature of the series- have you noticed how very few times Babbitt uses the 77 partition arrays, and so many times uses the 58? When he does use the 77, its always articulated as lynes much, much more clearly. So yes the individual lynes of the array may be articulated more clearly if aided with other reinforcement, but that would in turn take away from the detailed surface he is projecting. This is what I meant by "sparseness"- the fact that the piece treats the piano as one instrument, and not a small orchestra, when you look at how the details are composed-out. Its refreshing to talk to a pianist who has even heard of the concerto for 9 instruments, btw

+Yokozuna Kananoumi I think the key word in my initial comment which I am very happy to see generated this informative discussion is SOME of his piano works. I was doing research on Grisey and I perceive this general tendency as new pitch class structures replaced the major-minor system that timbre became more and more important - either to better highlight how composers adhere to or goes against convention (pretty much from Brahms to early Stravinsky and Stravinsky's neoclassicism) or in the case of some Schoenberg and Berg and especially Webern, to highlight the lines and structure of the new pitch class system. What always overrides organization of a work is the personal expression the composer desires, what is heard initially and subsequently heard as the piece grows with its own life (ok, this shows an aesthetic preference by me that often a composition attains its own life by the independent logic it takes form whatever plans the composer might have had). As for hearing the lines, well what many critics and theorist overlook is the importance of history a piece gains from repeated performances (bad ones if done enough become good ones and good ones either push a work into the canon or actually reveal the paucity of a work). The field of semiotics is useful here. Listeners bring a preconceived history and the challenge of every performer is to try and do a great job with people having 2,3, or or more different histories. I have had listeners classify some of my own works as "evil" simply due to the preponderance of references to diminished harmonies - a historical prejudice going far back to the Renaissance. The challenge of Babbit is twofold - its history is both very new and old. The ideas of partitioning and rhythmic complexity is derived from computer music and serialism, but the idea of the lyne and borrowing and subtracting from partitions goes far back to hocket technique and the time points system has links to the intricate rates of presentation of cantus firmus from the Ars Nova. My point supports the continual cry to reestablish solid music education (history and elements of composition through playing and writing). So imagine that some of your listeners "history" they bring might be up to Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps or what they might call "horror music " genre (the famous example being The Shining and the boatload of Ligeti used for the score). The best a performer can do is program it and offer select and informative liner notes mention precedents to the music (even if they seem somewhat remote, but deVitry will sound to a non-musician closer to Babbit than to a musician very familiar with 20th century music). I think more composers need to delve deep into 12-tone and serial techniques too. There was a bit of a rebellion against the absolute adherence to it decades ago but now we have swung to far away, many composers seem to learn this in depth at the graduate level if at all (e.g. at USC Film Music I think it still remains an elective). So this call to both composers and listeners to get more educated is not because only Babbit's music requires it BUT any music studied and performed to be heard with attention requires study from the listener. Thanks for the information and it sparks me to read more literature about Babbit's techniques (right just have the Mead)

+alphabet661 Chris Sahar first of all, when Arnone and me talked about not being able to distinguish lynes, we were refering to the fact that lynes are articulated by register, and certain lynes are in fact put in the same register, so they are unarticulated. Your "histories" are largely incorrect (not trying to be confrontational here)- partitioning was a problem adressed first with acoustic instruments- Babbitt deals with it as early as his first piece, which deals with trichordal and hexachordal partitions, Composition for Tenor and six instruments which deals with a bunch of uneven partitions, Relata I was the first all-partition piece. "Borrowing and subtracting from partitions" is something he only does from piece to piece, and it usually has to do with instrument lines and the hexachordal relations hes trying to project- see "sextets". The time point system was his attempt at relating the pitch and rhythmic dimensions into one contextual dependency, also the "modulus" wasn't at all existent in the Renaissance music- the modulus being the heart of the time-point system (its what makes them "points"). I already pointed out how timbre effects rhythm in these later pieces- they relate to certain partitions in the array by their placement in a subdivision of a duration of a time point to the number of pitches in a certain segment of a certain partition of the array. This would have drastically changed if he did use different instrumentation. And finally Milton above all always demanded that twelve-tone works hold up "self-referentially", which is to say, by themselves as they provide their own musical context. Trying to hear Milton's music through the ears of renaissance music is clearly not what he wanted, hearing Milton's music in light of an analysis isn't either. They hold up themselves within themselves, outside of your "histories". You don't need to study this stuff to understand it, in fact most Babbitt fans aren't musicians. p.s. it's Babbitt, not Babbit.

+Yokozuna Kananoumi Well I disagree and pardon the misspelling. Are you familiar with Roland Barthes "Mythologies"? This is what I mean by histories. Probably better to call them accrued listening habits which then develop in the listener a set of presumptions he or she is or is not aware of (and Barthes' book is based on Sassure's writing on semiotics). I do think it has a great impact upon how the music is received. And I should clarify the term precedents - precedents do not mean exact similarity but procedures and structures which offers models from which one could create newer models. With this in mind, I disagree with Babbitt that a composers' music can be entirely self-referential. However, this becomes a question of philosophy and aesthetics. I could argue that by setting the cantus firmus and having them sung twice as fast, 3/2 as fast 2 as slow etc, you generate a set of time points against each other. Of course the difference is the mathematical divisions and multiplications are, at heart, simply in twos and threes (though at the ars nova height septuplets and quintuplets were used sometimes, mainly in the highest voices). Babbitt bases it on a different mathematics of mod 12 as you very well know. However, with each line having different time points based on a nonrecurrence until all terms of mod 12 are given, you end up with a type of proportional music that was done in DeVitry's time (of course, based on radically different mathematical models). Wourinen in his book "Simple Composition" explains this well with the composers through medieval to modern times in the expansion of the pitch class gamut. He uses a type of Venn diagram that I say is a similar way I would describe move from DeVitry to Babbit over time. Finally if an object or system is self-referential, than how does one translate and object and system to others? Thanks for the stimulating debate. This is when I love to disagree - it brings to mind these philosophical questions which as listeners we can consider but also put aside during the moment of performance to simply savor the sounds and silence!

The definition you gave for "histories" was the one I had in mind- nurtured habits. I think you're confusing "time points" with "the time point system". They are radically different. All music is made up of time points, what makes it the time point system isn't "proportion", as you can repeat a single time point as many times or as few times as you want in the system, its also not a question of serialism applied to rhythm because after all that is basically what the canon is (which is what you're talking about. The time point system was a way of providing a relation between pitch and rhythm through analogous patterns. A system is still considered complete even if it is translatable to a different system- read Wittgenstein. And Babbitt's music holds together not on things outside our common experience (our personal "histories") but is based on things common to almost all humankind- the common experience of pitch, pitch class, timbre, dynamic, duration. Babbitt didn't mean that it was wrong for a certain bit to remind you of a horn call or a drunk cat- he meant that it does not add or take away from the piece not to know any of that. And there's the self-referentialism for you.

+alphabet661 Chris Sahar I also disagree. I wouldn't want to hear any of the piano pieces orchestrated in any way.