“No One is Afraid of Uncle Miltie Any More”

Milton Babbitt was a thorn in my side for the better part of the eight years I spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), four as an undergraduate major in Mathematics and four leading to my doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics. The sharp tip of that point was an essay he had written entitled “Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants,” first published in The Musical Quarterly in 1962 and subsequently included in the book Problems of Modern Music: The Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, edited by Paul Henry Lang. (One day when I was not looking, one of my fellow students pencilled in the title page under the words “Problems of Modern Music” the phrase, “Mainly, it doesn’t sound good.” Such was life during my student days.)

I suppose it would be fair to say that Babbitt wrote his article to make the case that group theory (a discipline of abstract algebra) could be harnessed to analyze twelve-tone compositions. To be fair, Arnold Schoenberg himself had developed a representation in the form of a twelve-by-twelve grid, which, for any given twelve-tone row, provided a compact representation of the 48 statements of the row, accounting for the twelve chromatic transpositions of the row itself, along with the inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion forms. My guess is that, when Babbitt saw one of those grids for the first time, the concept of permutation groups leapt to mind. (Babbitt began his collegiate education as a mathematics major, only later moving over to music.)

MIT had an impressive number of mathematicians on its faculty, and many of them were well-versed in group theory. So, since I was having a lot of trouble getting my head around Babbitt’s Problems in Modern Music essay, I loaned my book to one of the full professors on that faculty. When I came by his office the next morning, he declaimed, “What is this garbage?” (or words to that effect). It did not take me long to finally recognize that, while Babbitt may have known how to talk the talk of a mathematician, he was pathetically incapable of walking the walk.

To be fair, many years later, shortly after my doctoral thesis had been approved, I met a pianist that was preparing a Babbitt composition for recital. I sat beside him on his bench while he did a run-through, and I was quite impressed with how he had endowed all of those marks on paper with expressiveness. When it came to our talking about the what, why, and how of his approach to performance, mathematics never reared its head.

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of AMT Public Relations)

All of those paragraphs were written to establish a mind-set for an album of Babbitt compositions that was released by New Focus Recordings at the end of this past October. The title of the album is Milton Babbitt: Works for Treble Voice and Piano. The 21 tracks are performed by soprano Nina Berman and pianist Steve Beck. The six-movement “A Solo Requiem” requires two pianos, and the second pianist is Eric Huebner.

The good news is that the listening experience was rich enough that my mind never lapsed into thoughts of higher mathematics. On the other hand, when I consulted Babbitt’s Wikipedia page, I discovered that his list of compositions was divided into three periods. These covered the intervals of 1935–1960, 1961–1979, and 1979–2006, respectively. All of those periods are represented on Berman’s album. However, if I were to play this CD in “shuffle mode,” I doubt that listening alone would allow me to identify which tracks resided in which interval.

All that I can say for sure is that the demands made on the performers could not have been more intense. (That was the same impression I had listening to the pianist prepare for his recital.) As a result, it is hard for me to avoid suggesting that, regardless of what track one first encounters, all of the other tracks will come across as “more of the same.” It would probably be fair for the reader to then ask, “The same what?” The only answer I can give is, “Darned it I know!” As to whether or not Babbitt will be remembered for his cryptic ventures into higher mathematics, I can only say that, in the mid-Seventies, a colleague of mine in the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania declared, with no uncertainty and with a fond memory of Milton Berle, “Nobody is afraid of Uncle Miltie any more!”