MILTON BABBITT: A Celebration of his Life and Music
October
31-November 1, 2003
Millsaps College
Jackson, Mississippi
Anthony
K. Brandt
Rice University
The
Rhythm of Resemblances:
Structure and Surface in Babbitt's Post-Partitions
The conventional notion of rhythm refers the immediate sequence of musical attack-points. Notions of rhythm have been expanded to include harmonic rhythm and, sometimes, formal rhythm. However, rhythm is a much vaster terrain, operating at many different structural levels. Any time two or more events are connected by a listener as being related, they create a "rhythm of resemblance": were the events near or far from each other? How many events are grouped together? For instance, the development sections of classical works typically intensify not only the surface rhythms but also the rhythm of resemblances: thanks to motivic fragmentation, related events occur closer and closer together.
Milton Babbitt's music, as exemplified by his work "Post-Partitions," provides a particularly fertile exploration of the rhythm of resemblances. The complexities involved in apprehending the deeper structure of his music are very demanding. These include the fact that perpetual variation is built into the genetic code of the music; the speed of unfolding is rapid; dynamic and polyrhythmic performance is necessarily approximate; the polyphonic structural features are extremely dense; and there are surface distractions which divert the ear.
However, listening to his work is to be submerged into a field of resemblances, which create rhythms of incredible suppleness. Indeed, the overpowering unity of his vision enables a particularly thorough concentration of meaningful associations. In Post-Partitions, gestures of repeated notes, dynamic and registral extremes, linear fragments and more are all connected by the ear, creating a maze of rhythms which grow out of Babbitt's carefully formulated patterning. The full "reality" of Babbitt's music is impossible to apprehend on a single hearing: rather, each new hearing brings fresh connections and fresh rhythms. While Babbitt's underlying structures may be aurally remote, they are responsible for the bountiful proliferation of rhythms. Indeed, I will argue that the"composing out" of the underlying array is a process of rhythmicizing the resemblances.
