MILTON BABBITT: A Celebration of his Life and Music
October
31-November 1, 2003
Millsaps College
Jackson, Mississippi
Jeff
Perry
Louisiana State University
Mel Powell and the Evolution of American Modernism
This paper explores the mature aesthetic of Mel Powell (1923-1998) and its birth in Powell's early immersion in 1930s jazz and his subsequent studies with Paul Hindemith. One of the few twentieth century composers whose style at mid-century could accurately be termed neo-classical, Powell's subsequent discovery of the music of Webern and other European innovators led to a series of works from ca. 1959 until his death that define an authoritative dialect of American post-tonal modernism. I will outline certain key tenets of his compositional working method as a key to the style and substance of works such as the Filigree and Haiku Settings of 1959-60 and the second String Quartet of 1982. In such works, Powell's insistence on the interplay of asymmetry and periodicity separates his compositional ethic from that of European contemporaries such as Boulez and Stockhausen. Powell's lifelong friendship with Milton Babbitt and their collective advocacy of a distinctly American response to the problems of musical modernism in the post-Second World War period makes an appraisal of his work at this symposium especially appropriate.
