The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt / / Milton Babbitt; ed. by Stephen Peles, Joseph N. Straus, Andrew Mead, Stephen Dembski.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Babbitt, Milton,
• HerausgeberIn: Dembski, Stephen,; Mead, Andrew,; Peles, Stephen,; Straus, Joseph N.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2011]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (544 p.) :; 70 line illus. 9 tables.

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

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- The String Quartets of Bartók 1949 -- Review of Schoenberg et son école and Qu'est ce que la musique de douze sons? by René Leibowitz. 1950 -- Review of Polyphonie-Revue musicale trimestrielle; Quatrième cahier: Le Système dodécaphonique 1950 -- Review of Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music 1952 -- Tintinnabulation of the Crochets 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 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 -- In Memoriam: Mátyás Seiber 1970 -- Contribution to "Stravinsky (1882-1971): A Composer's Memorial" 1971 -- Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History [1972] -- In Memoriam: Stefan Wolpe 1972 -- Since Schoenberg 1974 -- Celebrative Speech 1976 -- Responses: A First Approximation 1976 -- Introduction to Marion Bauer's Twentieth Century Music 1978 -- Foreword to Beyond Orpheus 1979 -- Ben Weber (1916-1979) 1979 -- Robert Miller (1930-1981) 1981 -- The More than the Sounds of Music 1984 -- I Remember Roger (Contribution to "In Memoriam: Roger Sessions") 1985 -- "All the Things They Are": Comments on Kern 1985 -- Hans Keller: A Memoir 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 at Washington Square," Revisited and Dilated 1999 -- INDEX