The Times Quotidian

Remembering Milton Babbitt, The Path Least Taken
by Aram Yardumian

At age 76, Milton Babbitt received his PhD from Princeton University for his thesis on 12-tone theory—an event in and of itself unremarkable, and one the composer himself hardly noticed. That it came forty-six years after the thesis’s submission makes it somewhat more intriguing. By way of explaining the delay, the university claimed its readers in the music department at the time had simply not understood it. Impossible to understand, unplayable, unimpeachably academic—such are the stigmas notching the years gone and criticisms leveled against Babbitt’s far-ranging oeuvre. Yet there are also listeners who, without comprehending the high math architecture of Babbitt’s music, have discovered a bottomless cabinet of lyrical reflection and mystery to explore.

Babbitt’s innovations in the electronic music laboratory and the traditional orchestral setting eventually resulted in a critical and unprecedented bridging of the two. In the early 1950s he (along with Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening and Roger Sessions) co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, the home of the RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer, which was the first such synthesizer in America, and on which Babbitt generated some of his most important compositions. “I could produce things faster than any pianist could play or any listener could hear” he said in an interview. Thus, in superseding human abilities, he established and justified the use of the tape deck and loudspeaker as instruments in the orchestra setting, without threatening its demise. It was also Babbitt’s innovation to extrapolate the rigor of 12-tone set to rhythm, duration, register, and overall structure, not just tone and pitch as Arnold Schoenberg had done. Thus he was a maximalist to the minimalism of Adams, Reich and Glass. These developments, in sum, have had an inestimable (and unappreciated) effect on modern music, from post-Romanticism to Noise. And to his inheritors he bequeathed a path of departure from Schoenberg, taken by Berg and Webern and all those who leapt from the 12-tone precipice, into the abyss. But Babbitt leapt further and landed deeper.

Underpinning all of Babbitt’s published work is a highly-ordered two dimensional system of 12-tone composition. The two dimensions are best visualized as x/y-axes of set segments and set aggregates, respectively, constructed to flow on different time scales, one faster than the other. With the two sets of similar structures progressing at different rates, a novel counterpoint is achieved. The effects of a 12-tone counterpoint on the span of time in music are impossible, it is true, to fully conceptualize since the varieties are all but infinite. Without launching into a digression on the constituencies of tonal and atonal vocabularies, we may at least say Babbitt’s networks of relation and differentiation, as stemming from the counterpointing of his sets, allows for nothing less than a reevaluation of time and space, or rather, time within space—musical time series in non-linear dimensions—a concept reinvented by some in the space-rock era. The subsurface of the music is further diversified by increasing the number of non-redundant aggregates to the point of dispensing with stasis altogether.

If this doesn’t make any sense, the door is still open to you. In fact, I think listeners who have little or no technical understanding of music have a great advantage over those who practice music, inasmuch as they are freer to come to it as a sublime mystery rather than as a demonstration of aptitude that must be constantly scrutinized vis-à-vis their own. To appreciate a Babbitt piece is not solely to behold the precision splendor of its architecture; not merely the solving of an advanced Sudoku. Though an intuitive sense of intervallic pattern changes is what allows us to see through the surface (just as it does with tonal music, about which need understand nothing), we do not need to be cartographers to walk the interior. It is, I think, more simply a matter of repeated, concerted listens.

Indeed it would be remiss to say that Babbitt constructed music from abstract aggregates and inflections, on paper as it were, without recourse to the actual process of listening. Ironically, within the tight hyper-rational structures there is, as in all metrical-syntactic art forms, an even greater propensity for creative freedom. As Andrew Mead as pointed out, “it is possible to hear the ghosts of jazz and American popular song lurking beneath the surface of his most abstract compositions.” Of Babbitt’s childhood in the Deep South (so deep that he was a neighbor of Eudora Welty’s) he recollects, “I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements […] we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.”

String Quartet No. 2 (1954), from Occasional Variations, Tzadik
performed by the Sherry Quartet, released 2003

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It has never been the program of modern classical music to lay dead in the canal of the untrained ear, nor to have been an act more important to the composer than the listener. It is not a different language, in the historical sense; only a different register. If Schoenberg and Webern and Berg and Babbitt sound unengaging, it is not because indeterminancy and abstraction and mathematics and sudden dynamic shifts are somehow unbecoming of music, or because of how rapidly Schoenberg and his followers (not to mention electronics) accelerated the process of change. Fifty years from now the register will be common. Though often accused of ivory tower elitism (especially due to the title of an article in High Fidelity magazine, “Who Cares if You Listen?”), Babbitt’s relationship with the audience was intimate. Of course he cared if they listened, he just didn’t care whether they liked it or not.

Composition for Guitar (aka Sheer Pluck) (1984), from Occasional Variations, Tzadik
performed by William Anderson, released 2003

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Behind the thorny high math façade was Milton Babbitt, the little funny smiling man who played the Cole Porter songbook from memory on the piano, whose puns spilled over top of the seriousness of his work (e.g., “Joy Of More Sextets” ); the non-stop conversationalist who was spoke with great pleasure of second-order hexachords and baseball, who was, in Mario Davidovsky’s words, the last of the Romantics. By this he meant Babbitt was the last to ascribe to art the transcendental power located by the Romantics. Beyond him, Auschwitz.

The Joy of More Sextets (1986), form Sextets and The Joy of More Sextets, New World Record
Performers: Alan Feinberg, Rolf Schulte, released 1988

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Milton Byron Babbitt was born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1916 and died in Princeton, NJ on January 29, 2011.

Swans, Early Ruminations, 1981-1997
by Aram Yardumian

One evening in 1981, the members of a New York City band called Circus Mort agreed to call it quits. Two of them, Jonathan Kane and Michael Gira, left the rehearsal space to get beer and cigarettes, and by the end of the night they had begun a new band called Swans, under Gira’s direction. Kane stayed with Swans less than two years and many other members have come and gone; only Gira has remained constant and for thirty years Swans has been his personal pursuit of the same untailored nihilism pursued by Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Strauss, and Yeats. Buttressed by No Wave rebar, Swans rebuilt the psychedelic castle with open-tuned guitar sound sheets and sonic cement. Yet at heart it was always pure and minimal American blues. (To wit, Kane traced his percussion over Howlin’ Wolf’s “Evil”). Tipped onto it all were Gira’s epigramatic narrations. And they began to stun New York hipsters, jaded from five years already of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. As Kane recollects, “they looked like the audience during Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.”

Weakling, from Filth, (1983)

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Gira was never trained as a musician but he knew exactly the sounds he wanted. The first five Swans albums were exercises in surreal, percussion-driven abstraction, violent near to signal-loss, yet slow nearly to the point of stochastic interminableness; howling storms of disorientation contained in a gray celluloid frame. Or, as a Trouser Press writer put it glibly, “Sister Ray” played at half-speed. Such extensions of form simulated both the embracing and casting aside of the usual influences: SPK’s déjà la of madness, the minimal pulse of Suicide, the extended blood-letting of Hermann Nitsch, plus Throbbing Gristle-style tape loops, echoes of The Cramps and Eno. But always it was about transubstantiation and violence—and other things that have helped keep the band under the radar for thirty years. And yet Gira sees his early material as joyful and majestic. Swans are, after all “majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.”

Swans’ early period performances were made as loud as possible, occasionally causing some audience members to lose balance and vomit or the police to arrive and stop the show. Gira himself would often leave the venue coughing up blood from the intensity he generated. “I’d throw my body on the stage, get up, throw my body on the monitors, break my ribs, and I didn’t feel it,” he says. “It was like making the world into a whirlpool, lifting you up. It was exceptionally wonderful. It wasn’t negative in the least.” Then, he adds: “I guess in the lyrics it might have been a touch negative. But it went with the time.” At several mid-80s shows in Europe, Swans ordered the lights switched off and the doors locked so that the audience would simply have to take it. The legends of these events are exceeded only by stories from the making of Pasolini’s Salo.

Unbelievably, the modus operandi was not to mirror the ugliness of the world, but rather to overwhelm it, to outdo it, so to speak, with joy; to create a music so loud and overpowering that it would annihilate our corporeal bodies—to make the Kierkegaardian leap, and thereby attain eternal consciousness. But early Swans is not an exclusively emotional experience. There is an anti-Manichaean Modernism at the core of the entire project. “I have a hard time understanding the difference between ‘dark’ and ‘light’ personally,” says Gira. “There’s lots of joy in my music, always has been, and I really loathe being portrayed in the press as some sort of morose doom-meister.” It was perhaps Swans’ complete unwillingness to compromise which directed their lyric topicality to “basic states of being”, such as pain, obedience, anguish and redemption: “I don’t feel pain / I never escape / I’m under the bed / I’m licking the floor” or “Blood runs black / Cut my throat / Kill me, snake / Do what I say”. The paradox is found in simultaneous obliteration and vivification: “The act of resignation,” writes Kierkegaard, “does not require faith, but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox.”

The bludgeon approach, relying as it did so heavily on its own musical limitations, soon evolved. The appearance of the mythical Jarboe, whose presence ignited the retreat of the Swans glacier, revealed warmer climes, and at times crueler fangs. Gira began working with acoustic guitar, piano, and other simple elements, to expand. He stopped barking and developed an oaky baritone. Further diversity was forced upon the band during a tour in Eastern European, where a lack of functioning PA’s forced them to adjust their entire approach. Subsequent records made heavy use of baroque structures, and others were entirely acoustic. The late 1980s also marks the introduction of specifically religious motifs in Swans records.

Though the next several records of this new phase, among them Children of God and The Burning World, took a concern with religious questions, neither these influences nor the results sink below Gira’s perfected contradictions. Instead he sharpens the grain of his anti-didactic haze through use of contrast and counterpoint. The constant contrasts must be taken in balance. “It’s like reading Beckett,” he writes. “If you start thinking too much, you’ll never read it. You have to just let it flow through you and accept it.” Gira claims much of the material from this period was, in fact, inspired by a study of televangelist method. “They are great rock performers,” he claims. “You know, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggert. To me, they were amazingly electrified rock performers. The way they would work up a crowd. So I started listening to their language.”

Failure, from White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991)

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In 1989 Swans released what was to be their first and only record on a major label, The Burning World, on Uni/MCA. Bill Laswell produced it and in doing so, shifted the acoustic anchor left, in favor of pop melodies, and into a new, less worthwhile kind of nausea. Most of the songs sound like sea shanties. Gira’s lyrics continued to spin webs of depression, death, greed and despair, but on this record he actually sings a la Johnny Cash. They even covered “Can’t Find My Way Home”. In spite of the record’s final ten seconds, which I take to be the finest musical distillation of ambivalence since Mahler, The Burning World was, in Gira’s words, “a big fuck up. There’re a few good things on it, I think. After we recovered from the terrible anguish of that piece of shit experience I moved on and kept expanding the sound in ways that you know.”

The Other Side of the World, from Love of Life (1992)

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White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991), Love of Life (1992), Soundtracks for the Blind (1996) and the other mid-90s releases combine all Swans’ strengths, resulting in records more complex than ever before. Forms range from barbed hymns of betrayal to open-mouthed attempts at total experience, à la Francis Bacon. Failure, blindness, punishment, temptation, ideals, damnation, regret, paedophilia, and the night stars whose atomic power keeps us all alive and yet can bring instant death as well. Tracks like “Why Are We Alive?” and “The Other Side of the World” trace light years of mystery over the constant “feeding and shifting of the universe”; the instability of matter and the possibility of transmutation. “I don’t believe in an entity that is omniscient and sits there and manipulates the universe like a chessboard but I do have a sense of the strangeness and mystery of existence,” he writes. “There’s this notion of every molecule in the universe being inhabited by an intelligence that is always just imagining itself. As the molecules change and shift that is thought, that is energy. It’s a dream the entire universe is having. There isn’t really one being because, as you know, your body is liquid, it’s melting and changing and shifting.”

____________________________

Upcoming Beatific Annihilation_Part 2

Swans, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, Young God Records, 2010

Electroacoustic Music from Sicily, Instituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania
By Aram Yardumian

Islands are geographically unique in the ways they generate life and culture. On them we find species and traditions which have been forged in the crucible of isolation, from pollens and ideas that blow in with the trade winds, take root and grow without the pressures they would face on the continent. Remote islands such as Soqotra and the Andaman archipelago are renowned for their unique flora and fauna and outlying cultural tropes, while others like Zanzibar and Bali, closer as they are to the continental mass, respond more regularly to transmissions from culture-at-large. The Regione Autonoma Siciliana is, like all islands, the interface for multiple cultural inheritances: Greek, Roman, Norman, Spanish, Arab, Moor, and modern Italian. Sicilians have collected aesthetic forms from all these diverse colonizers and now boast a musical tradition both unified and diverse–something that has attracted the attentions of many, Alan Lomax not the least of which.

Sicily’s location between continents–two so very different continents–must be the beginning of any historical analysis of its music. On the island we find a great variety of religious and secular music played on instruments found only there. For example, the cupa cupa, a fricative percussion instrument, and the donax reed pipe. And unusual harmonic structures are found in both folk and choral music, some of which is due no doubt to the influence of the Arab tonal system. That we also find a sophisticated school of electronic music in Sicily should come as little surprise, especially to those who follow concomitant schools in mainland Italy. Sicily’s electronic music is remarkable inasmuch as we can best hear the ancient and the modern, the historic and the avant-garde, the intellectual and the emotional, the East and the West in one tradition.

For a rather short time the island even boasted the Electronic Music School of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania, under the guidance of Alessandro Cipriani (who himself studied with the venerable Barry Truax). And though it is now defunct, its approximate ten years of life has given us a small treasure box of Musique concrèt and pure electronic sound, the best of which is available on the Electronic Music Foundation’s 2003 CDr release, Electroacoustic Music From Sicily. The eleven featured compositions were recorded between 1995 and 2003 and include a few familiar names as well as several names unfamiliar even to someone who pays far too much attention to this sort of thing. Massimo Carlentini’s piece Mutamenti was featured on the Fondazione Russolo-Pratella label’s XXII° Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Di Musica Elettroacustica, 2000, and Vincento Cavalli has produced or recorded the odd CD. The rest are quiet geniuses, hopefully preparing new electronic masses in monastic isolation.

Speaking in terms of the Sicilian music tradition, the compositions on Electroacoustic Music From Sicily actively cross the threshold of the traditional before our ears. Recognizable forms slowly grow unrecognizable, while always some vestige of the old folk narrative survives, for each piece (with the possible exception of Rapisarda’s  Almaquae) tells a linear story or at least describes something literal. Mario Valenti’s Inside describes “the conflict engendered by the refusal to accept solitude, squalor, death” and was recorded in the village Agira. The piece, for all its heavy topic, is the most settling of the eleven with its light rain and church bells–not to mention its sense of humor: a snoring old man is looped beneath the campanile. Vincenzo Cavalli’s Idea, the entire sonic field and narrative of which is drawn from baritone and soprano saxophone sources, is a progressing figurative piece “coordinated with a work of spatialization in the stereo sound field” in order to generate specific sonic bands. And yet the piece stands not so far apart from jazz sounds of the Italian sixties.

Inside (1999) per nastro, Mario Valenti

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Idea (2000) per nastro, Vincenzo Cavalli

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While none of the old folk melodies or modes, per se, are employed in the compositions, the donax reed pipe is sampled by Massimo Carlentini, who also uses didgeridoo in his composition entitled Recycling recycled. Overall this piece builds an ambiance not unlike Jorge Reyes’s early albums and some of the work of Kenneth Newby and Stephen Kent. This piece has shares less with European electroacoustic music than the others and as such stands apart. The title refers to Carlentini’s approach, which he characterizes as “[sonic] material, duly processed, coming from different cultures, [each with] a message to deliver”. Anna Maria Gervasio’s Calvario Metafisico likewise is weighted with the sense of urgency in its message, for it is not a single but a double allegory of the fourteen stages of Christ’s journey to Calvary, and in turn a message of hope for those who suffer. One can hardly imagine watching Enrique Irazoqui marching up to Golgotha to the tune of this; in fact, the piece draws on no part of the Christian sacred music tradition. Something melancholic is there beside the tragic hope, and something mysterious but never divine, something perhaps redolent of Pasolini’s words, “I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

Calvario Metafisico (2001) per flauto, piano e nastro, Anna Maria Gervasio

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Speaking outside the purview of Sicilian music, some of the compositions also share a reverence for Stockhausen’s vari-scale microtonal structure (even if the Arab tonal system may be the ultimate source in some cases), and obsessive attention to granular texture. There is also a distinct awareness among these artists of the implications of the sound sources they are using. Massimo Fragalà, in his piece entitled Contaminazione, utilizes sounds originating in (unspecified) nations of the former Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the sounds of his voice and some taken from “contemporary reality” as a sonic allusion to “the cancellazione of the cultures and traditions of these people,” on the one hand, and on the other, “their resurfacing in all of their strength”. (I believe we can translate cancellazione here to mean diminution, not literally “cancellation”).

Contaminazione (2003) per nastro, Massimo Fragalà

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Given what we know about the mechanics of cultural transmission it seems unwieldy to make statements about what traits and innovations belong to what set of people or to what authority. Taxonomy, as Asif Agha said “is taxidermy”. What may be worth asking is how the dynamic relationship between ideas and physical culture relates more specifically to geography, that is, to landscape and available materials (beyond the Diamond Hypothesis); and how historical memory mitigates these processes. On islands such as Sicily, where the sea both mitigates and obstructs social interactions, these processes must be continually re-imagined.