Milton Babbitt & Abstraction in Music

 

All music is abstract. It hits all the good 'e' words: ephemeral, ethereal, evanescent. I just watched the Grateful Dead documentary on Amazon and learned that this fleeting quality was everything to Jerry Garcia. The mere idea of a recording offended him. He wanted the music to arise in the moment and then be forever gone. He didn't want to create anything that could be interpreted as a monument -- to himself, to the band, to anything. Evanescence was a feature not a bug. When the Dead got really "out," the music was totally abstract, unlike the traditional songs with words they performed, which gave listeners something to hang their hats on.

 

In other words, if all music is abstract, there are levels of abstraction within the art form, songs with words being the least abstract. They can tell stories. The can trigger concrete images and associations for the listener. Next, we move to instrumental music, all of which is more abstract than songs with words. The least abstract instrumental music is the genre of "tone poem," which seek to depict in sound various aspects of social living, say, a wedding or life on the city streets. Ellington did a number of these, for example, "A Tone Parallel to Harlem" and "Harlem Air Shaft." His composition "Bluebird of Delhi" employs an actual bird song to shape the melody. Next, you have purely instrumental music that refers only to itself, but which employs recognizable structures, melodies, chords and harmonic development. These elements in essence provide the narrative of the composition. The listener can detect themes and variations, including surprising deviations.

At the most abstract level, however, even these elements are dispensed with. The composer doesn't want the listener to have much at all to hang their hat on, anything that acts a crutch. The main idea is that we come to music with so many previously-created expectations and biases that when we hear traditionally constructed music we are not fully in the moment or fully responding to what actually is happening in front of us. We are responding to our memories and habits. Further, in traditional instrumental music it's simply too easy to manipulate the listener by playing to their ingrained preferences. John Cage took this idea to its extreme, creating entire symphonic or chamber compositions by using only chance methods, for example throwing the I Ching, or by turning on multiple radios to arbitrary stations and have them play simultaneously. Composing in the years after WWII, he didn't want anything to even hint at the ego-driven and monomaniac goal-driven characteristics of fascism.

Other composers of the time used intentionality to create their music, but did so in ways that sounded nearly random, eschewing traditional rhythms and motivic development. Some used the "twelve tone" system to avoid traditional harmonies. This is the opposite of easy listening music: it requires the listener to step up and meet it on its terms. I don't listen to this kind of music a lot, but do so on a regular basis. It's invigorating. Mental floss, a palate cleanser for your consciousness. But this is not to say that the music is without pleasure. I find Milton Babbitt's music to be especially beautiful, with gorgeous tonalities and timbres, and striking moments rising and falling as instruments combine and detach and combine again.