Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Len Fehskens writes:
>
>>I have even written serial music, and it still sounds random to me.
>
>Hell, I've written serial music and I can say the same.  But then again
>I wrote terrible serial music.  It had nothing to do with the idiom and
>everything to do with me.

"Sounding" random and being random are entirely different things of course.
Babbitt's music is an extreme case of NON-random composition, because
every note can be accounted for as to pitch, duration, loudness, choice of
register, placement in time, etc.  The problem with listening to Babbitt is
that at every point he demands that one listen in an entirely new way.  Or
does he? Certainly with respect to pitch he has done nothing more than use
the time-honored techniques of transposition, inversion, and retrograde;
and even his application of serial composition to other "parameters" has
precedents going all the way back to isorhythm.  The question is whether
this complex ordering is capable of being understood by the ear as well
as the eye.  There is nothing in principle that precludes this, regardless
of the herculean demands it makes on our musical memory.  There is
another point of view that says organization that is "hidden" to the ear
nevertheless can provide structure that is felt on an unconscious level.
This is not new.  The best example I can think of from past centuries is
the canon from The Musical Offering, "per augmentationem, contrariu motu"
of J.S.  Bach.  Can the listener be expected to mentally keep a
note-for-note correspondence between dux and comes, under inversion AND
when the distance between them grows greater every note? Others may differ,
but for me the enjoyment of such a piece comes in knowing what Bach was
doing and yet being able to interpret the relationship between the voices
on a moment-to-moment basis.  That is, the piece makes sense in terms of
voice leading at every instant, while being subject to the constraints of
the canon.

Now putting that back on Babbitt, it's possible he is trying to write
music that somehow makes sense moment-to-moment while maintaining a
rigorously serial structure.  I haven't talked to Mr. Babbitt in 35 years,
but I imagine that he views his serial technique in somewhat the same way
any good contrapuntist from Machaut onward did--as a compositional unifying
principle which can be used to create good music--but doesn't guarantee it.

Chris Bonds