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