#milton babbitt

[buntaindreemurr]

i just played bugsnax for the first time

floofty fizzlebean listens to milton babbitt

[sondheims-hat]

2006: Sondheim with Milton Babbitt.

[singeratlarge]

peter chauncey’s VIDEO OF THE WEEK: “Share Our News 2”—peter is based in the San Francisco Bay Area but he comes from Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi and a fulcrum city of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s-60s. It's The City of Soul, referenced in films, literature, and a Johnny Cash song. Jackson birthed electronic music composer Milton Babbitt, as well as blues and jazz artists such as Otis Spann and Cassandra Wilson. These elements and more inform peter’s singing & songwriting. “Share Our News” is an older recording with new relevance. The song speaks to the mass awakenings going on regarding race, conflict, and resolution. One single song spoken from the heart speaks to many.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0WU-qaPIg0&fbclid=IwAR3HCTuDCwIT8UsFUE_ky1zIIUgKipJ3_vbtP0rb9wG-5Khj3PVO6zMPjvE

#race #conflict #resolution #singersongwriter #alternativerock #urban #acoustic #jackson #mississippi #civilrightsmovement #soul #city #johnnycash #miltonbabbitt #otisspann #cassandrawilson #davidbowie #sanfrancisco #bayarea  #video #song

[capeofseaweed]

Milton Babbitt - Clarinet Quintet (1996)

[laurentgudel]

STATE MUSIC — COMPUTER MUSIC CENTER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

I spent five weeks in NYC between March and April 2023. It was a fantastic opportunity to work at the Computer Music Center in New York. The CMC is the first electronic music studio in the USA and Seth Cluett was kind enough to let me continue my research in the best conditions.

During this stay I was able to compose two new pieces for my forthcoming debut album State Music. The first was recorded in Studio 324 on two very early versions of Buchla and Serge analogue modular systems and two Bode frequency shifters. The process was similar to what I had done at EMS Stockholm, Radio Belgrade, KSYME Athens and Willem Twee Studio in Den Bosch. I tried to adapt to the machines installed in the studio, tested a lot of patches and recorded many hours of textures, accidents and other sonic events using a variety of techniques. The editing, collaging, layering and mixing was done later in my studio. I just followed one rule. Don't use the same recording twice. No loops, nothing like that.

The second composition was recorded in Jace Clayton's office. Why? Because the RCA Mark II, considered one of the first music synthesizers ever, still sits in that room. The synth has been out of order since 1976, when someone broke into the Prentis Hall building and vandalised the machine. But I decided to make use of it anyway. I opened one of the office windows to let sounds from the city into the room and recorded the tiny vibrations caused by street noise with a geophone magnetised to the synthesizer. In this way the synthesiser essentially acted as a loudspeaker. A cheap recorder was placed near the window. Two wide cardioid microphones were placed in the middle of the room for a high quality recording. Most of the time I sit in front of the synthesizer and do nothing but listen, and every now and then I flip a switch, turn a potentiometer or unplug a patch cable to activate the acoustic space of the office and make the metal frame of the machine vibrate.

It was an amazing moment. I've been working on the State Music project since 2018. I realised that being in that room with that silent machine felt like achieving something. My understanding of electronic music history is much deeper. The links between early synthesizers and the military industry are now much clearer to me. State music? Corporate music? I don't know and it doesn't matter.

Here's an anecdote from The Enabling Instrument: Milton Babbitt and the RCA Synthesizer" a paper by Martin Brody.

When the Mark-I appeared in 1955, it was listed in the RCA Acoustics Laboratory inventory with a proud comparison: The synthesiser was 'second only to the Typhoon rocket simulator as the largest single assembly to come out of the David Sarnoff Research Center'. [Although the Mark-I was built to recreate a peaceful expression of human subjectivity rather than to obliterate a hostile and remote man-machine, its input/output components were as indifferent to the workings of the psyche as an anti-aircraft predictor.As Harry Olson recalled, to test their new machine, Olson and Belar followed Seashore's playbook of analysing past performances. The goal was not to expose the musical mind, but to simulate the sounds of acoustic instruments and human performers with the utmost precision.

I would like to thank Seth Cluett, Anna Meadors, Jace Clayton and Nick Patterson for their help.

[napcomposing]

Milton Babbitt and Lou Harrison being relatable as fuck

I recently had to read two interviews from William Duckworth's Talking Music, in which he interviews a bunch of composers. I just had to share some of the things I wrote while reading.

Firstly, the stuff my therapist will be seeing (as soon as I actually get one, that is):

I was really shocked at how specifically relatable these points were to me. Especially Harrison with the "mindlessness". Babbitt struck me as well, but I imagine that writing solely for oneself isn't something exactly rare to find in composers, especially neurodivergent ones. Harrison actually also touches on that kind of feverish-ness of needing to create:

Lastly, some general observations:

Really good read. I highly recommend this book; it's extremely comprehensive. I'll probably put a few more of these in here as the semester progresses.

[oldnapcomposing]

Some snippets of my discussion post on Milton Babbitt and Lou Harrison’s interviews from “Talking Music” by William Duckworth

I do not intend to make this blog like an educational thing. Most of it is definitely gonna be incoherent rambling and obsessing over stuff, but I really want to share this.

Firstly, the stuff for my imaginary therapist:

I was really shocked at how specifically relatable these points were to me. Especially Harrison with the “mindlessness”. Babbitt struck me as well, but I imagine that writing solely for oneself isn’t quite as rare to find in composers, especially neurodivergent ones. Harrison actually also touches on the kind of feverishness of needing to create:

Lastly, some general observations:

Really good read. Highly recommend this book. I’ll probably put a few more of my discussion posts in here as the semester goes on.

Yeah… definitely don’t expect this composure to last…

[hellocanticle]

Next Gen Electroacoustic: Kotoka Suzuki

Starkland S-236 Every Starkland release is an event and this one is no different. This is a composer new to this writer and likely new to most of the new music community. But fear not of the unknown. Advance praise from the likes of John Chowning (one of the reigning bright lights of electronic music) of Stanford certainly add a heady air of anticipation as we are now privileged to hear what is…

[sivavakkiyar]

Synthesized Tronata for solo Schumpeter (To Joseph)

[sexartdesigncrime]

The RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center at Columbia's Prentis Hall on West 125th Street, NYC in 1958.

Pictured: Milton Babbitt, Peter Mauzey, Vladimir Ussachevsky.

[tim-official]

Stereotypical “tumblr user” music poll!! Reblog this and tag with a number for how many of these artists you listen to.

Throbbing Gristle

Pauline Oliveros

Егор и Опизденевшие

Qebrµs

Jacob Kirkegaard

Delia Derbyshire

Brian Ferneyhough

Iannis Xenakis

Merzbow

Oval

The Gerogerigegege

Milton Babbitt

Meshuggah

ज़ाकिर हुसैन

Mitski

[sondheims-hat]

1998: The American Academy of Arts and Letters inducts new members Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Milton Babbitt, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

[singeratlarge]

peter chauncey’s SONG OF THE WEEK: “Share Our News” https://peterchauncey1.bandcamp.com/track/share-our-news  ...peter has roots in the San Francisco Bay Area and Arizona, but he originally comes from Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi and a fulcrum city of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s-60s. It's The City of Soul, referenced in films, literature, and a Johnny Cash song. Jackson birthed electronic music composer Milton Babbitt, as well as blues and jazz artists such as Otis Spann and Cassandra Wilson. These elements and more inform peter’s singing and songwriting. “Share Our News” speaks to the mass awakenings going on in regard to race, conflict, and resolution. One single song spoken from the heart speaks to many.

https://peterchauncey1.bandcamp.com/track/share-our-news

#media #news #Jackson #Mississippi #Capitol #state #civilrights #soul #films#literature #singersongwriter #JohnnyCash #MiltonBabbitt #OtisSpann#CassandraWilson #race #conflict #resolution #insurrection #peterchauncey #music#civil #share

[condensedmatters]

Milton Babbitt would have loved tumblr

[nelson-riddle-me-this]

Whisper-shouted in my ear on the dance floor: "I HAVE THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF MILTON BABBITT!!"

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

“You know, I had the idealistic notion, when I was 20, that I was going into the theater,” Stephen Sondheim once said. “I wasn’t; I was going into show business, and I was a fool to think otherwise.”

It was a remark characteristic of Sondheim, the titan of musical theater whose decades’ worth of credits as a composer and lyricist included “West Side Story,” “Company” and “Into the Woods.” Here he was as many had seen him in interviews over the years: unsentimental and a bit flip, self-effacing to the point of selling himself short.

Because among musical theater artists of his generation, Sondheim, who died in 2021 at 91, was arguably the most artistic — challenging, unusual, incapable of superficiality in a medium often dismissed as superficial. He was, perhaps to his disappointment, not the best businessman, with shows that rarely lasted long on Broadway. And his work was better for it.

Together, they form a portrait that helps in considering Sondheim’s place among American composers. I say American because Broadway, alongside jazz, is the most homegrown of this country’s music, and his work constantly pushed the art form further. Where so many of his colleagues have operated within standard structures, he, even in writing a 32-bar song, seemed to always ask, “What else is possible?”

It’s also important to consider Sondheim as a distinctly American composer because his writing reflects a creative mind repeatedly fixated on the idea of his homeland, with an ambivalence by turns affectionate and acerbic. It’s there in his lyric contribution to “Gypsy,” arguably the Great American Musical, which the musicologist Raymond Knapp has described as “a version of the American dream that leads, as if inevitably, to striptease.” And it continues, with an unconventional patriotism in “Assassins” and a revealing journey across state lines and years in “Road Show.”

In that sense, Sondheim is not only one of the finest American composers, but also one of the most essential.

“He and Lenny are at the top of that list,” Paul Gemignani, Sondheim’s longtime music director, said, referring also to Leonard Bernstein. “Most Broadway composers are writing pop tunes. Steve never wrote a pop tune. ‘Send in the Clowns’ got lucky.”

Sondheim seemed fated to create musical theater at a higher level than his colleagues. Like Bernstein, he was pedigreed: His mentor, for lyric writing, was Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein; for composition, the modernist Milton Babbitt. Yet he emulated neither.

In an interview with the Sondheim Review, Sondheim said that he was trained by Hammerstein “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” But he thought of them in more classical terms: “sonata form — statement, development and recapitulation.”

I only included the beginning of the article, but I recommend reading the whole thing. Sondheim’s influence and innovation can’t be overstated. We won’t have another like him in our lifetimes.