MUSIC
Hands off
MICHAEL NYMAN
Milton Babbitt's name and music are likely to remain unknown in this country. He is an ex-jazz pianist, expert on pre-1950 pop music, father of American electronic music, Big White Chief of the formidable post- Schoenberg network at Princeton; his music polarises his staggering interdisciplinary intellectual range--covering information theory, computer science, mathematics, logic, linguistic philosophy; he considers advanced music analogous to advanced physics—totally beyond the comprehension of 'music-lovers' who should not be allowed contact with it.
Babbitt was in town last week to spread his wisdom to young composers at a Com- posers' Weekend (held by the Society for the Promotion of New Music) and, if they cannot accept his very narrow and specific musical 'aesthetic', they might at least deduce some need for a compositional dis- cipline, a commodity spread pretty thin amongst the young at the moment.
Babbitt introduced the concert of British and American electronic music held at the Royal Festival Hall to launch publicly the British Society for Electronic Music, whose projected studio would belatedly drag English music into the second half of this technological century. Babbitt's own En- sembles for Synthesiser—the synthesiser is a self-contained electronic instrument which combines in itself all the elaborate para- phernalia of the tape studio—certainly makes most other 'advanced' music sound like simple-minded babblings. He works with rather than in the medium, but although traditional methods of organisation, in the shape of rhythmic motifs, are easily heard, Babbitt's complex serial organisation makes maximum functional use of the 'lesser' musical elements, like timbre and rhythm duration. The result—a fascinating high- density, ever-changing integrated chain of events—makes perception very difficult as there is little or no note wastage.
But this approach is only one of many 'answers' for electronic music. Vladimir Ussachevsky's Of Wood and Brass is built from the modifications to a small range of wood and brass sounds, and is a sort of exploratory autobiography of the chosen elements. This piece used laborious manual techniques which have now been made re- dundant by the computer. Yet, ironically, the two computer pieces included in the concert were stylistically more old-fashioned than Babbitt's: J. K. Randall's Midget: seemed little more than a 'Cesar Franck meets late Stravinsky having overheard a conversation between Weill and Schoenberg', while the workmanlike, but slightly turgid, Connolly/Zinovieff Obbligati I/ (English) played off computer-reconstituted instru- mental sounds against the live instruments themselves—a combination which sounds a little stale to my ear.
Live electronics, in which the sounds are modified electronically at the same time as they are produced, were represented in the concert by the young English composer, Richard Orton's Sampling Afield. This was the liveliest piece, at its most successful where changes of the choral timbres and textures were slowest and simplest, allow- ing the ring-modulation (in the hands of Hugh Davies) to transform the inputs with the greatest variety of distortions—most obviously where each of the choral groups alternated a straight C major chord. On one hearing, with dynamic levels frustratingly low, it seemed to me that perhaps Orton had made too many samples without really defining the perimeter of the field.
This impression was confirmed by the not altogether convincing succession of piano/ 'cello events in Orton's Cycle performed during the Cheltenham Festival's 'Aleatoric Adventure', which Orton had devised. The still staid Cheltenham Festival was trying to be 'with it' in a cheapjack production hardly calculated to turn on the locals, though I particularly liked Tom Phillips's quiescent Ornamentik played by a modified tea-shoppe piano trio, presided over by the exquisite six-note arpeggios of John Tilbury. This should have pleased discreet Saturday- afternoon Cheltenham as a refined alterna- tive to all those ageing ghost-composers who still haunt the Festival's programmes.
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