I Thought You Were The Eschatot Who Knew Something About Music

Stupid people use terms they read in the typical venues of mid-brow, would-be high brow instruction in pretending you really know what you're talking about when you haven't gone through the work of really knowing.  When it's music, Aaron Copland's rule that when a literary man writes two words about music one of them will be wrong is often surpassed by all of them being wrong.  Such is the absurd assertion, accusation, really, that Luigi Dallapiccola wrote “academic serialism”.   Anyone who knows anything about Dallapiccola and his position in music would know that, far from the style of someone like Milton Babbitt or the others who typify the music given that designation, Dallapiccola's 12-tone music displays the continuity with tonal sonorities and gestures and even themes, it is a far less rigorous imposition of serialization than even some of Alban Berg's music.

The accusation, “academic serialist,” is, in fact, meaningless.  It was an invention of people who resented some of the American composers who held important academic posts (Dallapiccola wasn't one of them) and who were influential on juries and boards handing out grants and giving them to their buddies.  That's something that always happens when you give people like that the authority to distribute money.   If you look at the performance schedules of orchestras and other performing organizations, even at the alleged height of their dictatorship, the large majority of even the few “modern” pieces performed were not serial, not even the lyrical 12-tone writing of Dallapiccola.  Probably the most often played of the 12-tone music was the late music of Igor Stravinsky and no one with ears on their head or a brain in it ever called him an “academic serialist”.

The idea that even Milton Babbitt, the quintessential “academic serialist” fit the stereotype is stupid.  Stupy probably doesn't know it but Babbitt's most famous student was Stephen Sondheim.  This description by Anthony Tomassini of Sondheim's study with Babbitt dispels the nonsense.

… During the 50's and 60's Mr. Babbitt and his colleagues on the Princeton-Columbia axis won many disciples.  If simpler, tonal and quasi-tonal music was not actively banned at universities, student awards and tenure appointments made clear that Serialism was the way to intellectual acceptance.

[ I will insert here that I would bet you a hundred dollars that if you reviewed all of the college faculty hired to teach theory and composition in those years, across the United States even the more “traditional” serialists would be few as compared to those who composed tonally centered music.  The Ivys aren't the entire universe, much as they're presented as being such.]

Yet in the early 50's, just as the dissension was breaking out,  Mr. Sondheim, of all people, arrived at Mr. Babbitt's studio fresh from Williams College, eager for private lessons and oblivious to musical politics.  

“ I just wanted to study composition, theory and harmony without the attendant musicology that comes in graduate school,”  Mr. Sondheim said, recently.

[Again, such a musicological approach would study, mostly, tonal music and earlier, modal music.  Arnold Schoenberg wrote four musical textbooks, that I'm aware of, all deal with tonal music, even his latest textbook which, I believe, is the Counterpoint book, finished after his death.  Schoenberg was certainly not an "academic serialist" composer.]

“But I knew I wanted to write for the theater, so I wanted someone who did not disdain theater musc.  Milton, who was a frustrated show composer, was a perfect combination.”'

Mr. Sondheim, who knew little about atonal music, asked Mr. Babbitt to teach him 12-tone technique,  Mr. Babbit refused.  “It would have made no sense for Steve,”  he said.  “Instead, we did analyzes of Mozart symphonies, Beethoven quartets;  we did species counterpoint.”  
The most important thing Mr. Sondheim learned from his teacher was the principle of “long-lined composition,”  he said,  “How do you organize materials to last for 3 minutes, 15, minutes, 33 minutes?  This turned out to be very useful when I started writing long songs and scenes, like “Someone in a Tree” and the opening of Act II in “Sweeney Todd”

But they also studied show songs.  When Mr. Sondheim taught a course at Oxford a few years ago, he presented an analysis of Jerome Kern's “All the Things You Are”  that he learned from Mr. Babbitt.  “I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts armed with all his serious artillery,”  Mr. Sondheim said.  “Of course, now I pay for it.”

For all Mr Babbitt's devotion to great popular music, he sees a clear demarcation between it and the music he dubs, only half-kiddingly,  “nonpopular music.”  That term, he suggests, is more accurate than others that have been used; classical, serious, concert or contemporary classical music.  But he finds the division important and debunks the idea that rock audiences can be lured into the concert hall by crossover music.

“In my day we understood these different categories,”  he said,  “To say that music is music is a very vacuous tautology.”  

So Mr. Babbitt continues to write music that is unrepentantly complex and adamantly nonpopular.  He does care if you listen,  though he's not counting on it.

I think Babbitt's music is complex in the playing and listening but the idea that it's more "complex" than late Beethoven or Bach or, really, Mozart is a silly idea.  It's certainly no more "complex" than the music of Bartok.  It is, though, unpopular, if by that you discount its continuing interest to performers and conductors of the highest ability who continue to play it, despite the declarations of the lower-mid-brow repeaters of such terms as "academic serialism".  I think what they really mean is that it's both hard for them to follow and to ignore the way the pop music they favor is.  There is music that is made to be listened to and music that is made to be bought, become familiar with and to not really hear after it's been assimilated.  Like other consumer junk, its facile consumption is the key to its high volume of sales.  I'll bet Nickleback has more people familiar with their stuff than Sondheim.