In Memoriam: Milton Babbitt and John Barry

Two big losses in the music world happened over the weekend, and I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them here.

Composer Milton Babbitt died on Saturday at the age of 94. Babbitt was a giant in the American avant-garde - a total serialist who arranged the parameters of musical sound (pitch, rhythm, envelope, timbre, anything he could control as a composer) into complex systems to such a sophisticated degree that he just about ended the possibilities of composing as a total serialist. And at the same time, he helped start the next big thing, helping to develop the first electronic music synthesizer with RCA, founding the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and fueling one of the few genuine revolutions in music.

Babbitt wrote an article for High Fidelity in 1958 which explained his strong belief that music should be researched and studied in the Academy the same way science and mathematics are (read it here), which the editors cheekily entitled "Who Cares If You Listen?" It's a fascinating read -- without the title, it's an interesting argument for allowing musicians to work with sound as experimentalists in a safe space, but it became known as a primary document in the establishment of ivory tower elitism in the United States.

He wasn't entirely opposed to populist music, as much as his reputation indicates the contrary, though. Among his students, the most recognizable name outside of the New Music world was Stephen Sondheim, who really put self-indulgent musical theater on the map. And Babbitt flirted with Gunther Schuller's Third Stream concepts a bit, as well. While a lot of his music strikes me as elegant if somewhat uninteresting, I've always had a thing for his 1957 composition "All Set" for jazz ensemble. There's something genuinely swinging about the aggressive lack of swing. I've heard performances of the piece that bring out the "jazz" in it better than what I link to here, but the sound quality is good, and the commentary on the screen is another nice read:



Yesterday, composer John Barry died at 77 of a heart attack. The celebrated film composer is best known for the soundtracks of 11 James Bond films, but in poking around today for something different to post, I realized just how ubiquitous his music was in the second half of the 20th Century. I can think of no one whose orchestration sounds like his, and I can only come up with a handful of composers for western orchestra who can be as easily identified by tone color alone (Messiaen for sure, maybe Xenakis and Holst). He was another electronic music pioneer of sorts, adding some very early synthesizer parts to his scores in the 1960s and 1970s.

Here's a classic Barry recording that isn't from a Bond film - the theme to the 1970s TV drama The Persuaders: