The Legacy of Milton Babbitt: Post-WW II Serialism in the America

[Society for Music Theory]

The Legacy of Milton Babbitt:
Post-WW II Serialism in the Americas
Wright State University Department of Music, March 3-4, 2012

Colloquium on Post-WW II Serialism in North America
Andrew Mead, Keynote Speaker
Sat., March 3, 2-8 p.m. and Sun., March 4, 9 a.m.-12 p.m.

Concert: The Legacy of Milton Babbitt Sun., March 4, 2012, 2 p.m.
Featuring Winston Choi, Franklin Cox, Gerald Noble,
Thomas Sobieski, and Matthew Snyder

The 2012 American Innovators conference, originally intended to take
place last year in celebration of Milton Babbitt's lifework, will
instead honor his memory. The main theme of this conference will be
the legacy of Milton Babbitt and other leading figures of post-WW II
serialism in North America, focusing both on past accomplishments and
new perspectives for serialism.

One of the primary aims of this conference is to honor the legacy of
Milton Babbitt, who in many ways revived the serial tradition in the
United States, with a stock-taking of the serial project as a whole
and of the particular paradigm of serialism that Babbitt was
instrumental in formulating.

A wide range of topics involving aesthetic, cultural, and political
concerns are welcome. Some specific questions that might be explored
include the following:

1) What was the significance for both composition and theoretical
understanding in Babbitt's formalization of serialism? What problems
did Babbitt's paradigm help solve, and are there problems still
remaining to be solved? What are the limitations of this paradigm?

2) Schoenberg's rationale for his twelve-tone method was grounded on
what he viewed as an artistic and cultural crisis. He believed that
common-practice tonality was facing a threat to its viability as the
common language for modern art music, and that no credible system had
previously been developed that could integrate the wealth of new
harmonic and expressive resources that had appeared in recent
decades.

Can one by analogy understand Babbitt's serialism as a response to a
then-current artistic and cultural crisis, to the loss of viability of
a shared idiom, and/or to the development of new harmonic and
expressive resources? Is, for example, Richard Taruskin's thesis of a
cultural reaction to the Cold War a credible candidate for this
crisis? Are there other candidates, or is the notion of a crisis
unnecessary for assessing Babbitt's significance as a composer?

3) Is Babbitt's serialism compatible with Schoenberg's? Can
Babbitt's serialism be integrated with Schoenberg's pantonal
conception of his twelve-tone method? Is serial music necessarily
atonal? Can it be conceived of as an expansion of tonality, or does
one preclude the other?

4) Is our musical culture still facing a threat to the validity of
common-practice tonality as the privileged language for modern art
music, or, as neo-tonalists assert, has the crisis been overcome by
the rejection of serialism? Is this overcoming the end of
progressively-conceived musical history, or are there other models
available for understanding progress in the arts?

5) Was Babbitt's system the culmination of the serialist project?
Are there tensions between the American serialist conceptions of
Babbitt, Donald Martino, Charles Wuorinen, and Harvey Sollberger, to
name but a few composers? In the last half-century, have other crises
arisen to which Babbitt's system was not designed to respond?

6) How has Babbitt's formalization of serialism influenced non-
serialist Modernist composers such as Elliott Carter? Has Babbitt's
approach had significant influence on Minimalists, post-Minimalists,
neo-Tonalists, or improvisational musicians?

7) Babbitt's claim to the mantle of the Schoenberg tradition was
contested by European serialists. Was the competition between the two
directions mutually productive or destructive? Is there any hope of
harmonizing the two traditions? Is it possible to build bridges
between Babbitt's system and Spectralism, New Complexity, or other
recent compositional movements?

8) Can Babbitt's serialism be productively applied to microtonality,
or might other serial approaches prove more productive?

9) How can one assess the political/cultural legacy of Babbitt's
influence throughout the cultural scene and within the American
academy?

All conference participants are invited as guests to the Sunday
afternoon concert featuring music by Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino,
Charles Wuorinen, and others.

Presentations at the Colloquium should last no longer than 30 minutes,
followed by a 10-minute question/discussion session. Either abstracts
(maximum three pages, excluding figures, tables, and bibliography) or
complete papers may be submitted. When submitting a proposal, please
indicate what media will be used in the presentation (CD, projector,
etc.). An electronic classroom with stereo will be available for the
Colloquium; the room will also have an upright piano.

All submissions should include full contact information for the author
and indicate the author's academic position, if applicable. The
deadline for submission of paper or abstract is Feb. 10, 2011.

Some or all papers from the colloquia may be published in the
forthcoming "American Innovators" book series.

Submissions can be sent electronically to frank...@yahoo.com or
mailed to:

Dr. Franklin Cox
Department of Music, Wright State University
3640 Col. Glenn Highway
Dayton, OH 45424-0001
(937) 767-1165