Celebrating 60 Years of the [i]Symposium[/i] (1961-2021): Learning from our Past

01 May 2021 The 2021 College Music Symposium is a true milestone as it marks the 60th year of the society’s journal, which was first published in 1961. Perusing through these decades of issues, thousands of articles, essays, and reviews, is both fascinating and...

Is It Possible to Sing the Prologue to Orlando di Lasso’s [i]Prophetiae Sibyllarum[/i] in Tune?

05 June 2013 What is the limit of applicability of this sort of analysis? Certainly it would be ludicrous for a piano piece by Milton Babbitt. Remember, however, that studies (see Endnote 13) have shown a preference by string players for PT over ET—this has...

[i]The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and his Associates[/i] by Frank Tirro - [i]CMS Sourcebooks in American Music No. 5[/i]

17 June 2016 trombonist Mike Zwerin, and it not only sports jazz musicians, but also includes such influential modern composers as Milton Babbitt, Georges Auric, Paul Hindemith, Frederick Delius, Ferruccio Busoni, and Erik Satie. Because of the wide net he casts for...

Emergent Dissonance and the Resolution of a Paradox

01 October 1996 als dissonant erscheinen. 71The authoritative (and perhaps seminal) statement of this view is found in two essays by Milton Babbitt, "Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music," in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, eds. B....

Speaking Drums and (Im)mute(able) Books: Jazz as a Bridge Between West African and Western European Cultural Paradigms

31 August 1996 of Western art music, so much so that it results in the limited audience appeal typical of Arnold Shönberg and Milton Babbitt. It would be an oversimplification to posit one specific cause for the demise of bop's popularity, but most likely, bop was...

Review Essay of Five Music Appreciation Textbooks

01 October 1997 value received from music is equal to the effort taken to understand and actively engage the listening experience. As Milton Babbitt stated (when referring to "difficult" modern music), "Like all communication,... music presupposes a suitably equipped...

Schenker's Parallelisms, Schoenberg's Motive, and Referential Motives: Notes on Pluralistic Analysis

01 October 2001 Accounts of Tonal Music," Music Theory Spectrum 14 (1992): 150-70. 5The concept of referential motives is discussed in Milton Babbitt, Words About Music, eds. Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),...

A Reevaluation of Isorhythm in the "Old Corpus" of the Montpellier Codex

01 October 2011 and Its Development," 27-58, and Sanders, "The Medieval Motet," 497‒573. 5Serialist composers such as Anton Webern and Milton Babbitt are most often mentioned, but the technique has also been used by twentieth-century composers as diverse as Olivier...

Toward a Pedagogy of Composition: Exploring Creative Potential

01 October 1986 all precompositional and compositional choices were made by the composer from the thinking approach. Certain pieces by Milton Babbitt incorporating combinatorial principles, as well as certain types of computer-generated music, can also be said to be...

Survivor from Darmstadt

01 October 1985 just a moment, having Phil Glass, Charles Wuorinen, David Del Tredici, Henry Mancini, George Crumb, Laurie Anderson, Milton Babbitt, and Nam June Paik (with their best students) thrown together twenty-four hours a day, listening to each other's lectures...

Order and Freedom: The Composer's Dilemma

01 October 1984 more completely. The result has been called "a classic example of such procedures."4 Similar procedures were used by Milton Babbitt in his Three Compositions for Piano, composed in 1948. But the rigid controls of serialism began to pall. Hans Werner...

Oral History and Music History in Our Time

01 October 1979 in The Music Makers. Then, educators as different as Carl Schachter, the music theorist, Michael Steinberg, the critic, Milton Babbitt, the composer, and Julius Levine, the bass player, deplore the separation between theorists, composers, and performers...

Musical Pattern Perception

01 October 1979 How the human mind structures its complex environment is a topic that has been explored for generations by individuals from a wide variety of disciplines. Musicians now seem to be generally aware that pattern perception is highly relevant to their...

Analysis Applied to Performance

01 October 1979 in Music," SYMPOSIUM 14 (1974), 146-148. Also see p. 150. 2I first became aware of this relationship in about 1959 when Milton Babbitt pointed it out to a class in which I was a student. 3The word "layer" is used here to translate Schenker's term...

The New Music Ensemble in the University

01 October 1978 inherent differences between the Music the Whole World Knows and Loves and much contemporary compositional thought, as Milton Babbitt's provocative article "Who Cares If You Listen?" illustrates. (His words were written for High Fidelity...

And Now We Begin—A Survey of Recent Theory Texts

01 October 1973 must come from the tonal period for harmony and counterpoint, and possibly the modal period for counterpoint as well. Milton Babbitt argued for a Schenkerian theory of tonal music,4 Leo Kraft for that plus Fux's species counterpoint,5 and William...

The Contemporary Performing Ensemble

01 October 1968 Douglas Leedy, Roger Reynolds, Yuji Takahashi, and Yannis Xenakis; other composers in the broad-based repertoire are Milton Babbitt, Roy Harris, Ulysses Kay, and Walter Piston. Information may be obtained from Paul Chihara, Coordinator, Twice Ensemble,...

The Crisis in Theory Teaching

01 October 1965 of a Symposium entitled The Crisis in Theory Teaching. The other authors were A. Tillman Merritt, Andrew Imbrie, and Milton Babbitt. Their articles also appear in SYMPOSIUM Volume 5. This discussion intends to convey to our readers current ideas on the...

The Crisis in Theory Teaching: A Grain of Salt

01 October 1965 a Symposium entitled The Crisis in Theory Teaching. The other authors were A. Tillman Merritt, Howard Boatwright, and Milton Babbitt. Their articles also appear in SYMPOSIUM Volume 5. This discussion intends to convey to our readers current ideas on the...

Expanding Frames of Reference: Teaching the History of Electro-Acoustic Music

01 October 2006 listening has been required for decades to appreciate various forms of jazz and concert music, from Charles Ives to Milton Babbitt to Cecil Taylor and beyond. As do all forms of art and music, electro-acoustic music has its own tension between "high...