Thinking in and about Music

Thinking In and About Music offers a new look at Milton Babbitt's music, one which brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality in order to provide a multi-faceted look at one of the twentieth century's most fascinating musical minds.

Zachary Bernstein is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. His writings on twentieth-century music have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Online, Theory and Practice, and Oxford Bibliographies Online.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Permissions
About the companion website
Chapter 1 On Milton Babbitt, Schenkerian
Introduction
Goethe, Schenker, and Hierarchical Organicism
Babbitt and Schenker
The Implications of the Series
Analepsis and Prolepsis
Conclusion
Chapter 2 Construction, Cognition, and the Role of the Surface
A Way into Emblems
Rudolf Carnap and Phenomenalistic Construction
George Miller, Information Processing, and Memory
Babbitt's Cognitively Informed Compositional Techniques
Organicism as Cognitive Heuristic: The "Schenker Memorative Approach"
"The Requirements"--and Responsibilities--"of Cognitive Communication"
Conclusion: Babbitt's Psychology and the Analysis of His Music
Chapter 3 The Seam in Babbitt's Compositional Development: Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments
"My Most Difficult Piece"
Trichordal and All-Partition Arrays
"Nearly Divine" Proportions
Generative Polyvocality
Extending the Trichordal Array
The Arrays of Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments
"Invariants of Order Embedded in Invariants of Content"
Chapter 4 The Surface and the Series in Composition for Four Instruments
Chapter 5 Poetic Form and Psychological Portraiture in Babbitt's Early Texted Works
Introduction
"The Widow's Lament in Springtime"
Du
Two Sonnets
Vision and Prayer
Philomel
Conclusion
Chapter 6 Completeness and Temporality
Introduction
Over-, Under-, and Multiple Completeness
Signals and Verticality
Conclusion: "Sounds of Relations"
Chapter 7 Babbitt's Gestural Dialectics
Introduction: The First Measure of Post-Partitions
Sources of Embodied Energetics: Kinesthetic Empathy and Musical Forces
The Gestural Function of Virtuosity
Liminal Periodicity and the Threat of Discontinuity
Serial Anomalies and Text Setting
Rhetorical Closing Gestures in Three Late Piano Pieces
Conclusion: Babbitt's Gestural Music and Formalist Discourse
Afterword: "Anything Vital is Problematical"
Glossary
References