Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1997

Abstract

It is a great honor and a personal pleasure to participate in this Symposium in honor of Milton Babbitt. Babbitt's work, his "thinking in and thinking about music," have so profoundly shaped my own work and the field in which I work, the field of music theory, that it is hard imagine what either would have been without him. I have a deep and grateful sense of his influence on me.

Babbitt's more general influence, his role in shaping our larger musical culture, is the topic of this article. I want to focus in particular on the 1950s and 1960s in this country. It is frequently asserted that this was period in which Babbitt and his serial approach dominated the American musical scene. Indeed, the notion of a serial "tyranny" has taken firm hold in journalistic and musicological accounts of the period.

Comments

Copyright 1997. Perspectives of New Music. Used by permission. This article first appeared in Perspectives of New Music vol 35 number 2, 1997.

Included in

Music Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.