Milton Babbitt: An Elizabethan Sextette/Solo Piano Works/Groupwise/Vision and Prayer

Milton Babbitt has often been criticized for being cold, mechanical, and overly intellectual, with his interests in electronics and twelve-tone composition lacking human elements.  However, a recent read of his Words About Music, a compilation of lectures he gave about his views on Schoenberg's system and other aspects of music, while often very technical and beyond this amateur's understanding, revealed someone who had a quick sense of humor, a way of lecturing to students and others and, more importantly, a total passion for his calling.

It's one thing not to like someone's work because it just doesn't reach you, but it's quite another to dismiss it because of perceptions about a composer's qualities.

This recording, then, is an excellent example of showing Babbitt in a variety of settings, including some beautiful vocal works that amply demonstrate a very human approach to composition.  "An Elizabethan Sextette" is, of course, a series of a half-dozen love poems from the Elizabethan era, including one by the famed queen.  The singing is in six parts, so this sense of polyphony adds to the lushness and captivating nature of the works.

Alan Feinberg's piano work on five pieces, four of which are under 2 1/2 minutes with the last, "About Time" running over twelve, is recorded with great clarity, his performance precise, and the composition compelling.  The piano is inherently an evocative instrument and, whatever views there are about twelve-tone composition, the range of sounds generated in these pieces show, to this untutored listener, a certain warmth, as well as of virtuosity and the interesting combinations and recombinations of twelve-tone technique utilized.

"Groupwise," is a concerto for flute, alto flute and piccolo with a piano and string trio accompaniment.  The flute is almost constantly soloing, but the range of sounds generated by the other instruments in conjunction with the main one is striking and alluring.  The piano has its own sort of sound world, while the string trio has its, as well and then there are duos of violin and cello and what appears to be a viola and cello.  Exploring low and high registers, using pizzicato techniques, and unusual arrays of long and short notes are just a few examples of what this untrained ear can pick out as far as notable sound elements.  Simply put, what's attractive about this is the way the various instrument combinations "speak" to one another within the recombinations of the twelve tone set.

Dylan Thomas's poem "Vision and Prayer" is rendered into a striking piece with Babbitt's use of electronic tape from the classic Mark II RCA Synthesizer at the pioneering Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (another recently-read book, Electronic Sound, discussed this instrument and center at some length by author and composer, Joel Chadabe) and the now-90 year old Bethanie Beardslee's utterly amazing soprano vocals from a recording many years earlier than the late 1980s ones on the rest of this album. Here is a way for the electronics to mesh with the human voice so it isn't overly harsh or forbidding--unless you just don't like electronic sound to begin with.

Arnold Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2/Die Gluckliche Hand/Wind Quintet

Conductor Robert Craft's series of recordings of the work of the renowned modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg for the Naxos label includes this interesting combination of works showing the range of material produced by Schoenberg over a long, productive career.

The Chamber Symphony No. 2 was begun in 1906 when the composer was in his early thirties and the first of the two movements bore the hallmarks of the romantic approach to lush melodies and fairly standard harmonies of the era, but with a new ending and different instrumentation when Schoenberg completed the work in 1939.

The second and longer movement, however, is reflective of the changes in the composer's approaches in the three decades since his first attempt.  In a rapid allegro tempo, the movement emphasized polyphony, a syncopated rhythm and a complexity that makes the performing far more challenging from the musicians than the simpler first movement.

A "drama with music," the four movement "Hand of Fate" from 1913, just after Schoenberg's famed "Pierrot Lunaire.  It was an impressionistic pantomime for two silent performers, the main being "The Man," or Schoenberg as an artist, who confronts the ego and its desire for fame.  The opening scene finds a Greek-style chorus offstage mocking "The Man" for his blatant desires as he lies outstretched on the stage.

A woman then appears with a goblet for the man who, taking the drink, does not acknowledge the woman, who then leaves with another man, but later returns, before once again departing.  This mirrored Schoenberg's painful experience of having his wife elope with an artist, who then hung himself, and the spouse, at the urging of the composer's student, Anton Webern, returned to her husband.

In a third scene, the man finds a goldsmithng operation in a cave and determines to do the work better than the workers there.  In so doing, he inadvertently creates a jeweled crown of incredible proportions while crushing the anvil in the shop.  As he gives the object to the stunned workers, they attack him.  Suddenly the woman and the third man she'd left with earlier return and the female ascends a high mountain with the artist in pursuit.  From the pinnacle, however, she flings a large rock down and crushes the artist.

In the final scene, there is a return to the beginnings of the pantomime with the chorus again mocking the prostrate man.

The symbolism is also musical with the artist representing Schoenberg's new method of composing (serialist, twelve-tone row) crushing the tonality of tradition (the anvil) and revealing the crown (atonal music), which he attempts to give to the workers (composers trapped in old forms) who, of course, attack him for his impudence.

Speaking of which, the Wind Quintet of 1923-24, finds Schoenberg deep in the early stages of his serial development, composing a symphonic sonata in four movements that stretches for nearly forty minutes.  Between the new sounds expressed in twelve-tone form, the length of the work, and the fact that it is a technically demanding piece for the tempos involved, this work contrasts significantly with the others.

Adjusting for the atonal form of hearing twelve tones, rather than a piece developed around a single note (or tone, expressed as the tonic), ordered in a row called a "basic set," which forms the basis, but is not the entirety, for the piece, as the tones relate to one another without a dominant tonic.

There is a richness, nimbleness, and range of fascinating instrumental contrasts in this work that can be very rewarding, even for amateurs who don't fully appreciate the systemic concepts embodied in the serial technique.  There is no question, even for the untrained ear, that the dispensing of traditional tonal and harmonic approaches gives the music a more "open ended" form that, to this listener, finds the "speech patterns" among the various instruments compelling and intriguing.

This disc is an excellent survey of different aspects of Schoenberg's evolution as a composer over a thirty-plus year timespan, carried out by Craft's passion and expertise in developing the project of recording all of Schoenberg's published pieces for Naxos.