Word: babbittical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HARRY LEVIN Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature...
...radical post-war avant-grade split into those wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic...
After several Faculty members--including Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History, and Harry Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature--said that the committee studies might prejudge upcoming negotiations between the Corporation and Radcliffe's College Council, President Pusey replied that the Corporation would take no further action without Faculty study and advice. The resolution then passed unanimously...
...standards, even Stravinsky and Bartok are somewhat old hat. "The tradition that I am upholding is the tradition of the continuance of music," he says. He has introduced new works by Milton Babbitt and Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer...
...musical vocabularies. The result has been that the schism between composer and listener, which is an unmistakable sign of health, has become so broad that orchestras will not play new works. Even when they do, as in the cases of Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto or Milton Babbitt's Relata II, they cause outbreaks of hysterical recrimination, especially in those citadels of analytical dross, The New York Times and The New Yorker. The modern composer faces an audience whose taste is a brew of remembrance and indigestion, appealing for Beethoven, Tchaikowsky, and Verdi and refusing to acknowledge the existence...