Bernstein, Zachary - 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.

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CONTENTS

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