Lewin on Babbitt on Schoenberg

In October 1998, I received a surprise package in the mail from David Lewin. It was a 12-page manuscript, 7 pages of which were a single-spaced typescript and 5 pages of which were musical examples, charts, and a mathematical proof. It was accompanied by this note:

Following are 12 excerpts from Lewin's 1983 lecture.

I have numbered these excerpts for reference in any future discussions or commentary.

My thanks to June Lewin for permission to reprint this material here.

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The Old Order Changeth

Milton Babbitt

May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011

The Old Order Changeth (1998)

Ursula Oppens, piano

I am somewhat sad that people talk so much of atonality, of twelve-tone systems, of technical methods when it comes to my music.  All music, all human work, has a skeleton, a circulatory and nervous system.  I wish that my music should be considered as an honest and intelligent person who comes to us saying something he feels deeply and which is of significance to all of us.

– Arnold Schoenberg

(in Schoenberg, edited by Merle Armitage)

[Other composers] would say to me, "This twelve-tone thing seems interesting.  I've tried working with it but it gives me problems.  I'm okay for the first seven or eight notes, but then for the last four or five notes – I don't know what to do with them."  The temptation always was to say, "Well, stick them in the contrabassoon and nobody will notice!"

This kind of misapprehension however reflected a much deeper one: the notion that twelve-tone music involved counting up to twelve.  There were all kinds of strictures that people imagined were associated with this . . . .  People imagined that you couldn't repeat a note until all twelve had been sounded.  Well obviously such people had never looked at a piece that anybody called twelve-tone.  Such a terrible confusion of the representation of a ... row with the whole conception of the structural function of ordering was pathetic and led to fundamental misunderstandings, many of which, I'm afraid, still persist.

– Milton Babbitt

(in Milton Babbitt : Words about Music

edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus)