Response to Babbitt and Rochberg: Accessible vs. Alien Styles of Musical Composition

Gabrielle Richardson, Contemporary Music (April 12, 2011)

The emergence of atonality and serialization in mid-twentieth century musical composition sparked a keen debate among schools of musicians and critics over whether or not music should be conceptualized intuitively or intellectually. The main arguments focus on the question of music being “accessible” to the theoretically uneducated public as opposed to being “alien” and unintelligible due to its complexity. Two particular figures came to the forefront of the debate, Milton Babbitt and George Rochberg, and indeed the debate’s origin can be directly attributed to Babbitt, for he is responsible for truly ushering serialism into the American musical heritage.

In 1958, composer, mathematician, and professor Milton Babbitt wrote an article entitled “Who Cares if You Listen?” (“The Composer As Specialist”) in which he delivered the opinion that music, in its complexity, should not be compelled to cater to the musically uneducated, or laymen, of the public sphere; rather, he defended the atonal, serial, highly scientific, mathematical, and complex nature of his music by designating musical academics and in-the-know listeners as his intended audience. Babbitt believed that “the composer’s first obligation is to his art, to the evolution of music and the advancement of new musical concepts.” In essence, he stated in the article that not only is it not necessary for all audiences to understand complex music, but that in some cases it is not meant for all audiences to understand it. In a sense, Babbitt’s position is one of both accessibility and inaccessibility: his music is accessible to those who are already musically educated, those who desire to be educated on it, or those who appreciate it for itself; his music is inaccessible in that one does need to be musically educated in order to fully understand its subtleties, and also because of the fact that public opinion hinges so much upon spoon-fed delivery of music. Babbitt was the first to show a turning inward to composing for the art itself and not for public opinion; he did care if people listened to his music, and he wanted people to experience it, but on his terms only. In essence, Babbitt represents the end of composers’ works being dependent upon public trend.

Babbitt’s article sparked much debate and in 1971 was countered by a riposte of George Rochberg, professor of music at University of Pennsylvania. Rochberg was of the opinion that music should be accessible to all listeners, no matter their level of musical training, and that flooding music with scientific and mathematical focus removes the elements of emotion and intuition in the work; he believed that atonality and serialism dehumanize the music and open up the possibility for music becoming a slave to scientific methodology rather than creative, artistic motivation. Rochberg, earlier in his career, had dabbled in twelve-tone and serial music, before reverting to more “classical” forms of Romantic and previous periods; it is interesting that he found the former to be inaccessible even though he was well educated in the style.

Of the two articles, I agree more with Babbitt’s position on compositional style, for several reasons. Firstly, I agree with Babbitt’s confident view that music need not cater to the public opinion. While I am personally of the opinion that there is not a single individual alive who cannot touched in some manner by some style of music, I do believe that certain music is, and should be, stratified, just like every other discipline in life. For example: the most common, unspecialized individual understands and uses basic math for every day calculations (to buy gas, to divvy out allowances to children, to count, to tell time, etc.), however this does not mean they enjoy, comprehend, or need to utilize advanced analytical trigonometry. Specialized forms of math are inaccessible to them because they do not know how to use it.; just because it is inaccessible does not mean that it should not be so. There is nothing wrong with the common individual not being familiar with the workings higher math; so it is with music – the musical laymen find music accessible on their level and enjoy it to the fullest, and there is no reason why every single person who listens to music should need to be theoretically educated so as to comprehend the advanced workings of atonality. This would be like telling every person who enjoys gazing at art, no matter how un-artistically inclined they may be, that they must be able to pick up a paintbrush and create the equivalent of a Botticelli in order to fully find art accessible.

Secondly, Rochberg seems to be creating a dichotomy by associating classical music with morality and twelve-tone with immorality when he speaks of serialism’s amorality, dehumanization, and irrelevance to the genuine essence and purposes of art. He plays with the position that unlimited pursuit of scientific methodology as it applies to music erodes the essential human element and results in a blindness of consequence to future music. I believe his to be a weak argument, at best, simply because of the fact that all music and compositional styles – atonality or tonality, integral serialism or minimalism, musica ficta or musique concrete – stem from the intuitive urge of a composer and are developed by intellect. To use a Cokerism: a monkey could theoretically take all the available pitches in the world, throw them up in the air, and they would come down as Beethoven’s 5^th, but it is highly improbable. The point (as I interpret it) is that there must be a process of motivation, consideration, deliberation, limitation, and execution involved in any compositional style: the motivation may be intellectual or intuitive, but either way it stems from a function of the natural human composition; the same follows for the rest of the process. When a dichotomy between moral and immoral music is formed based on whether or not it is tonal or atonal, that seems to me more dehumanizing than the actual scientific nature of the music because it ignores the fact that humans were responsible for the current system. In the case of musique concrete and such works as created with Babbitt’s synthesizer, even if the music has no human performance content or error factor, it still has the virtues of being humanly conceived and created. Only when we actually progress to machines being personally and intuitively motivated to the deliberate intellectual composition of their own music, with no human catalyst or intervention whatsoever, will I accept Rochberg’s claim that science dehumanizes music and makes it inaccessible.

I do find one point of Rochberg’s to be valid for consideration, and that is the point that focusing too much on science takes away the identity of music as an art. This is a fine line; while I do not believe that science in music as a tool or catalyst is dehumanizing to the art, I do believe that when science becomes music or vice versa is when the individual nature of the discipline is lost. Music has an emotional power the source of which science cannot identify, science can only explain the manifestations of the emotion in the listener; I think that this is the main thing that separates music from science in so far as individual disciplines, and feel that although we should not shy from using science in music for affects or developing compositional styles, we should be wary of forgetting that music has an innate emotional power that affects everyone regardless of what style it is or how mechanical it may be.

Finally, I feel that Babbitt’s article, by virtue of it being the first expression of its kind by a composer on his certain style of music, is more logically presented than Rochberg’s, because though Babbitt defends his own style of complex composing, he also matter-of-factly states that not all people are meant to be connoisseurs of his style, thus he acknowledges a dual perspective of the accessible and the alien in his article. Rochberg, on the other hand, tries to argue the accessible/alien nature of music from a philosophical and aesthetical perspective, which turns in weakly supported points without addressing any possible rebuttals. It is my personal opinion, based upon the two texts as well as my own intuition and intellect, that Babbitt’s overall position is more logical in terms of the self-actualization of music.