Customer Reviews

Babbitt: Piano Music Since 1983

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It is hard to disagree that beauty is in the ear of the listener or that not all art is about beauty. Either way, this music is not for everyone. I for one happen to love it and want to get to know it better. I do not read scores as I listen or know enough about music theory to distinguish one form of serialism from another. But when I *listen* to this music, it grabs my attention--demands it--and engages me. I like what I hear; it sounds something like this:

Canonical Form (1983): First, rumbling. Then scurrying in short bursts, forming a foamy kind of glowing, neon effervescence in a black sea. A series of island-like, long bundles of such effervescence with differing colors or forms of lights-I see a bundle of lights, brief blackness, another bundle, blackness, etc. Each island is clearly meant to be experienced as a separate movement or section within the piece. Intense, fine, spare beauty. A kind of Zen simplicity seems to emerge from these complex sets of brilliant dots of light.

Emblems (1989): Subtly different. A bit sharper, edgier, more demonstrative. More fidgety; less foamy display of lighted collectives of notes. Events feel more isolated from one another, harsher. As in "Canonical Form," this comprises more texture than line or harmony. Where "Form" had the feel of a filmy texture, this is more like a series of rips or tears in an underlying texture. But through the course of the piece, the edges of events tend to become softer. Events seem to grow closer to one another and, slowly, seem to run into one another more and more, creating ever longer segments of running notes. Such change is imperceptible at any point in the piece.

Preludes, Interludes, and Poslude (1991): Mischievous, coquettish, teasing. Sparkling needle pricks with warm, glowing auras around them. Spare, but overall, the music is more bright than dark. Energized, but without apparent movement or development. Crystalline, funkless jazz; very pure, as though concentrated.

Tutte le Corde(1994): Cells of timbre-color juxtaposed vertically and horizontally. Each cell is a flash of sound, a few notes in a brief, cool/quick or warmer/steady sequence. Spare, but total silence never occurs; resonances of one cell replace those of the cell before. No apparent movement or development. Overall effect is one of intense activity in silence, of heat surrounded by so much cool that you see the heat, but never feel it.

Maybe Kandinsky felt this way when he was trying to explain how his mid-career abstractions were simply visual analogs of the ultimate abstract art--music. This may not be everyone's cup of tea. But however Babbitt achieves these effects, I'll be back to get more. I'm hooked. Solo piano seems an ideal medium in which to experience them.

Works on this recording are some of the finest of his output for solo piano. These piano pieces are virtuosic and elegant in form and expression, intelligent and emotive on a very high level.

This lovely disc is both a great place to start if you're new to Babbitt's music and the best all-Babbitt piano disc. Babbitt's music is quirky, unusual, and, at times, breathtakingly beautiful like no other I know. I prefer Goldray's more sensual playing to Alan Feinberg's steeliness and certainly to Robert Taub's wild inaccuracies. Very highly recommended.

These are remarkable performances of stunningly beautiful pieces. Emblems and Canonical Form rank among high among my favorites. Stop reading, and just buy it!

Babbitt is 12 tone music with a differance.Every now and then an fmajor triad might pop out of the blue (tutti le corde, at 2:52) leaving the playful chatter reeling in a state of shock.it's delightful stuff,but difficult as well....you need to listen attentively and mr.Goldray is a superb guide,delighting in the delicate,playful interplay of lines.
The disc comes with blissfully humane programme notes by Fred Everett Maus, a reaction against the overly arcane writings of the composer himself, which have done so much to sabotage his success as a composer.

for Babbitt's music is, of all things, not pretty, or at least not 'merely pretty.' They act as though Babbitt has turned to writing lullabies in his dotage. In fact he hasn't. He's doing what he's always been doing-- writing compelling, exotic, occasionally perverse, but always intriguing works that at their best engage the listener's sense of wonder at the vast possibilities of the musical universe. In Goldray Babbitt has found a wonderfully sensitive interpreter who makes Babbitt's music sound richer, more detailed and more capacious than it ever has.

These recordings are certainly among the finest available of Milton Babbitt's piano works--Alan Feinberg's recordings amongst them. Yes, I find them beautiful, with or without a score. But after all, beauty is a subjective term, and relative to how & what one experiences as beautiful(--e.g. beauty in a Bach Keyboard Concerto is different from that which one experiences in a Mozart or Beethoven Concerto. It is thus merely a matter of preference.) One word of caution: Babbitt's intellectually challenging music is not recommended for the intellectually challenged!

Late Babbitt is indeed filled with beauty and enigmatic power. His erudite fealty to dodecaphonicism is unchanging,durable and unshakened in his creativity.
These are works from the Eighties,and after a more rough,gruff period overall.
The 'Canonical Form' is quite rightly a powerful work scouring the entire timbral canvas of the keyboard. Babbitt usually works this way, dividing the keyboard into seven regions,roughly encompassing a major seventh in each, where discreet tones garnered as flotsam materials are jettisoned into each,like detritus, usefull and pleasurable passing one while idly gazing from a bridge on high.Andrew Mead has an impressive book on the hexachordal and trichordal distributions within Babbitt's oeuvre, as well as the serialized rhythmic dimensions of the modulus. Where the functions of discreet pulses every four let us say,is loud for its structural punctuative importance. That's the cognitive feel I receive in this music. Its strength emanates from its controlled spontanaeity summoning the gestures of tranditional beauty, gentle evocative,and suggestive.Babbitt has no equal within this rather cloistered self-referential yet diverse camp of USA 12 Tone.Epigoni have proceded exploiting other dimensions as the rough,leathery phallic power in Shapey or the fastidious dithyrambic images of Wuorinen, or the taciturn tepid effrontery in Donald Martino.
Babbitt's piano music is like a gentle limb passing one in a stream.
'Emblems' is quite similar exploiting even more graphic gesturing,long durational work for this language,any work exceeding 10 minutes mounts Mahlerian dimensions within the structures of dodecaphonic language.
And as we move forward here the music does get constricted,with predictable structures unfolding,as the 'Preludes, Interludes, Postludes'.
Goldrey has the reserved yet impassioned demeanor this music demands,sitting a top it's formidable effulgence.

....this cd contains no voluptuous or beautiful music at all, but rather atonal, amusical combinations of sounds by a mathematician who lacks the slightest fragment of a musical bone in his body. this is music for the eye and head by all-star theorist milton babbitt. recommended listening for the intellectual and mathematically talented deaf person with score in hand.

.....milton babbitt. If not, probably by a Babbitt sound-a-like. The review below that one is simply hilarious. The review at the bottom was written by an honest person. This reviewer hears no music on the CD in question.