| Abstrakt: |
Milton Babbitt's music is constructed from a hierarchy of exhaustive lists; one can thus understand completeness in his pieces as a result of the completion of these lists. In many cases, however, the endings of pieces are not coordinated with the completion of exhaustive lists. This challenges the significance of the concepts, drawn from cognitive psychology and Schenkerian organicism, that Babbitt uses to justify his hierarchical compositional techniques. A new model of interpreting completeness in Babbitt's music, incorporating Jonathan D. Kramer's notion of "vertical time," is suggested as an alternative approach. Newly available sketch materials from the Milton Babbitt Collection of the Library of Congress shed light on aspects of Babbitt's compositional process, including some of the motivations that led him away from hierarchical completeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
