By: Joseph Straus , CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Milton Babbitt’s song, “A Widow’s Lament in Springtime” (1951) is based on a precompositional design known as a “trichordal array.” In the phrase discussed here, there are four linear aggregates (played in the voice part and three registrally distinct melodies in the piano part) and four vertical aggregates (composed of one trichord from each of the four melodies). Both linear and vertical aggregates are concerned with projecting and developing the same small repertoire of trichords and hexachords.
Bibliography:
Andrew Mead, An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Zachary Bernstein, Thinking In and About Music: Analytical Reflections on Milton Babbitt’s Music and Thought
(Oxford University Press, 2021).
About the Author:
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is also the author of Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (4th ed., Norton, 2016).