By: Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet has long been understood as the epitome of his mature
twelve-tone style, based on hexachordal inversional combinatoriality. The composer Milton
Babbitt lavished analytical attention on this piece, especially the opening of its third movement.
This video presents and illustrates Babbitt’s penetrating analysis, which encompasses both
systematic twelve-tone features as well as local motivic associations.
twelve-tone style, based on hexachordal inversional combinatoriality. The composer Milton
Babbitt lavished analytical attention on this piece, especially the opening of its third movement.
This video presents and illustrates Babbitt’s penetrating analysis, which encompasses both
systematic twelve-tone features as well as local motivic associations.
Bibliography:
Milton Babbitt, “Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition,” The Score and I. M. A. Magazine
12 (1955): 53–61. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen
Peles with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton University
Press, 2003): 38–47.
Milton Babbitt, “Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant, Journal of Music Theory 5/1
Milton Babbitt, “Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant, Journal of Music Theory 5/1
(1961): 72–94. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles
with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus (Princeton University
Press, 2003): 86–108.
Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus, eds. Milton Babbitt: Words About Music (The
Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus, eds. Milton Babbitt: Words About Music (The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)
Joseph N. Straus, “Babbitt the Analyst,” Music Theory Spectrum 34/1 (2012): 26–33.
Joseph N. Straus, “Babbitt the Analyst,” Music Theory Spectrum 34/1 (2012): 26–33.
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).