Milton Babbitt: An Elizabethan Sextette (2007)

Getting to know Milton Babbitt’s music is like discovering a new world. For more than forty years Babbitt has been publishing compositions that explore the ramifications of Arnold Schoenberg’s epochal insight, and each successive work opens up new vistas or reveals striking new perspectives within the twelve-tone universe. The present recording spans Babbitt’s compositional career, touching on most of the musical veins that run through his work. The variety of his compositions is immediately apparent from their diversity of ensemble and scope; their underlying communality emerges upon greater familiarity. On first hearing, An Elizabethan Sextette and Playing for Time would appear to have little in common; yet they contain identical underlying abstract structures. About Time employs a simple variant of the same structure, and Groupwise contains structures closely related to those in the aforementioned works. Briefly put, these underlying structures are contrapuntal webs of twelve-tone rows, craftily woven together to yield a maximal variety of ways of combining segments of different rows into collections of the total chromatic. Supple enough to afford a wealth of different interpretations both of detail and mode of presentation, these contrapuntal networks nevertheless preserve certain recognizable large-scale attributes in all their incarnations.

Tracklist

1. An Elizabethan Sextette
2. Minute Waltz
3. Partitions
4. It Takes Twelve To Tango
5. Playing for Time
6. About Time
7. Groupwise
8. Vision And Prayer

Bethany Beardslee, soprano
Alan Feinberg, piano
The Group for Contemporary Music
Harvey Sollberger, conductor

New World Records NWCR521