Milton Babbitt's taking-off point was Schoenberg's twelve-tone method but he extends serialism to include rhythm, dynamics, tone color, and speed, as well as pitch, harmony, and counterpoint. The computer is a natural instrument for Babbitt. He thinks with it and through it. With the computer, sounds can be superimposed; retrograde progressions become available by reversing the numbers; and all manner of speed changes, including rhythmic augmentation, diminution, and fluctuations of tempo can be accurately programmed. The serialization of rhythm, for instance, involves ordering clurational values in a graduated scale. Various rhythmmic patterns and variants can then be programmed by multiplying or fractionalizing a proportional mathematical series. It could be a simple arithmetical progression such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or something more complex like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Dynamic values-levels of soft and loud, fade-outs and fade-ins-may also be rotated in series. The computer (Fig. 423), in contrast to the limitations of conventional musical instruments, has the capability to control a limitless supply of musical and nonmusical sounds. With so vast a range of sonorities available to it, the computer can be programmed to perform as a composing machine. As such it can construct works based on self-generated numbers, or become the partner of a human composer. Babbitt's Vision and Prayer (1961) for soprano and synthesizer merges the nonelectronic and electronic worlds of sound with a soprano singing live along with a tape produced by the computer (in this case the RCA Mark II Electronic Sound Synthesizer that fills an entire room at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). The text by Dylan Thomas is intoned by the soprano in wide-skipping intervals, while the computer's tape deals with the tone quality and the structure of the poem. It is not surprising that Babbitt was attracted to a poem like Dylan Thomas' Vision and Prayer. It is a well-known anthology piece, a sonorous vision that reads with a sense of verbal grandeur. Yet it is a serial poem, the length of the lines predetermined by the number of syllables that, according to the series, it must possess. The number series I to 9 yields on the printed page two visual designs, each with seventeen lines. The first design (for the first six stanzas) proceeds on the basis of one syllable for the first line, two for the second, three for the third, and so on up to nine syllables for the ninth line. The series then moves in retrograde. The tenth line has eight syllables, the eleventh has seven, and so on until at the seventeenth line one arrives again at a one-syllable word. This progression-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6 5, 4, 3, 2, 1-yields a diamond-shaped stanza. For the second set of six stanzas, the syllables per line follow the progression 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, which produces on the page two triangles linked at their common apex (line 9). The first and last stanzas follow:
Who ............. I turn the corner of prayer and burn Babbitt also produces purely computerized works as in his Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), a work on which he has commented thus: The title Ensembles refers to the multiple characteristics of the work. In both its customary meaning and its more general one signifying "collections," the term refers more immediately to the different pitch, rhythmic, registral, textural, and timbral "ensembles" associated with each of the many so delineated sections of the composition, no two of which are identical, and no one of which is more than a few seconds duration in this ten-minute work.... Also, in its meaning of "set" the word "ensemble" relevantly suggests the, I trust, familiar principles of tonal and temporal organizations which are employed in this as in other of my compositions. Babbitt's aesthetic stance rests upon an appeal to intellectual rigor as the basis for the putting together (i.e., the composing) of a piece of music. It is an uncompromising view that makes no concession to immediate popular understanding. As he himself has said, "the composer's first obligation is to his art, to the evolution of music and the advancement of musical concepts."
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