2009/01/01 by Richard Taruskin · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Musical #Musicology #Babbitt #Rite #Politics #Art #Art history #Humanities #Philosophy #Literature #Theology #Political science #Law
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/jm.2009.26.2.274
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Good heavens, I've never thought of it," Milton Babbitt exclaimed when a Canadian journalist asked him about the possible influence of the Cold War on his thinking about-hence his writing of-his music. "It certainly didn't have any influence on me in any musical way," he insisted, even while admitting that the politics of earlier decades had "profoundly influenced his politics and philosophy," according to the interviewer, Paul Mitchinson-and even after Martin Brody had broken the ground for musical studies of "Cold War culture" with the seminal article to which Peter Schmelz makes reference in his introduction: a study precisely of Babbitt, conducted not by (let's say) an unsympathetic West Coast music historian, but from within the family of academic serialists, albeit by a member of the clan who could be described, in words he had used to describe another, as "a staunch and impassioned, if progressively more disenchanted, partisan." 1 Babbitt had sat for interviews on the way to that article, and Brody thanks him for this "cooperation in editing them." 2 Had he forgotten? Did he suddenly disagree with what he had told his interviewer?