CHAPTER 16 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 391
No musician seized more eagerly on the constructive possibilities of twelve-
tone technique than Milton Babbitt. Trained as a mathematician as well as a musi-
cian, Babbitt found beauty in the idea of a system of rationally ordered sounds.
Starting with the work of Schoenberg, Webern, and Alban Berg, he extended
their innovations by serializing nonpitch elements as well: rhythm, dynam-
ics, timbre, and register. Babbitt’s extensions of the serial principle—sometimes
called integral serialism or total serialism—produced music whose network of
internal connections and relationships was formidably complex, despite such
plain titles as Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four
Instruments (1948). Babbitt was a jazz enthusiast with a deep knowledge and love
of classic American popular songs, but with the exception of All Set (1957), scored
for jazz ensemble, none of this is refl ected in his compositions; such interests
lay outside the work of the composer as “specialist,” conducting research into
advanced musical structures much as a chemist or physicist conducts scientifi c
experiments. Babbitt’s passion for intellectual control would lead him during
the late 1950s into the realm of electronic music.
If a musical Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1940 and awakened twenty
years later, the variety of new music would surely have surprised him. What pre-
war commentators had sometimes dubbed an “atonal school” had developed
by 1960 into a range of idioms—freely chromatic, twelve-tone, integrally serial-
ized, electronic, chance-based—with only atonality in common. Schoenberg’s
“emancipation of the dissonance” was now fully on display in the United States,
as composers made music out of previously excluded sounds. This emancipation
brought fresh energ y and excitement to the contemporary music scene.
New works featuring tonal centers, triads, and tuneful melodies had certainly
not disappeared, although their vocabulary was expanded with angular melo-
dies, dissonant harmonies, irregular rhythms, and new timbres. Their promi-
nent place in the classical sphere is refl ected in the list of Pulitzer Prize winners
in music. The fi rst was awarded in 1943 to William Schuman for a cantata, fol-
lowed in 1944 by Howard Hanson for a symphony, and in 1945 by Aaron Copland
for Appalachian Spring—all tonal works. During the two postwar decades, only one
atonal work—Elliott Carter’s String Quartet no. 2 (1960)—won the prize. Awards in
other years were for Charles Ives’s Symphony no. 3 (composed four decades ear-
lier but only recently premiered); symphonies by Walter Piston; operas by Gian
Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Robert Ward, and Douglas Moore; and a fi lm score
by Virgil Thomson. Except for Ives, all were stylistically conservative composers.
A g a i n st t h i s back g rou nd of opposi ng out look s a nd f rag mented
institutions, Elliott Carter emerged during the 1950s as a unique
fi gure: a respected composer who worked his way toward a more
and more complex atonal musical style while steering clear of
musical systems. Carter, born in New York in 1908, attended Har-
vard College. In 1932 he went to Paris to continue his schooling in
the liberal arts while also studying music with Nadia Boulanger.
After the war he began writing music of marked individuality: a
piano sonata (1946), a sonata for cello and piano (1948), and his fi rst
string quartet (1951). From the piano sonata on, admirers saw each
new work as a daring advance. And in 1962 Stravinsky, whose age,
eminence, and barbed comments on the musical scene had made
him an imposing presence, pronounced Carter’s Double Con-
certo for piano, harpsichord, and small orchestra a masterpiece.Milton BabbittPulitzer Prize winnersK Milton Babbitt (1917–
2011) at the RCA Mark II
synthesizer.172028_16_386-411_r3_sd.indd 391 23/01/13 10:56 AM