Yesterday, WKCR-FM, Columbia University's one of a kind, wonderful radio station played 24 hours of Milton Babbitt's music, along with interviews with Babbitt and discussions with friends, former students and learned academicians. I listened from 11AM to 1AM, 13 hours. This is one of two ways to listen seriously to Babbitt's music. The other way is to listen in the dark. Listening to Babbitt on my Mac laptop without additional musical speakers revealed this music in a concentrated way (headphones might have been apt in this situation). I used to listen to, and enjoy, Richard Wagner's operas in a similar way - with a small FM radio. Verisimilitude is fine. But having the music so that it doesn't envelop one is an advantage for one's imaginings. It also aids in one's enveloping the music.
As I promised, next time we'll discuss Diana Raffman's "Is Twelve-Tone Music ...?", Richard Taruskin's 1996 NYT's piece, "How Talented Composers Become Useless", and Dmitri Tymoczko's "The Sound of Philosophy: The musical ideas of Milton Babbitt and John Cage". Raffman's paper, along with her exciting book, Language, Music, and Mind are available at her U. of Toronto page. Tymczko's paper is avalable at his Princeton U. site. See below for links.
http://www.music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/
http://philosophy.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/diana-raffman
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