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...Milton Babbitt's notorious 1958 High Fidelity article "Who Cares if You Listen?"

https://artasillumination.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/who-cares-if-you-listen.pdf

There Babbitt likens his academic work in music to the scientific research taking place in other departments of the university:

>> The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without
special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics,
philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less
extensive than his background in other fields. <<

Babbitt later protested that the editors had affixed the title of article without his knowledge, still less consent. Yet regardless of Babbitt's protest, the reader now can recognize that those editors had understood Babbitt's main idea - perhaps better than the author had himself!

Possibly, though, the audience's "problem" with modern music precedes the moralism or scientism of the post WWII avant-garde.

In his article...

#Modernism #20thCenturyMusic #MiltonBabbitt

@johncarlosbaez

I strongly recommend his "All Set", if you can find it. Written for a smallish jazz band, once available on a Nonesuch Lp.. There is also a mono version in the CBS/Sony anthology Outstanding Jazz Compositions Of The 20th Century.

I'd love it if someone like Anthony Braxton would record it again.

#miltonbabbitt