milton babbit

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Part 1

Today we look back at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival that took place earlier this month. Specifically, we review the opening concert which took place for the first time at SFMOMA. Appropriately for a collaboration with an institution focused on the visual arts, many of the pieces combined electronic music with graphics, video, or dance.

SFEMF is often a coming-together of people from the Bay Area electronic-music and new-music communities, and the audience was filled with familiar faces. Some even joined me in live tweeting with hashtag #sfemf during the concerts.

The concert opened with a solo performance by Sarah Howe entitled Peephole live electronic music and video.


[Sarah Howe. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Howe describes her video work as “beautifully messy textures of low fidelity source material”. The result was quite mesmerizing, with ever-changing pixelated patterns on the large screen that pulsated and radiated, sometimes converging on seemingly recognizable images, sometimes completely abstract. The music featured highly processed electronic sounds taken from acoustic sources.

Next was Interminacy, a performance by Tom Djll and Tim Perkis based on “lost” John Cage stories, as “rescued from a Bay Area public-radio vault” (they did not say which public radio station). We hear Cage’s distinctive voice and speaking style, as recognized from his recorded interviews – see our post on John Cage’s 99th birthday for an example – with Djll and Perkis providing music in between the words supposedly derived from I-Ching. The music did cover a variety of synthesized electronic sounds, recording samples, and other elements, leaving plenty of silence as well.


[Tom Djll and Tim Perkis channel John Cage. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

It started out straightforward enough, but the narrations took a bit of a darker turn, which audience members may or may not have reacted to in amusement or horror. I personally fell into the former category, and considered this one of the more brilliant and well-crafted tributes I have heard in a long time. You can hear an excerpt from an earlier performance below (or here).

<a href=”http://djll.bandcamp.com/track/interminacy-excerpt” _mce_href=”http://djll.bandcamp.com/track/interminacy-excerpt”>Interminacy (excerpt) by Tom Djll/Tim Perkis</a>

The following performance featured Kadet Kuhne performing live with a video by Barcelona-based artist Alba G. Corral in a piece entitled STORA BJÖRN. Corral created visuals using the programming environment Processing that generated complex graphical patterns based on the constellation The Great Bear.


[Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

Kuenhe’s music weaved in and out with the visuals in undulating but ever changing textures and timbres. The result of the combined music and visuals was quite meditative – at the same time, the visuals retained a certain analytical quality perhaps because of all elements based on connected lines. Glitchy elements in the music fed back into the lines and spaces.

Plane, a collaboration Les Stuck and Sonsherée Giles featured dance, visuals together with music. Stuck’s musical performance began against a video of Giles’ dancing that was created using a special camera technique and a limited palette of colors and effects to produce a low-resolution image with no sense of perspective. It did look a bit like a heat image of a moving body.


[Les Stuck. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

At some point during the performance, Giles herself appeared on the stage and the performance transitioned to live dance. Her movement was slow and organic, and she often stayed close to the ground, as if to make herself two-dimension like the images on the screen.  Stuck’s music combined with the dance had a greater intensity than the previous music-and-visual performances on the concert, particularly in contrast to the far more delicate STORA BJÖRN that preceded it.

The concert concluded with a performance of Milton Babbit’s Philomel, performed by Dina Emerson. We lost both Milton Babbit and Max Mathews this year, and both were recognized with tribute performances during the festival. Philomel is perhaps the best known of Babbit’s famously complex compositions. You can hear an early recording of the piece in a tribute post here at CatSynth, as sung by soprano Bethany Beardslee. Emerson certainly had her work cut out for her in taking on this piece, but she came through with a beautiful and energetic performance.


[Dina Emerson performs Milton Babbit’s Philomel. Photo: PeterBKaars.com.]

The piece combines electronic sounds, live voice and processed recorded vocals weaved together in a fast-moving texture that preserves a narrative structure. One can alternately listen to the words as disjoint musical events or as part of the larger story. At some point, even while focused directly on Emerson’s presence, the live and recorded sounds began to merge together. The electronics often seem to match the timbre and pitch register of the voice, which aided in the illusion of a single musical source.

Overall, I thought it was a strong concert with a particularly strong finish. It also was somewhat shorter and faster paced, with no intermission or long pauses between sets, which I thought was quite effective.

I also attended the Saturday concert and will review that in an upcoming article.

RIP Milton Babbit

Milton Babbit, a noted and influential composer, teacher and thinker, passed away this Saturday at the age of 94. He is someone who I had met personally and with whom I had a rather influential encounter.

He is known for his highly complex and highly rational music – music that could truly be called “experimental” in light of his vision of academic music programs as laboratories for. He was not only involved in the early expansion of serialism beyond pitch into rhythm and dynamics, but also involved in the early development of electronic music. He was one of the first directors of the “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” and involved with the development of the RCA Mark II synthesizer. Many of his compositions from the 1960s were either fully electronic, such as his 1961 aptly named Composition for Synthesizer and his piece Philomel which featured electronic sounds and the processed voice of Bethany Beardslee. Philomel was probably his most well-known work, and you can hear a clip in this video:

Many remembrances describe his music as difficult or unapproachable, indeed the New York Times obituary opens with a description of his music as “impenetrably abstruse”. But I actually find several of the pieces beautiful, I could see listening to them and enjoying them for particular moods rather than as objects of study. Although he is most closely associated with the integral serialism that informed his composition, I see in pieces like Philomel similarities to works by Karlheinz Stockhausn and Luciano Berio based on very different compositional ideas.

I had my own encounter with Babbit about 16 years ago, when I was applying for the graduate composition program at Julliard. I had gotten a callback for live interviews with professors, and I found myself in his office with him looking over my scores. He was very friendly and humorous, and had kind words for my music (far more so than any other reviewer that day). Most significantly, he advised me about the relatively conservative “star-struck” environment Julliard – which has its place for turning out the next generation of professional concert musicians who aspire to cross the street to Lincoln Center – but that I would probably be happier continuing my work at a university such as Yale where I was completing my undergraduate work or Princeton where he taught. There was nothing condescending or discouraging about his advice – it was more a sense of “you are one of us” and I remember it fondly to this day. It was also important in the process that eventually brought me to UC Berkeley and to my current life in California.

My positive personal experience with him was in contrast to the portrayal he received in some of my early classes, where his statements about music most notably his essay “The Composer As Specialist / Who Cares if You Listen?” (an editorial retitling that he never liked) were often put into a dichotomy with others – I recall a couple of smackdowns with Babbit’s essay on one side and a counter-essay by Susan McClary on the other. As someone who was struggling to figure out where I fit in the world of academic music, moving between very rational and very theatrical, I sometimes took the bait on one side or the other. In the end, the argument was a non-argument. In fact, one of the fun things I have learned about Milton Babbit from the obituary writings was his fondness and knowledge of popular and theater music (particularly pre-World War II) and his brief experience with Broadway musicals. Something to keep in mind as we continue to make new music.