Back in my high school years, when rave went mainstream, I asked a friend, who was a standout cellist, what he thought of electronic music. He said, “Do you mean the stuff composers were doing in the late fifties and early sixties? It was kind of a fad.” I nodded to disguise the fact that my classical knowledge amounted to the soundtrack of the film Amadeus; however, this factoid was archived in my brain when I took the leap from avant-garde rockers to modernist composers and heard Milton Babbitt’s synthesizer opera Philomel (1964).
Babbitt was as academic of a composer as one can get: mathematician, Princeton professor and 12-tone serialism chauvinist, he is nevertheless most known for the punk rock sounding essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” which caused a lot of angry letters to the editor of High Fidelity magazine in 1958. Although he later claimed that the editor changed the title from “The Composer as a Specialist” his stance against the popular is strident and approaches the great American taboo of elitism:
“And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism.”
And what electronic media did Babbitt withdraw to? A research synthesizer larger than your studio apartment. The RCA Mark II was golden age Cold War technology, implemented to demonstrate American exceptionalism and maximize efficiency, the latter of which Babbitt was most interested in. Why deal with an orchestra and conductor when you can get exactly what you want? It is rumored that Igor Stravinsky, no stranger to music controversy, suffered a stroke when witnessing Babbitt operating the paper tape binary sequencer of the RCA Mark II. Did he believe that the end of the composer was nigh, or entertain visions of complete creative control?
Fifty-three years later, Babbitt’s Philomel is an epoch of classical music when electro-curiosity ruled the academy. The incredible soprano Bethany Beardslee thrusts her voice between the pulses of the RCA Mark II to tell Ovid’s myth of violence and metamorphosis. Bleeps and bloops stand in for rousing crescendos. Mathematical sequences upstage the drama. But for all the rigor that early electronic music exudes, it doesn’t seem out of place in the current music landscape. An uncompromising artist can be popular and voluntary withdrawal from the public hasn’t stopped many “outsider” musicians from getting heard. Even more important, the offspring of technology like the RCA Mark II has allowed the public to be the composer. It’s highly conceivable that a modern day Bethany Beardslee could lay down a version of Philomel with a Casio SK-1 and Garageband in her bedroom, which is something I would care to listen to.
