Archive for June, 2010

Edgard Varèse: The Liberation of Sound

Earlier today I posted Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” as an example of an avant-garde attitude that I don’t care for. As an antidote to that, here is a beautiful article by the visionary avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (often referred to as the Father of Electronic Music). To me, this writing is an expression of [...]

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Who Cares if You Listen? (Milton Babbitt’s Famous Article)

In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]

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