Playing Babbitt by Ear: How I Composed More Semi-Simple Variations, Intermezzo, and Fugue on a Theme by Milton Babbitt for Piano Four-Hands

Milton Babbitt’s Semi-Simple Variations (1956) is—as are many of Babbitt’s works—a model of structural unity. A careful analysis reveals its horizontal and vertical symmetry, even distribution of pitch classes, and corroboration between disparate musical parameters. The discoveries from analysis are often lost on the act of listening, however. The resultant music sounds wacky, unpredictable, and fascinatingly idiosyncratic. In 2016, for Princeton University’s Milton Babbitt Centenary Celebration, I composed More Semi-Simple Variations, Intermezzo, and Fugue on a Theme by Milton Babbitt for piano four-hands as a response to the brilliant surface of Babbitt’s music. In this essay, I analyze Babbitt’s theme and first variation, then I discuss how my piece adopts Babbitt’s melodic snippets and hexachords within a seemingly incompatible stylistic domain.