Milton Babbitt, Philomel and other works (Bethany Beardslee, Lynne Webber, Jerry Kuderna, Robert Miller)
“What if Elliott Carter‘s name was Ginsberg?” asked Morton Feldman once. Would his reputation be so high? I listen to Babbitt’s music pretending he’s called Babtescu, in the hope that the sensuousness and humour for which he’s praised will become apparent to me.
CDCM Computer Music Series Vol. 1
I bought this second hand because it has Jerry Hunt’s Fluud on it. I hope there’s a grant out there for a scholar to go through Hunt’s archives to translate the paralanguage he wrote in:
Fluud is a system of translation of the mechanisms of austral/boreal trace patterns produced as an aural-visual performance extraction (Robert Fludd [1574-1647] monochordum mundi syhiphoniacum, 1622). The interference austral diagrams are duplicated to generate embedded templates of patterns. Pulse and melody bursts with orders of motions (color) are translated from the channels of regulative currents (austral, boreal). The templates are selective codings of the elemental determinants (body)….
If you like Jerry Hunt's writing, you would have loved his talking. He could start a perfectly grammatical sentence nicotine-buzz fast and finish it three quarters of an hour later. One hint to his work is that the titles usually make reference to some small town in Texas and to a term from Rosicrucianism, while the works themselves usually have some chance-driven structure, but the structure rather that referring, as Cage did, to the 64 I Ching throws, refers to a table from one of the English mystics — usually the Table of Angels of John Dee, but in this case the monochord of Robert Fludd.
Thanks! I had picked up on the references to Dee, Kelley, Fludd et.al., but wasn't aware of the Texan angle. I'm interested in figuring out how his scores and texts translated into the gestural activities used to perform his music.