Milton Babbitt - Philomel (1995 compi of material released 1970-1980)

Music both bracingly alien and strikingly beautiful from American seralist/electronic pioneer Milton Babbitt (1916-2011).  Babbitt became involved with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the early 60s, and two of his purely electronic works can be heard on the album at that link.

This collection focuses on voice and piano alongside the electronics, and starts with Babbitt's most famous work Philomel (1964).  The vocal parts were written for the soprano Bethany Beardslee, who sings the lead and the electronically manipulated vocal echoes here.  The libretto by John Hollander recounts the myth of Philomel's escape and transformation as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, developing from the virtually mute character in the opening syllables to her final form as a literal songbird.

Next are two versions of Phenomena, which rather than having a text is just built around various sung phonemes, performed in dexterous leaps and bounds by Lynne Webber.  Originally devised for soprano and piano in 1969, then for soprano and electronics in the mid 70s, both are featured here.  The remainder of the collection is piano-based, with a short solo piece (Post Partitions, 1966) and then a really engrossing piano and tape work (Reflections, 1975). 

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Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (1964)

One more disc from the Masterworks box set mentioned in the previous weeks.

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was established in the early 1950s by some of the composers featured here; this album was recorded in 1961 and released in 1964 (except for the last Babbitt piece on this CD, which didn't appear on the original LP and dates from 1967).

A few of these composers were new names to me on discovering this album, and I think I'll listen to all of them in more detail at some point. Bülent Arel and Halim El-Dabh for definite - their pieces that open the album are the most engaging, and all the more mindblowing for their vintage.  The latter is based on an ancient Persian story, and is narrated in a truly bizarre, 'tape-transformed' voice.

Elsewhere on the album there's a piece by Vladimir Ussachevsky that sounds like it belongs more on Extended Voices, and the final track, Otto Leuning's Gargoyles, adds violin into the mix to provide a more accessible reference point.  Overall, I'd say this album intrigued me rather than being fully engrossing in the way that Extended Voices was, but Columbia-Princeton is still well worth getting to grips with.  For another view, here's a somewhat charming reminisce from someone who first encountered it as a nine-year-old!

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