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Notes on playing with Play on Notes: Babbitt’s music as recompositional puzzle
Journal article   Open access

Notes on playing with Play on Notes: Babbitt’s music as recompositional puzzle

Christopher Doll
Music Theory Spectrum, Vol.37(2), pp.297-312
Autumn 2016

Abstract

Milton Babbitt twelve-tone music combinatoriality post-tonal pedagogy '   ?
Play on Notes for children's voices and bells (1966) has become a standard piece for analysis in university-level post-tonal theory curricula. This article presents a new recording of the work, along with a new way of approaching it analytically. This analytical approach requires us to recompose the piece itself, by finding nontrivial ways to alter its structure while simultaneously keeping the work's essential character intact. The benefits of such an activity emerge from this article's presentation of seven revisions exploring different aspects of the original piece's unique structure.
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Doll 2015 Play On Notes manuscript for SOAR2.01 MBDownloadView
Accepted Manuscript (AM) Open Access
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https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtv017View
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