Listening to Milton Babbitt's Electronic Music: The Medium and the Message
Robert Morris · Perspectives of New Music · 1997
EW COMPOSERS of electronic music in 1960s took Marshall McLuhan's slogan the medium is literally. If considered at all, statement was best appreciated as an invitation to focus attention on contingencies between a message and its mode of transmission. But this was really nothing new, for relation between messages and channels had been already mathematically formalized a decade and a half earlier in Claude Shannon's Information Science. Certain dependencies between musical ideas and their implementation in electronic medium, however, were not adequately addressed in general until 1962 in an important article by Milton Babbitt. The article, Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and Electronic Medium, appeared in very first issue of Perspectives of New Music and introduced time-point system, Babbitt's consistent and musically pertinent solution to problem of temporal interpretation of