All Set (Babbitt)

All Set, for jazz ensemble, is a 1957 composition for small jazz band by the American composer Milton Babbitt.

History

All Set was commissioned by the 1957 Brandeis University Creative Arts Festival, which in that year was a jazz festival. It was premiered there by the Bill Evans Orchestra in a performance that was recorded and released on a Columbia Records LP in 1963. The title is a play on words referring to the all-combinatorial twelve-tone series Babbitt used in composing the work (Wuorinen 1974). The published score is dedicated to Gunther Schuller (Babbitt 1963, 3).

Analysis

The composition is scored for alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet, trombone, contrabass, piano, vibraphone, and percussion (trap set: small and large tom-toms, snare drum, bass drum, hi-hat, three suspended cymbals).

The lyrical, imagist tendencies of Babbitt's earlier vocal works are also evident in All Set, which combines a twelve-tone pitch structure using an all-combinatorial set (hence the work's title) to what Babbitt calls "jazz-like properties ... the use of percussion, the Chicago jazz-like juxtapositions of solos and ensembles recalling certain characteristics of group improvisation" (Barkin 2001). Through this fusion of the sounds and rhythms of the jazz ensemble with strict serialism, Babbitt demonstrates the flexibility of his procedures (Simms 1986, 344).

The composition falls into three main sections, starting in bars 1, 169, and 270, and concludes with a coda of eighteen bars. Each of the three sections is announced by a prominent statement of the combinatorial pitch array used as the basis of the work, and each section is subdivided into two parts (Stuessy 1978, 176–78).

As with most of Babbitt's music, pitches are organized according to an array, rather than to a single, referential twelve-tone row. In the opening eight measures, for example, four row forms occur simultaneously (Babbitt 1987, 115–17; Stuessy 1978, 166):

All Set (Initial pitch array)
P0 C E F B F♯ B♭ G E♭ D♭ D A A♭
I7 G E♭ D A♭ D♭ A C E F♯ F B♭ B
R0 A♭ A D D♭ E♭ G B♭ F♯ B F E C
RI7 B B♭ F F♯ E C A D♭ A♭ D E♭ G

It is entirely arbitrary which of the four lynes of the array is to be regarded as the untransposed prime form (P0). In this case, that designation is assigned to the lyne presented in the score by the trumpet and trombone, but another source chooses the third lyne, which is presented in the high register of the vibraphone and the left hand of the piano (Arnold and Hair 1976, 159). Regardless of which row is used as a reference, all of the hexachords are drawn from the (unordered) second-order all-combinatorial hexachord, type [0,1,2,6,7,8], which is Babbitt's "source set" number 4 (Arnold and Hair 1976, 160; Babbitt 1955, 57; Stuessy 1978, 166–67).

It was in this work, together with Partitions for piano, that Babbitt introduced his idea of time points as an analogue to the twelve chromatic pitch classes (Griffiths 2010, 155). There is no steady beat from either the trap set or bass (as might be expected in a jazz piece), so that the effect produced is one of persistent and rather nervous activity (consistent with the tonal material), with only occasional relief (Stuessy 1978, 179–80).

Discography

References

Further reading

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