Delicate or robust?
Composing blogger James Ricci, in an item about his mentor, Milton Babbitt , recalls one of the too-many Babbitt stories about a premiere performance shortchanged by inadequate rehearsal. In this case, an orchestra's inadequate rehearsal time for a Babbitt piece was compared with the apparently over-generous rehearsal for a repertoire warhorse which shared the program, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade . The complaint was, more likely than not, justified, but attempting to reconstruct the rationale behind such a rehearsal schedule might be more than an idle exercise and may, in fact, reveal something interesting about how repertoire is handled in real life by the institutions which dominate concert music-making. From Babbitt's point of view, his work — here, Ars Combinatoria , but the understanding is general to his catalog, not specific to this chamber orchestra piece — was something rather delicate, with every detail projecting and embodying its underlying structures, thus...