Milton Babbitt’s Concerti - New Juilliard Ensemble (2016)

In 2016, I contributed to the “improbable world premiere” of Milton Babbit’s 1976 Concerti for ensemble and tape. The piece was once thought lost, but the score and tape part were rediscovered in 2015. However, there was a problem that made the piece impossible to perform as-is: the tape part was incomplete and only contained the first five minutes. The score contained the notes and rhythms for the rest of the tape part, but the rest of the audio was nowhere to be found. Joel Sachs, founder and director of the New Juilliard Ensemble, launched a plan to put this piece together for the Focus! Festival in 20216 as part of a centennial tribute to Babbitt. My colleague at Juilliard Jonathan Dawe (who studied with Babbbitt) and I worked together to do what we might call something like “speculative audio archeology.” Dr. Dawe went through the score and tape part and identified a number of timbres that seemed like likely candidates to apply to the notated elements missing from the tape. Once we had those timbres allocated, I went through the existing audio assets and extracted as much timbral information as I could. Using audio restoration tools (iZotope RX) plus regular mixing tools, I was able to clean up the mostly good-condition tape and extract a variety of unpitched audio to load into my own system. I also designed a number of synth patches to closely emulate those pitched sounds that couldn’t be reproduced nicely with sampling, or that would need to be dynamically modulated to get the right effect. Finally, once I had built a fairly enormous bank of sounds, I put together a MainStage set that would allow a group of keyboardists to realize this score in real time. The team debated whether to just produce an audio file of what we thought the tape would have been or whether to have musicians do it live. We eventually decided on the live route for two reasons - it would enable us to continue to tweak timbre and placement until the last minute and Dr. Dawe thought that Babbitt would have liked it that way. The system ultimately was presented with quad-channel audio with three keyboardists playing the quite challenging tape part.

Here’s an article by the New York Times covering the event.

If you’d performing this piece and would like to have the MainStage project, send me an email at nathan@nathanprillaman.com. Since the percussion sounds are sampled from the original tape (and thus not my copyright), I won’t be posting these assets publicly.