Portmantonality and Babbi’S Poetics of Double Entendre *
Portmantonality and Babbi’s Poetics of Double Entendre * Joshua Banks Mailman NOTE: The examples for the (text-only) PDF version of this item are available online at: hps://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.mailman.php KEYWORDS: tonality, triads, formal function, materiale Formenlehre, baseball, Thelonious Monk, Milton Babbi, 12-tone row, affordances, superarray, cognitive metaphor, Tin Pan Alley, Schenker, hermeneutics, partial ordering, pitch permeation, portmanteau, puns, ragging, recomposition, reduction, repetition, serialism, dialogic form, improvisation, dodecaphony ABSTRACT: This essay presents a theory of musical and verbal double entendre inspired by and applicable to the late-period music of Milton Babbi. Rather than assuming the appropriateness of any single method (which might tend toward singularity of meaning), a number of approaches are applied to three late works: primarily his Whirled Series (1987), and secondarily his Canonical Form (1983) and Gloss on ’Round Midnight (2001). These are interpreted through various kinds of analysis, not only serial, but also tonal (chordal and voice-leading), associational, pitch-permeational, and form-functional. Connections to Tin-Pan-Alley song lyrics, jazz improvisation, hermeneutics, and Gibsonian affordances are discussed in relation to these musical analyses. All this is done to infer and cultivate connections (represented as conceptual integration networks) between Babbi’s extra- theoretic verbal expression and extra-dodecaphonic aspects of his music, connections that suggest an underlying poetics (a tacit motivational philosophy implicitly fueling his creativity) that provides pragmatic benefit to the artistic ambitions of diverse personal identities. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.2.9 Received September 2018 Volume 26, Number 2, June 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory I.
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