Here’s a web article (short, or perhaps mini if not micro) on the New Music Buff Blog:
Abraham Lincoln and the Avant Garde
(Go read it while the link is still alive.)
Two ideas here are worth commenting on:
1.) “Until a fair assessment is made of the work and achievements of the computer labs there [University of Illinois] it is difficult to say if they exceeded that of the Columbia Princeton lab (with the brilliant Milton Babbitt at the punchcards).”
It raises me hackles when research is presumed to be competitive. Sal had a fair sized ego and that likely came with a competitive streak — I recall Sever Tipei’s anecdote about an inebriated Sal stating that he was “the King.” — but there is something very odd about trying to find a “good, better, best” matrix in computer research applied to an aesthetic purpose.
Babbitt, “brilliant,” “at the punchcards,” is apples and oranges alongside Sal Martirano and the SALMAR Construction. If the comparison is Babbitt’s punchcards and the “L’s GA” piece, the comparison slips even farther off axis. “L’s GA” is a multimedia work with a possibly political purpose, though the purpose is really more humanitarian than political (anti-war), and that’s not the case with the more familiar work of Milton Babbitt. If you want to compare and contrast these men, pit “L’s GA” against “The Joy of Sextets.” See where that gets you. (If there’s one thing these composers share, it’s a sense of humor. Sal’s four channel tape, apparently made for a symposium of some sort, parodying Babbitt’s famous (infamous) modula 12 text is hilarious. It will take some serious searching of the Sousa Archive/Center for American Music to find it, however.
2. “Unfortunately the posts on youtube do not contain the video footage which definitely enhances the experience of this true multimedia masterpiece.”
This is so true, it deserves italics. To my knowledge, such documentation does not exist. The available representations of this work, therefore, are not the entire intended experience. The audio documentation is all we have, and it must suffice. Sal clearly thought the audio portion sufficient to include the work on released recordings. It is in this form that it must be enjoyed (or judged, or evaluated, or analyzed, or compared to Babbitt).
When I compare Babbitt to Martirano, I find Martirano’s body of work more compelling and satisfying. It is also rarer by a factor of at least a thousand fold. This is the most disheartening lesson for those of of us who compose and scatter our works about like seeds: quality of production does not secure an audience. Yes, there is a body of work filed away at SA/CAM on the campus of the University of Illinois with Sal’s name on it. The SALMAR is housed in a large display case, and it has been semi-restored and is playable. The annual composition contest keeps Sal’s memory alive at the U of I School of Music, in the academic context in which he worked. But he is not in the books like Babbitt is. This is a cultural deficit that really should be corrected. I think of this each time one of these mini articles emerges in the literature.