Milton Babbitt's Music for the Mass: Kickstarter funding

[vaarky]

In case anyone is interested, the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco (IOC) recently launched a Kickstarter campaign (closes March 15 2012) to raise funds to do the first-ever recording of Milton Babbitt's Music for the Mass.

Babbitt is an American composer (and iconoclast) known for his serial and electronic music. This piece is less "out there" (for him), using elements such as traditional counterpoint and "mere" tritones in his melodic lines. It's an amazing piece of music filled with beauty and but also remarkable complexity.

It's been unknown and virtually unperformed, hidden in obscurity for the past 74 years. It is quite difficult; in fact, other groups have tried it and gave up or modified their performance to add instruments. IOC already succeeded in singing it in concert, and the group was in touch with Babbitt's family toward the very end of his life, so he knew it was finally being performed as written.

IOC recently won the ASCAP award for adventurous programming and was featured at the Chorus America conference. The group is now aiming to be the first chorus to record this masterpiece and get it known more widely.

If you want to learn more or feel like helping out, here's the Kickstarter link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/twe ... for-the-ma

(Kickstarter is a site that helps small projects with fundraising; there is a 6-minute video of the project and a brief text description. Visitors who wish to contribute can do so via Amazon payments or can contact IOCsf.org if they wish to support the project in other ways.)

[CHGiffen]

This is amazing news! Finally, the world will have a chance to assess properly Milton Babbitt's Music for the Mass - on its own, without all the (generally ignorant) conjectural feasibility and appropriateness of such music from a major serialist composer.