Composition for Twelve Instruments
Composition for Twelve Instruments is a serial music composition written by American composer Milton Babbitt for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, harp, celesta, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. In it Babbitt for the first time employs a twelve-element duration set to serialize the rhythms as well as the pitches, predating Olivier Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités", but not the Turangalîla-Symphonie, in which Messiaen used a duration series for the first time in the opening episode of the seventh movement, titled "Turangalîla II".
Babbitt's use of rhythm in the piece was criticized by Peter Westergaard in Perspectives of New Music: "can we be expected to hear a family resemblance between a dotted half note followed by a sixteenth note and an eighth note followed by a dotted eighth note ?" He would later employ an approach based on time-points, which Westergaard described as a solution to the above problems.
The combinatorial tone row used may be represented: 0 1 4 9 5 8 3 t 2 e 6 7
