Composition for Four Instruments
It is remarkable for a strong sense of integration and concentration on its particular premises—qualities that caused Elliott Carter, upon first hearing it in 1951, to persuade New Music Edition to publish it.
The piece can be broken up into fifteen sections according to the subset of instruments playing: four solos, four trios, six duos, one tutti.
[7] It never once appears complete as a melodic succession, however,[8] though several authors[9]Cone 1967[10] have given different conflicting versions of a row claimed to be "made explicit only in the final section".
[citation needed] The piece begins with a three-note motive, or trichord (a collection of three distinct pitch classes), in the next-to-lowest register: B–E♭–C, with a succession of +4 then −3 semitone intervals.
The following measures present three transformations of this opening trichord, in retrograde-inversion, retrograde, and inverse forms (D♭–B♭–D, G♭–A–F, and A♭–E–G, respectively) separated into the mid-high, high, and lowest registers, respectively (therefore with interval patterns of −3 +4, −4 + 3, and −4 +3).
[14] The clarinet solo continues by adding more forms of the basic trichord until a complete twelve-tone aggregate is unfolded in each register.
As a result, seeking for "the row" caused "even the friendliest people" to become baffled and resentful, because of a fundamental misunderstanding about Babbitt's approach to his material: That's not the way I conceive of a set.
The trichordal relationships between the notes in the four registers of the clarinet foreshadow the interaction between the four instrument voices in the conclusion of the piece.
As he does in the pitch domain, Babbitt achieves additional variety in the rhythmic patterns of Composition for Four Instruments by manipulating the duration row and its three variations in different ways.
[19] In the final three bars of the piece, the clarinet plays the retrograde of the opening duration row with each element multiplied by 4, giving the pattern 8 12 16 4.
