Milton Babbitt wrote None but the Lonely Flute for Dorothy Stone, and his original program note read in its entirety, "I do not presume to direct the listener's awareness to other than that which least requires direction, the superb performance which the composition is about to receive." The flute indeed stands solo in Babbitt's piece, but its music seems haunted by the song by Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky to which its title alludes: "None but the Lonely Heart." Babbitt's purely serial universe is no place for Tchaikovsky's soaring Romanticism to dwell undisturbed, of course; the song is broken down into fragments and transformed, so what once was broad and desperately communicative now is referred to in enigmatic utterances. The primary mood is questioning, with short phrases turning upwards at their ends. There seems to be a dialogue between the high and low registers of the instrument, but the questions echo and fade away in the emptiness surrounding the solo instrument. The conversation, of course, is within the work, not in the room, and even as Babbitt's piece ends with a sharp tweet, one senses that Babbitt is perfectly comfortable with keeping the allusions in their indeterminate form and leaving the flute wondering why it feels so lonely.

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