Milton Babbitt

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Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. He is particularly noted for his pioneering serial and electronic music.

1 Biography
2 Articles
3 References
4 External links
- 4.1 Listening

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Biography

Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi at an early age. He studied violin and later clarinet and saxophone as a child. Early in his life he showed ability in jazz and popular music.

Babbitt's father was a mathematician, and it was mathematics that Babbitt intended to study when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. However, he soon left, and went to New York University to study music instead. There he became interested in the music of the composers of the Second Viennese School, and went on to write a number of articles on twelve tone music including the first description of combinatoriality and a serial "time-point" technique. After receiving his degree in 1935, he studied under Roger Sessions, first privately, later at Princeton University.

In 1947, Babbitt wrote his Three Compositions for Piano, which are the earliest examples of total serialization in music, pre-dating Olivier Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités by two years, and Pierre Boulez' Polyphonie X by five.

In 1958, Babbitt achieved unsought notoriety through an article in the popular magazine High Fidelity. His title for the article, "The Composer as Specialist", was changed, without his knowledge or consent, to "Who Cares if You Listen?" More than 30 years later, he commented that, because of that "offensively vulgar title", he was "still ... far more likely to be known as the author of 'Who Cares if You Listen?' than as the composer of music to which you may or may not care to listen." (Babbitt 1991)

Babbitt later became interested in electronic music. He was hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with their RCA Mark II Synthesizer, and in 1961 produced his Music for Synthesizer. Many other composers regarded electronic instruments as a way of producing new timbres. Babbitt was much more interested in the rhythmic precision he could achieve using the Mark II synthesizer, a sort of precision regarded, certainly so regarded in 1961, as impossible in performance by actual, live, human performers.

Babbitt continued to write both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments, sometimes combining the two. Philomel (1964), for example, was written for soprano and a synthesized accompaniment (including the recorded and manipulated voice of Bethany Beardslee, for whom the piece was composed) stored on magnetic tape. This piece was written in collaboration with the poet John Hollander and was funded by the Ford Foundation. It might seem that his use of the Mark II Synthesizer put Babbitt in the habit of writing music of enormous rhythmic complexity, and that his subsequent pieces for conventional instruments with mortal perfomers became, as a result, so complex as to seem unplayable, but it is fairer to say that his interest in these sorts of complexities preceded his time with the Mark II and has continued well after the demise of the Mark II to the present day.

In 1971, Babbitt became a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School.

In 1982, the Pulitzer Prize board awarded a "special citation to Milton Babbitt for his life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer."

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Articles

(1965). "The Structure and Function of Musical Theory", College Music Symposium 5.
(1972). "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History", Perspectives in Musicology: The Inaugural Lectures of the Ph.D. Program in Music at the City University of New York.
(2003). "The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt." ed. Stephen Peles et al. Princeton University Press.
(1992) [written 1946] "The Function of Set Structure in the 12-tone system." PhD Dissertation, Princeton University.

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References

Babbitt, Milton (1991). "A Life of Learning", American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 17. [1]
Andrew Mead. An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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