Milton Babbitt


Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He was a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, recognized for his serial and electronic music.

Biography

Babbitt was born on May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia to Albert E. Babbitt and Sarah Potamkin, who were Jewish. He was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Babbitt began studying the violin when he was four, but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to jazz and theater music, and "played in every pit-orchestra that came to town". Babbitt was making his own arrangements of popular songs by age 7, "wrote a lot of pop tunes for school productions", and won a local songwriting contest when he was 13. A Jackson newspaper called Babbitt a "whiz kid" and noted "that he had perfect pitch and could add up his family's grocery bills in his head. In his teens he became a great fan of jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke".
Babbitt's father was a mathematician, and Babbitt intended to study mathematics when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. But he soon transferred to New York University, where he studied music under composers Philip James and Marion Bauer. There he became interested in the music of the composers of the Second Viennese School and wrote articles on twelve-tone music, including the first description of combinatoriality and a serial "time-point" technique. Babbitt was a pioneer in integral serialism, serially organizing dynamics and rhythms in addition to pitches. He emphasized the importance of composers pursuing composition as research rather than focusing on societal approval. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he studied under composer Roger Sessions, first privately and then at Princeton University. He joined Princeton's music faculty in 1938 and received one of the university's first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942. During the Second World War, Babbitt divided his time between mathematical research in Washington, D.C. and Princeton, where he was a member of the mathematics faculty from 1943 to 1945.
In 1948, Babbitt returned to Princeton's music faculty, and in 1973 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School. Among his students were music theorists David Lewin and John Rahn, composers Bruce Adolphe, Michael Dellaira, Kenneth Fuchs, Laura Karpman, Paul Lansky, Donald Martino, John Melby, Kenneth Lampl, Tobias Picker, and James K. Randall, the theater composer Stephen Sondheim, composers and pianists Frederic Rzewski and Richard Aaker Trythall, and the jazz guitarist and composer Stanley Jordan.
In 1958, Babbitt achieved unsought notoriety through an article in the popular magazine High Fidelity. His title for the article was originally "The Composer as Specialist" but "the editor, without my knowledge and—therefore—my consent or assent, replaced my title by the more 'provocative' one: 'Who Cares if You Listen?', a title which reflects little of the letter and nothing of the spirit of the article". In 1991, Babbitt said of the article's lasting notoriety: "For all that the true source of that offensively vulgar title has been revealed many times, in many ways, even—eventually—by the offending journal itself, I still am 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". In 2006, Babbitt told the Princeton Alumni Weekly, "Now obviously, I care very deeply if you listen if nobody listens and nobody cares, you're not going to be writing music for very long".
Around 1960, Babbitt became interested in electronic music. RCA hired him as consultant composer to work with its RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 1960, Babbitt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition. In 1961, he wrote Composition for Synthesizer, marking the beginning of a second period in his output. Babbitt was less interested in producing new timbres than in the degree of rhythmic precision he could achieve with the synthesizer.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Babbitt wrote both electronic and acoustic music, often combining the two. Philomel, for example, is for soprano and a synthesized accompaniment stored on magnetic tape.
By the end of the 1970s, Babbitt was beginning to shift his focus away from electronic music, the genre that had first gained him public notice. Babbitt's compositions are typically considered atonal, but it has also been shown that, especially in his third-period music, notes from his serial structures are sometimes arranged and coordinated to forge tonal chords, cadential phrases, simulated tonal voice-leading, and other tonal allusions, allowing for double meaning, like many of his composition titles. This phenomenon of "double meaning" of notes in the context of his double-meaning titles has been called portmantonality.
From 1985 until his death, Babbitt served as the Chairman of the BMI Student Composer Awards, the international competition for young classical composers. A resident of Princeton, New Jersey, he died there on January 29, 2011, aged 94.
Filmmaker Robert Hilferty's Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer broadly depicts Babbitt's thinking, attitudes about his past, and work in footage largely from 1991–1992. The film was not completed and fully edited until 2010, and was presented on NPR online upon Babbitt's death.

Honors and awards

First period

  • 1935 Generatrix for orchestra
  • 1939–41 String Trio
  • 1940 Composition for String Orchestra
  • 1941 Symphony
  • 1941 Music for the Mass I for mixed chorus
  • 1942 Music for the Mass II for mixed chorus
  • 1946 Fabulous Voyage
  • 1946 Three Theatrical Songs for voice and piano
  • 1947 Three Compositions for Piano
  • 1948 Composition for Four Instruments
  • 1948 String Quartet No. 1
  • 1948 Composition for Twelve Instruments
  • 1949 Into the Good Ground film music
  • 1950 Composition for Viola and Piano
  • 1951 The Widow's Lament in Springtime for soprano and piano
  • 1951 Du for soprano and piano, August Stramm
  • 1953 Woodwind Quartet
  • 1954 String Quartet No. 2
  • 1954 Vision and Prayer for soprano and piano
  • 1955 Two Sonnets for baritone, clarinet, viola, and cello, two poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • 1956 Duet for piano
  • 1956 Semi-Simple Variations for piano
  • 1957 All Set for jazz ensemble
  • 1957 Partitions for piano
  • 1960 Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments
  • 1960 Sounds and Words for soprano and piano

    Second period

  • 1961 Composition for Synthesizer
  • 1961 Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized tape, setting of a poem by Dylan Thomas
  • 1964 Philomel for soprano, recorded soprano, synthesized tape, setting of a poem by John Hollander
  • 1964 Ensembles for Synthesizer
  • 1965 Relata I for orchestra
  • 1966 Post-Partitions for piano
  • 1966 Sextets for violin and piano
  • 1966 Play on Notes for bells and voice
  • 1967 Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape
  • 1968 Relata II for orchestra
  • 1968–69 Four Canons for SA
  • 1969 Phonemena for soprano and piano
  • 1970 String Quartet No. 3
  • 1970 String Quartet No. 4
  • 1968–71 Occasional Variations for synthesized tape
  • 1972 Tableaux for piano
  • 1974 Arie da capo for five instrumentalists
  • 1975 Reflections for piano and synthesized tape
  • 1975 Phonemena for soprano and synthesized tape
  • 1976 Concerti for violin, small orchestra, synthesized tape
  • 1976 A Birthday Double Canon for SATB
  • 1977 A Solo Requiem for soprano and two pianos
  • 1977 Minute Waltz for piano
  • 1977 Playing for Time for piano
  • 1978 My Ends Are My Beginnings for solo clarinet
  • 1978 My Complements to Roger for piano
  • 1978 More Phonemena for twelve-part chorus
  • 1978 Eppesithalamium for solo cello
  • 1979 An Elizabethan Sextette for six-part women's chorus
  • 1979 Images for saxophonist and synthesized tape