Milton Babbitt is a modern American composer, held in high esteem for his contributions to musical electronics and serial organization. Apart from his pioneering work in these two fields, this major composer is also a teacher and a theorist. Now in his nineties, – he was born in Philadelphia in 1916, and grew up in Jackson, MS – Babbitt has devoted most of his life to music, for which he has a gift. When he was just four years old, he began his study of the violin. The clarinet and the saxophone followed. And interest in popular song and jazz came naturally.
Surprisingly, this born musician studied mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. (Later, during World War II, he taught mathematics and worked as a mathematical researcher at Princeton.) But music was his true calling. At New York University he studied music with Philip James and Marion Bauer. He received his B.A. degree from NYU in 1935. He next studied composition with Roger Sessions, initially as a private student, and later at Princeton University. In 1942, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University. While he was at NYU, an important development of that period interested him greatly, and was to play a major role in his... show more

Milton Babbitt is a modern American composer, held in high esteem for his contributions to musical electronics and serial organization. Apart from his pioneering work in these two fields, this major composer is also a teacher and a theorist. Now in his nineties, – he was born in Philadelphia in 1916, and grew up in Jackson, MS – Babbitt has devoted most of his life to music, for which he has a gift. When he was just four years old, he began his study of the violin. The clarinet and the saxophone followed. And interest in popular song and jazz came naturally.
Surprisingly, this born musician studied mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. (Later, during World War II, he taught mathematics and worked as a mathematical researcher at Princeton.) But music was his true calling. At New York University he studied music with Philip James and Marion Bauer. He received his B.A. degree from NYU in 1935. He next studied composition with Roger Sessions, initially as a private student, and later at Princeton University. In 1942, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University. While he was at NYU, an important development of that period interested him greatly, and was to play a major role in his life and work: the relatively new twelve-tone compositional method and the serial technique developed by Schoenberg. Schoenberg determined compositional structure by manipulation of a constant sequence of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. When he was working at Princeton, Milton Babbitt went far beyond Schoenberg’s original technique, and applied the method to dynamics, timbre, rhythm, and other aspects of music. These parameters were now assigned a new structure according to fixed sequences. These sequences became structurally important not only while being operated on their own, but also while interacting with other serial parameters. Babbitt’s development and expansion of Schoenberg’s technique is known as total serialism.
In 1948, Babbitt succeeded Roger Sessions on Princeton’s music faculty. He also taught at New York’s Juilliard School later.
Babbitt’s ‘Three Compositions for Piano’, created in 1947, is widely believed to be the first serial work, pre-dating Messian’s creations by at least a year. Among his other important early works are a string quartet each in 1948 and 1954; ‘All Set’, which was influenced by jazz, and ‘Partitions’ for piano both from 1957. All these works are in his rigorously organized serial style. What is known as Babbitt’s “new complexity” is his extension of Schoenberg’s challenging methods and technique. Babbitt has developed and classified arrays, combinatoriality, partitioning, the time-point system, pitch set and pitch class, all of which are important serialist concepts. His complex compositions were incomprehensible not just to audiences but also to some musicians. He therefore looked for non-traditional settings and formats as a means of composing and performing his work. The analog technology of RCA Mark II synthesizer, which was just evolving, gave him the format he was looking for; and the setting was the Columbia-Princeton recording studio, founded in 1959 by him jointly with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. ‘Vision and Prayer’, his first entirely synthesized work, was completed a year later. The human voice forms an indispensable part of Babbitt’s conception; this is emphasized in ‘Philomel’ (1964), an early example of combining tape playback with a live performance. The performer was soprano Bethany Beardslee, Babbitt’s wife.
Moving forward, Babbitt’s compositions became more complex: bringing into play every possible musical parameter in delineating structure, and using the close connections between rhythmic organization and pitch, his increasingly dense modes of musical significance are seen in ‘Post-Partitions’ for piano (1966) and ‘Relata II’ for orchestra (1968). In his 1970 work, ‘String Quartet No. 3’, the polyphony has been integrated by the use of metronomic stability, sectional form, changes of velocity engineered by changes in metrical density, and the use of many other musical parameters, including the distinction between arco and pizzicato string playing. Seldom, if ever, has anybody performed these works successfully.
Babbitt’s degrees from NYU and Princeton have been mentioned earlier. Several other universities have recognized him for his work. His contributions to twelve-tone and electronic music have earned him a lifetime Pulitzer Prize in composition. Babbitt, who is an admirer of composer Jerome Kern, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
show less