Milton Byron Babbitt was born on May 10, 1916, and died on January 29, 2011. He was an American composer, music theory expert, mathematician, and teacher. He received the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in serial and electronic music. Babbitt's way of creating music was greatly influenced by Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. He developed a system for creating music based on arrangements of all the musical notes available.

Biography

Leon 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 at age 4, but later switched to playing the clarinet and saxophone. He was drawn to jazz and theater music early in life and played in every pit orchestra that visited his town. By age 7, he was arranging popular songs on his own. He wrote many songs for school plays and won a local songwriting contest at 13. A Jackson newspaper called him a "whiz kid" and noted that he had perfect pitch and could calculate his family's grocery bills mentally. In his teens, he became a fan of jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke.

Babbitt’s father was a mathematician, and Babbitt planned to study mathematics when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. However, he later transferred to New York University, where he studied music with composers Philip James and Marion Bauer. There, he became interested in the music of composers from the Second Viennese School and wrote articles about twelve-tone music, including the first description of combinatoriality and a serial "time-point" technique. Babbitt was a pioneer in integral serialism, organizing dynamics and rhythms in addition to pitches in his compositions. He believed composers should focus on research rather than seeking approval from others. After earning 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 earned one of the university’s first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942.

Babbitt married Sylvia Miller, a statistician, in 1939, and the couple had a daughter.

During World War II, Babbitt split his time between mathematical research in Washington, D.C., where Sylvia worked for the War Production Board, 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. His students included 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, theater composer Stephen Sondheim, composers and pianists Frederic Rzewski and Richard Aaker Trythall, and jazz guitarist and composer Stanley Jordan.

In 1958, Babbitt gained unexpected attention through an article in the magazine High Fidelity. The article was originally titled "The Composer as Specialist," but the editor changed the title to "Who Cares if You Listen?" without Babbitt’s permission. In 1991, Babbitt said he was more often remembered for the article’s title than for his music. In 2006, he 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 a consultant composer to work with its RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 1960, Babbitt received a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition. In 1961, he wrote Composition for Synthesizer, marking the start of a new phase in his work. Babbitt focused more on achieving rhythmic precision with the synthesizer than on creating new sounds.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Babbitt composed both electronic and acoustic music, often combining the two. For example, Philomel (1964) features a soprano and a synthesized accompaniment, including the recorded and manipulated voice of Bethany Beardslee, for whom the piece was written.

By the late 1970s, Babbitt began to focus less on electronic music, the genre that had first brought him public attention. His compositions are typically considered atonal, but some of his later works use serial structures to create tonal chords and phrases, allowing for dual meanings in his music and titles. This phenomenon has been called "portmantonality."

From 1985 until his death, Babbitt served as Chairman of the BMI Student Composer Awards, an international competition for young classical composers. A resident of Princeton, New Jersey, he died there on January 29, 2011, at age 94. His wife had died before him, and he was survived by his daughter and two grandchildren.

A film titled Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer, directed by Robert Hilferty, features footage from 1991 to 1992 that shows Babbitt’s thoughts, attitudes, and work. The film was not completed and fully edited until 2010 and was shared online by NPR after Babbitt’s death.

Honors and awards

• 1960 – Received a special grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
• 1965 – Became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1974 – Was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1982 – Received the Pulitzer Prize with a special citation for his life's work as a respected and influential American composer
• 1986 – Was named a MacArthur Fellow
• 1988 – Received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for music composition
• 1999 – Was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame
• 2000 – Became the National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity
• 2010 – Received the Extraordinary Lifetime Musical Achievement Award from the Max Reger Foundation of America

Articles

• (1955). "Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition." The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 12:53–61.
• (1958). "Who Cares if You Listen?" High Fidelity (February). [Babbitt called this article "The Composer as Specialist." The original title was changed without his permission or knowledge by an editor at High Fidelity.]
• (1960). "Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants," The Musical Quarterly 46/2.
• (1961). "Set Structure as Compositional Determinant," Journal of Music Theory 5/1.
• (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, edited by Barry S. Brook, Edward Downes, and Sherman Van Solkema, 270–307. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-02142-4. Reprinted, New York: Pendragon Press, 1985. ISBN 0-918728-50-9.
• (1987) Words About Music: The Madison Lectures, edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph Straus. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• (1992) "The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System." PhD Dissertation. Princeton: Princeton University.
• (2003). The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, Joseph Straus. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Selected discography

• Piano Works. Three Compositions (1947–48); Duet (1956); Semi-Simple Variations (1956); Partitions (1957); Post-Partitions (1966); Tableaux (1973); Reflections (1974) for Piano and Synthesized Tape; Canonical Form (1983); Lagniappe (1985). Robert Taub, piano. Harmonia Mundi 905160.
• Clarinet Quintets. Phoenix Ensemble (Mark Lieb, clarinet; Aaron Boyd, Kristi Helberg, and Alicia Edelberg, violins; Cyrus Beroukhim, viola; Alberto Parinni and Bruce Wang, cellos). (Morton Feldman, Clarinet and String Quartet; Milton Babbitt, Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet). Innova 746. St. Paul, Minnesota: American Composers Forum, 2009.
• Concerto for Piano and Orchestra/The Head of the Bed. Alan Feinberg, piano; American Composers Orchestra; Charles Wuorinen, conductor; Judith Bettina, soprano; Parnassus, Anthony Korf. New World Records 80346.
• The Juilliard Orchestra. Vincent Persichetti: Night Dances (conducted by James DePreist); Milton Babbitt: Relata I (conducted by Paul Zukofsky); David Diamond: Symphony No. 5 (conducted by Christopher Keene). New World Records 80396–2. New York: Recorded Anthology of Music, 1990.
• The Juilliard String Quartet: Sessions, Wolpe, Babbitt. Roger Sessions, String Quartet No. 2 (1951); Stefan Wolpe, String Quartet (1969); Milton Babbitt, String Quartet No. 4 (1970). The Juilliard Quartet (Robert Mann, Joel Smirnoff, violins; Samuel Rhodes, viola; Joel Krosnick, cello). CRI CD 587. New York: Composers Recordings, Inc., 1990.
• Occasional Variations (String Quartets No. 2 and No. 6, Occasional Variations, Composition for Guitar). William Anderson, guitar; Fred Sherry Quartet, Composers String Quartet. Tzadik 7088. New York: Tzadik, 2003.
• Philomel (Philomel, Phonemena for soprano and piano, Phonemena for soprano and tape, Post-Partitions, Reflections). Bethany Beardslee and Lynne Webber, sopranos; Jerry Kuderna and Robert Miller, pianos. New World Records 80466-2 / DIDX 022920. New York: Recorded Anthology of American Music, 1995. The material on this CD was issued on New World LPs NW 209 and NW 307, in 1977 and 1980, respectively.
• Quartet No. 3 for Strings. (With Charles Wuorinen, Quartet for Strings.) The Fine Arts Quartet. Turnabout TV-S 34515.
• Sextets; The Joy of More Sextets. Rolf Schulte, violin; Alan Feinberg, piano. New World Records NW 364–2. New York: Recorded Anthology of American Music, 1988.
• Soli e Duettini (Around the Horn, Whirled Series, None but the Lonely Flute, Homily, Beaten Paths, Play it Again Sam, Soli e Duettini, Melismata). The Group for Contemporary Music. Naxos 8559259.
• Three American String Quartets. Mel Powell, String Quartet (1982); Elliott Carter, Quartet for Strings No. 4 (1986); Milton Babbitt, Quartet No. 5 (1982). Composers Quartet (Matthew Raimondi, Anahid Ajemian, violins; Maureen Gallagher, Karl Bargen, violas; Mark Shuman, cello). Music & Arts CD-606. Berkeley: Music and Arts Program of America, Inc., 1990.
• An Elizabethan Sextette (An Elizabethan Sextette, Minute Waltz, Partitions, It Takes Twelve to Tango, Playing for Time, About Time, Groupwise, Vision and Prayer). Alan Feinberg, piano; Bethany Beardslee, soprano; The Group for Contemporary Music, Harvey Sollberger, conducting. CRI CD 521. New York: Composers Recordings, Inc., 1988. Reissued on CRI/New World NWCR521.