Milton Babbitt

Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) 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. Babbitt was born in Philadelphia to Albert E. Babbitt and Sarah Potamkin, who were Jewish. He was raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and 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 with 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. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University College of Arts & Science in 1935 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he studied under Roger Sessions, first privately and then at Princeton University. He joined Princeton's music faculty in 1938 and received one of Princeton'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 more notable students are 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 J. 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 "The Composer as Specialist" (as it was later published several times) but, he said, "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".More than 30 years later, he said, "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".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 (known since 1996 as the Columbia University Computer Music Center). In 1961 he produced his Composition for Synthesizer, marking the beginning of a second period in his output. Babbitt was less interested in producing new timbres than in the rhythmic precision he could achieve with the synthesizer, a degree of precision previously unobtainable in performance.Through the 1960s and 1970s Babbitt wrote both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments, often combining the two. Philomel (1964), for example, is 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.

By the end of the 1970s Babbitt was beginning his third creative period by shifting his focus away from electronic music, the genre that first gained for him public notice. Like most dodecaphonic music, 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 (all-partition arrays and superarrays) are sometimes arranged and coordinated to forge tonal chords, cadential phrases, simulated tonal voice-leading, and other tonal allusions, allowing for double meaning (serial and tonal), like many of his composition titles. This phenomenon of "double meaning" of notes (pitches) 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, at age 94.Filmmaker Robert Hilferty's Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer broadly depicts Babbitt's thinking, attitudes about his past and then-current 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.