Milton Babbitt

Biography

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's compositional approach was deeply inspired by Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. He built a compositional system based on permutations of the total chromatic.

Life and career

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. 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.
He married Sylvia Miller, a statistician, in 1939, and the couple had a daughter.
During World War II, Babbitt divided 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. 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; composer-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" (and it was republished several times under that title) 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 Manhattan. 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's sequencer.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Babbitt wrote both electronic and acoustic music, 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 to shift his focus away from the electronic music that had first gained him public notice. His 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 "double meaning" of pitches in the context of his double-meaning titles 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, aged 94. Babbitt's wife predeceased him, and he was survived by his daughter and two grandchildren.
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 to 1992. The film was completed in 2010, and was presented on NPR online upon Babbitt's death.

Honors and awards

1960 – Guggenheim Fellowship
1965 – Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1974 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1982 – Pulitzer Prize, Special Citation, "for his life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer"
1986 – MacArthur Fellow
1988 – Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for music composition
1999 – American Classical Music Hall of Fame
2000 – National Patron of Delta Omicron
2010 – The Max Reger Foundation of America – Extraordinary Life Time Musical Achievement Award

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 knowledge or permission 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 (cond. James DePreist); Milton Babbitt: Relata I (cond. Paul Zukofsky); David Diamond: Symphony No. 5 (cond. Christopher Keene). New World Records 80396–2. New York: Recorded Anthology od 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.

Listening

Babbitt's Beguiling Surfaces, Improvised Inside, Three-part video essay from the Society for Music Theory by Joshua Banks Mailman, 2019.
Slowly Expanding Milton Babbitt Album (since 2018), produced by Erik Carlson
Milton Babbitt interview from National Public Radio Performance Today program, May 10, 2006
Speaking of Music: Milton Babbitt Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian, 1984
Art of the States: Milton Babbitt
Recording Concerto Piccolino – Lee Ferguson, vibraphone Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Recording None But the Lonely Flute – John McMurtery, flute Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Woodwind Quartet (1953), performed by members of the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet.
Robert Hilferty documentary on Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt "The Revolution in Musical Thought" The Baltimore Museum of Art: Baltimore, Maryland, 1963 Archived May 6, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Accessed June 26, 2012
Soni Ventorum plays the Woodwind Quartet