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Milton Babbitt: Three Compositions (1947-1948)

Wiki: Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He studied violin and later clarinet and saxophone as a child.

Babbitt’s father was a mathematician, and it was mathematics that Babbitt intended to study when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. However, he soon left and went to New York University instead, 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 went on to write a number of 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 and Science in 1935 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he studied under Roger Sessions, first privately, later at Princeton University, where he joined the music faculty in 1938 and received one of Princeton’s first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942 (Barkin & Brody 2001). During the Second World War Babbitt divided his time between mathematical research in Washington, DC, and Princeton, where he became a member of the mathematics faculty from 1943 to 1945 (Barkin & Brody 2001).

In 1948, Babbitt joined Princeton University’s music faculty and in 1973, became a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York.

In 1958, Babbitt achieved unsought notoriety through an article in the popular magazine High Fidelity (Babbitt 1958). His title for the article, “The Composer as Specialist”, was changed, without his knowledge or consent, to “Who Cares if You Listen?” More than 30 years later, he commented that, because of that “offensively vulgar title”, he was “still … 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” (Babbitt 1991, 17).

Babbitt later became interested in electronic music. He was hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with their RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (known since 1996 as the Columbia University Computer Music Center), and in 1961 produced his Composition for Synthesizer. Babbitt was less interested in producing new timbres than in the rhythmic precision he could achieve using the Mark II synthesizer, a degree of precision previously unobtainable in live performances (Barkin & Brody 2001).

Babbitt continued to write both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments, often combining the two. Philomel (1964), for example, was written 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.