Milton Babbitt

• Born: May 10, 1916
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 29, 2011
• Place of death: Princeton, New Jersey

American classical composer

A progenitor of integral serialism, Babbitt is a pioneer in the field of electroacoustic music. His work has had a profound influence on composers in Europe and America, and his compositions reflect his philosophy that music is an evolving, increasingly complex, and specialized art form.

The Life

Milton Byron Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, but he grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. The members of his immediate family were active in both music and mathematics, two fields whose influences are readily apparent in Babbitt’s career and compositional output. He began his musical studies at an early age on the violin and later the clarinet and saxophone. While his compositions and writings are rooted primarily in the world of classical music, his knowledge of American popular music and his formidable skills in jazz are widely known. Early in his career he composed both jazz and popular music.

Babbitt began his college career as a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania. However, he soon changed both the location and the focus of his studies, transferring to New York University and taking up music composition under the tutelage of Marion Bauer and Philip James. He took an early interest in the music of Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, and the composers of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Alban Berg). He earned the bachelor of arts in 1935, after which he began studying with Roger Sessions privately. He continued his studies with Sessions at Princeton University, earning a master of fine arts in 1942. While his dissertation for the Ph.D. was completed in 1946, the degree was not conferred until 1992. Apocryphal accounts assert that the dissertation was so complex that it lay unread on the desk of Oliver Strunk, the music faculty member involved in its consideration.

Babbitt’s first academic post was at Princeton in 1943, not as a member of the music faculty but rather in the mathematics department. He later joined the music faculty in 1948 and the composition faculty at the Juilliard School in 1973. In addition to writing compositions during this time, some using electronic instruments, he composed theoretical works involving the development of the twelve-tone system.

Babbitt’s interest in the electronic medium is of significant historical importance as he was instrumental in the establishment of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, one of the most important institutions of its kind. It was originally founded as the Columbia University Studio in 1952 by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. The merger occurred in 1959 and was facilitated by the acquisition of the RCA Mark II synthesizer, an instrument that Babbitt had a hand in developing.

His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960-1961), a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1982 for “his life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer,” and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1986. He was also appointed Conant Professor of Music at Princeton (succeeding Sessions in this post). His students included many prominent composers, such as Paul Lanky, Peter Westergaard, and Stephen Sondheim.

Babbitt died on January 29, 2011, in Princeton, New Jersey; he was eighty-four.

The Music

Three Compositions for Piano. Completed in 1947, this stands as the earliest work in which the relationships of a twelve-tone row are applied systematically to other musical parameters. Many of Babbitt’s European contemporaries (Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen) did the same, but this piece is the first completed work. It stands as evidence supporting Babbitt’s assertion that the first steps toward integral serialism, as it became known, were taken in America. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method ordered a row oftwelve pitches and expressed their various transformations (transposition, inversion, retrograde, and combinations of these, such as retrograde inversion), which kept their intervallic content largely intact. Integral serialism (heretofore referred to simply as serialism) applied the properties of the row to musical parameters other than just pitch (such as rhythm, dynamics, articulation, and instrumentation).

In this piece, Babbitt serialized a set of rhythms throughout. The sequence 5-1-4-2 is inverted (in this case. by subtracting the number from 6) to get 1-5-2-4. The retrograde is simply the sequence backward, or 2-4-1-5, and the retrograde inversion is the inversion backward, or 4-2-5-1. These four combinations are used in the different “voices” of the work. For example, the first phrase in the lowest voice in the piano has a statement of five pitches, then one, then four, and then two, each grouping separated with tied notes or rests. Each variant is also imbued with a different character using other musical parameters such as articulation and dynamics.

In this work Babbitt also utilized combinatoriality, a technique created by Schoenberg, which gives the work a high degree of chromaticism. This technique is utilized in nearly every work of Babbitt since and is discussed in many of his theoretical publications.

Composition for Four Instruments and Composition for Twelve Instruments. These works display Babbitt’s progression to a system where the materials are all inherently related. Both significantly advanced and refined the method by which Babbitt would derive rhythms from the pitch material in the twelve-tone row. After Three Compositions for Piano, 1948’s Composition for Four Instruments displays a technique that Babbitt referred to as partitioning, splitting the musical material of the row into different voices. Each voice so derived then exhibits a certain character as determined by other musical parameters. His Composition for Twelve Instruments explores the use of a duration scale. These explorations led to his development of the time-point system.

All Set. Babbitt was fond of puns, and the title of this piece represents several. Written for jazz ensemble, it is often what the bandleader asks of the band before beginning (many conductors of this piece cannot resist the temptation to do so in good humor). Jazz ensembles also often perform their numbers in sets, with breaks in between. The title also refers to the twelve-tone set used by Babbitt in its construction. All Set is one of the first of Babbitt’s works to use his time-point system, in which rhythms are derived explicitly from the intervals of the twelve-tone set and relationships are directly proportional. Partitioning is used here as well, dividing the six solo instruments into voices (alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, and piano). The piano, bass, and drums form the rhythm section, as is typical in a traditional jazz tune (although this is not). The main body of the work is then followed by a drum solo and a bass solo, then a coda with all of the instruments. All Set stands as one of the first examples of third-stream music. “Third stream” was coined by Gunther Schuller in 1957 (the same year All Set was completed) to describe a new category of music that embodied basic elements of jazz and Western art music.

Philomel. Many of the most important works of the early pioneers in the field of electroacoustic music have a vocal component, and Philomel is a pivotal one. Its inclusion of a soprano is only one of the aspects that gives it a human quality one might not expect from a work in which electronic synthesis and processes are integral. It is written for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound. The soprano’s voice in the recorded part is processed using various electronic enhancements, creating an unusually otherworldly effect. The synthesized part utilizes many complex serial techniques for which Babbitt is known—the electronic medium provided him with the possibility for unparalleled complexity, as the limitations of the human performer are not in effect here.

John Hollander wrote the text for this work, which is based on the sixth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which describes the legend of Philomel, princess of Athens. Tereus, king of Thrace, is sent by his wife, Procne, to bring her sister Philomel back from Athens. During the return, Tereus forces Philomel into the woods, where he rapes her and cuts out her tongue, rendering her unable to tell the tale. Upon their return, she weaves a tapestry that depicts the events, and the sisters exact their revenge: Tereus is served the limbs of his son for dinner. He chases them into the woods, and the gods intercede, changing them all into birds—Tereus becomes a hoopoe, Procne becomes a swallow, and Philomel is transformed into a nightingale. The work was commissioned by Bethany Beardslee, whose premiere performance of the work in 1964 and whose virtuosic recording indelibly mark this piece.

Musical Legacy

Babbitt took Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method and developed it into a full-fledged system in which all of the aspects of a musical composition are intrinsically connected. Through his explorations with synthesizers, he was able to fully realize his vision of integral serialism. The impact of his music and of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center is clear: Among the list of prominent composers who have studied there are Varèse, Luciano Berio, Charles Wuorinen, Wendy Carlos, and Mario Davidovsky. Nearly all of the composers who worked there were influenced not only by Babbitt’s techniques with electronic music synthesizers but also by his compositional methods and philosophies in general.

In an unfortunate turn of events, he will always be remembered as the author of an article he entitled “The Composer as Specialist.” Without Babbitt’s consent or knowledge, the editors of the magazine High Fidelity renamed the article “Who Cares If You Listen?” It is likely that the new title helped sell many magazines, although it did not reflect Babbitt’s true message. In the article he asserted that the field of the contemporary composer had become very specialized, analogous to what had occurred in other fields, such as philosophy and mathematics. He encouraged composers to withdraw from mainstream venues, as they placed unreasonable demands and limitations on their creative expression. Just as math professors and other scholars should not edit an academic journal so that, if read aloud, it would sell a sufficient number of seats at Lincoln Center, composers should not simplify or alter their compositional vision to do the same. Babbitt’s musical output and philosophy influenced and emancipated many composers, resulting in a generation whose compositions exhibit remarkable complexity.

Principal Works

chamber works:Composition for Four Instruments, 1948; Woodwind Quartet, 1953; All Set, 1957; Sextets, 1966 (for violin and piano); Arie da capo, 1974; Dual, 1980 (for cello and piano); The Head of the Bed, 1982 (for soprano, wind, and strings); The Joy of More Sextets, 1986 (for violin and piano); The Crowded Air, 1988; Consortini, 1989; Soli e Duettini, 1989 (for flute and guitar); Soli e Duettini, 1990 (for violin and viola); None but the Lonely Flute, 1991; Swan Song No. 1, 2003 (for wind and strings).

instrumental works:Three Compositions for Piano, 1947; Partitions, 1957 (for piano); Composition for Synthesizer, 1961 (for synthesizer and four-track tape); Reflections, 1975 (for piano and synthesized tape); My Ends Are My Beginnings, 1978 (for clarinet); Beaten Paths, 1988 (for marimba); Play It Again, Sam, 1989 (for viola).

musical theater (music): Fabulous Voyage, 1946 (lyrics by Richard S. Childs; libretto by Richard Koch; based on Homer’s Odyssey).

orchestral works:Composition for Twelve Instruments, 1948; Relata I, 1965; Relata II, 1968; Ars combinatoria, 1981; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 1985; Concerto for Orchestra, 2004.

vocal works:Philomel, 1964 (for soprano and four-track tape); Phonemena, 1970 (for soprano and piano); Phonemena, 1975 (for soprano and tape); A Solo Requiem, 1977 (for soprano and two pianos).

writings of interest:Milton Babbitt: Words About Music, 1987 (edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus); The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, 2003 (edited by Stephen Peles).

Bibliography

Babbitt, Milton. The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt. Edited by Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Strauss. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Babbitt, Milton. Interview by Gabrielle Zuckerman. American Mavericks, American Public Media, July 2002, musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview‗babbitt.html. Accessed 30 Mar. 2017.

Boretz, Benjamin. “Milton Babbitt.” In Dictionary of Contemporary Music, edited by John Vinton. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

Gagné, Nicole V. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music. The Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Kozinn, Allan. "Milton Babbitt, a Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94." The New York Times, 29 Jan. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/arts/music/30babbitt.html. Accessed 30 Mar. 2017.

Mead, Andrew Washburn. An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.