Photo courtesy of Schirmir AMP Archives
[Jan. 31, 2010] - American composer Milton Babbitt, whose work influenced generations of younger composers and musicians worldwide, died at age 94 this past Saturday in Princeton, NJ, where he still held a post as emeritus professor at Princeton University.
Throughout his life, Babbitt yoked his output to an undeniable intellectual rigor and, to many listeners, an off-putting aesthetic thorniness. By contrast, however, he often showed off a caustic wit both in his words and within the pages of his scores, and many works bear whimsical titles, such as his Whirled Series for saxophone and piano; None but the Lonely Flute for solo flute; Play It Again, Sam for solo viola (written for Samuel Rhodes, the longtime violist of the Juilliard String Quartet, who have been ardent champions of Babbitt's work); and Joy of More Sextets for piano and violin.
One of Babbitt's most visible American champions has been conductor James Levine, who has regularly programmed his work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Ensemble; Levine has also recorded Babbitt with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
From his early works onwards, Babbitt marked himself as a musical descendant of Schoenberg and of the serialist style; indeed, he expanded Schoenberg's framework by creating works in which not just the 12 pitches of the scale are given equal prominence, but using serial ordering to determine other elements such as dynamics and note duration as well. Babbitt's work became the foundation of what became dubbed "total serialism," whose European adherents included Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono.
Babbitt never sought for his work to achieve any sort of popularity amongst musicians or audiences; the most famous expression of this sentiment came in the title of a 1958 essay he wrote for High Fidelity Magazine titled "Who Cares If You Listen?" Though Babbitt protested that he hadn't given his article that title--an editor had--he asserted within the essay that audiences were fundamentally irrelevant to contemporary composers, because their primary duty was to each other, just as contemporary physicists', mathematicians', and philosophers' work was not meant to be heard or understood by a larger audience.
Born in Philadelphia in 1916, Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He began violin lessons at age 4, but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Growing up in the heady days of jazz' first flowering, by age 7 he was already creating his own arrangements of the popular songs of the day.
He first encountered the European avant-garde in 1932 as a 16-year-old philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania, when his uncle brought him Schoenberg piano scores. He soon switched both disciplines and schools, and began studying composition at New York University with Marion Bauer and Philip James; in 1935 he began private study with Roger Sessions, which proved a pivotal association.
Three years after their first meeting, Sessions invited Babbitt to join the faculty at Princeton; later, Babbitt--whose students ranged from Mario Davidovsky to Stephen Sondheim--also joined the faculties of The Juilliard School, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies; Tanglewood; the new music academy at Darmstadt; and New England Conservatory. During World War II, however, Babbitt also taught math at Princeton and worked in Washington doing secret research for the American government.
Among the many honors bestowed on Babbitt was his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965; in 1982, Babbitt received a special Pulitzer Prize for his life's work, and a MacArthur "genius" fellowship four years later.
Browse more editorial features here
by Anastasia Tsioulcas
