Milton Babbitt

Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. He is particularly noted for his pioneering serial and electronic music.

Related Topics:
May 10 - 1916 - American - Composer - Serial - Electronic music

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Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi at an early age. He studied violin and later clarinet and saxophone as a child. Early in his life he showed ability in jazz and popular music.

Related Topics:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Jackson, Mississippi - Violin - Clarinet - Saxophone - Jazz - Popular music

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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 to study music instead. 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 degree in 1935, he studied under Roger Sessions, first privately, later at Princeton University.

Related Topics:
Mathematics - University of Pennsylvania - New York University - Music - Second Viennese School - Twelve tone music - Combinatoriality - Roger Sessions - Princeton University

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In 1947, Babbitt wrote his Three Compositions for Piano, which are the earliest examples of total serialisation in music, pre-dating Olivier Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités by two years, and Pierre Boulez' Polyphonie X by five.

Related Topics:
Serialisation - Olivier Messiaen - Mode de valeurs et d'intensités - Pierre Boulez - Polyphonie X

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Babbitt later became interested in electronic music. He was hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with their RCA Mark II Synthesizer, and in 1961 produced his Music for Synthesizer. Many other composers regarded electronic instruments as a way of producing new timbres. Babbitt was much more interested in the rhythmic precision he could achieve using the Mark II synthesizer, a sort of precision regarded, certainly so regarded in 1961, as impossible in performance by actual, live, human performers.

Related Topics:
Electronic music - RCA - RCA Mark II Synthesizer - Timbre

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Babbitt continued to write both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments, sometimes combining the two. Philomel (1964), for example, written in collaboration with the poet John Hollander, 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. It might seem that his use of the Mark II Synthesizer put Babbitt in the habit of writing music of enormous rhythmic complexity, and that his subsequent pieces for conventional instruments with mortal perfomers became, as a result, so complex as to seem unplayable, but it is fairer to say that his interest in these sorts of complexities preceded his time with the Mark II and has continued well after the demise of the Mark II to the present day.

Related Topics:
Musical instrument - Poet - John Hollander - Magnetic tape

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Fred Maus (2004, p.163) argues that many of Babbitt's statements from the mid-century onward form a position now know as constructionism such as Babbitt's insistance, contra Schenker's essentialism, that the overtone series is irrelevant to tonal music ("Now, what music, in what sense, ever had been founded on it?" (ibid, p.158)).

Related Topics:
Fred Maus - Constructionism - Schenker - Essentialism

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