Milton Babbit (jan 1, 1916 – jun 1, 2011)

Description:

an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.

Academicism, American Style
1. Craft conducted Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles at its premiere at Princeton University.
2. Princeton was a leading school for composition and theory at this time, thanks largely to the efforts of Milton Babbitt.
3. Babbitt was a trained mathematician as well as musician.
4. He developed “set theory” in 1946 as a basis for the analysis of twelve-tone technique.
a. Some of the terms he used have become standard in the analysis of twentiethcentury music.
5. He also composed in a manner similar to the zero hour composers, a little prior to their works, but did not publish the compositions (with one exception). This left him with some resentment, because they had credit for the new ideas that he had also developed.
6. Babbitt was criticized for being “too academic,” but he relished this label.
7. The increase in funding for the sciences in the United States, spurred on by the success
of Sputnik, resulted in an increase in new-styled composition in the United States, the “new PhD
music."

“Who Cares If You Listen?”
1. Much of the music composed in the early twentieth century eventually received approval from audiences.
2. The composers in this chapter, however, did not win such popular approval.
3. Babbitt provided the reasoning behind their music in a lecture originally entitled “The Composer as Specialist,” which is now known by another title: “Who Cares If You Listen?”

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