By David Hamilton

The standard line on Milton Babbitt for more than four decades has revolved around terms such as “cerebral” and” academic.” His most widely reprinted writing is an article entitled “Who Cares If You Listen?” His rigorous analyses of the properties of Schoenberg’s “method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another” (and his own extensions thereof) encouraged many to dismiss him as a theoretician—and to pigeonhole him as the opposite pole to the “anti-rational” approach of John Cage. More recently, he has been painted as the leading figure of a “Northeastern academic establishment” that ruled over American music from the 1950s to the 1970s.

This common line was not only wrong, but pernicious, for it furnished easy excuses for not listening to Babbitt’s music. He did care that people listen; his own title for that notorious article was “The Composer as Specialist,” but an editor thought he knew better. His conversation about actual musical works, old and new, has always been stimulating and original, and clearly derives from delight in listening and in the play of invention. As for his supposed sometime hegemony over American music, the claim seems laughable to those who were there. His music was then rarely performed outside new-music and academic circles; rather than Babbitt, the likes of Samuel Barber, William Schuman, and Morton Gould reaped the bulk of major commissions in those decades. His few orchestral works have not often been adequately realized, nor was his list of recordings ever imposing until recent years.

He found his compensation in constant work, in his devoted pupils, and in the dedicated performers who continue to find his music a challenge both technically and expressively. These persuasive advocates have often commissioned new works as well, and in recent years more and more of his music has found its way onto CDs; a milestone in this regard was Robert Taub’s collection of piano works, gratifyingly hailed as “one of the seminal recordings in contemporary American music” by “downtown” critic Kyle Gann: “I’ve come to enjoy Babbitt’s sparkling, unpredictable textures more and more with each listening.” New works continue to pour from his pen, their punning titles reflecting the zest that he still brings to his work (and also the fascination with aural double-entendres that pervades his music): consider Sheer Pluck (for guitar), Transfigured Notes (for string orchestra), and Whirled Series (for alto sax and piano).

Listen to one of his notable interpreters, soprano Bethany Beardslee, describing her reaction to Babbitt’s piano music:” . . . it’s like listening to a sound surface that sparkles like diamonds. He often gets this dazzling sonic effect—like Ravel in La Valse. Pure sensuousness.” Or to pianist and author Charles Rosen: “It has been said of Debussy that a third in his music sounds more like a third than in anyone else’s, that the contrast brings out the individual sonority of each interval. This peculiar sensitivity is found in Babbitt, and gives his music its precise elegance.” Or to pianist Robert Taub’s assertion that “the music of Milton Babbitt must be played from the heart.” To consider Babbitt’s works in the light of such thoughts, instead of from the composer’s formidable reputation as theoretician, advocate of “maximum multiplicity of function” in art, and eloquent apostle of high-modern complexity, is to discover qualities too often overlooked.

Born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1916, Milton Babbitt was raised in Jackson, Mississippi, in a musical family. His first instrument was the violin (he played the Bach Double Concerto in public at age five), but in school he became interested in jazz, taking up the clarinet (and also alto sax), playing gigs, composing songs, and laying the foundations for his famously encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music. At the same time he managed to become acquainted with new music from Europe, notably that of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Upon graduation from high school at age 15, he entered the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in philosophy, but eventually transferred to New York University because of the presence there of Marion Bauer, author of a then-recent book about the 20th-century music that so interested him. Upon graduation, he studied privately with Roger Sessions and worked toward an M.F.A. in music at Princeton, where in 1938 he was hired as an instructor.

During the war years, he undertook “ultra-secret” duties in Washington and taught advanced math at Princeton to engineers preparing for radar work. In 1946, he returned to the Princeton music department, where he remained until his retirement in 1984, succeeding Sessions as Conant Professor of Music in 1960. Among other accomplishments during these years was his role in the founding of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, where his electronic works have always been prepared. Since 1971 he has taught composition at The Juilliard School. Awarded a special citation in 1982 by the Pulitzer Prizes for “his life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer,” he received a MacArthur fellowship in 1986, and from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1991, the William Schuman Lifetime Achievement Award.

Milton Babbitt was, and remains, a dazzling, witty, charming teacher who lectures in a highly personal mixture of colloquialism and complex, elegantly structured sentences—a style rather well rendered in his book <i>Words About Music</i> (edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Even after 40-plus years, the impression Babbitt made at the first meeting of an elementary harmony class—with his penetrating demonstration of the diatonic tonal system’s inherent structural logic, coherence, and richness—remains vivid to this writer. Commuting from New York at that time, he seemed to know everybody and to have heard everything, and his involvement in the metropolitan musical scene enhanced his pied-piper charisma. Though he eventually came to live in Princeton fulltime, he is still a vivid figure at New York concerts of new music, as supportive of his former students and colleagues as ever. His students today at Juilliard react with the same enthralled fascination as we did at Princeton decades earlier.

David Hamilton has written on music and recordings for numerous publications, including High Fidelity, Opus, and The New York Times. Editor of The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia he is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School.