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Milton Babbitt

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Milton Babbitt (1916 to 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician and teacher. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. As a child he played violin, clarinet and saxophone, and he loved jazz and show music. He wrote arrangements of popular songs at an early age. His father was a mathematician, and that way of thinking continued to resonate in his music.

Music and breakthrough

Babbitt studied in New York and with Roger Sessions, and from 1938 he was affiliated with Princeton University. He stayed there, with an interruption during the Second World War, teaching for decades; in 1973 a position at the Juilliard School was added. He became fascinated by the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. He developed that technique into a system of his own and was a pioneer of integral serial music: not only the pitches, but also the rhythm and dynamics were built according to a fixed ordering. He also worked with the electronic music of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, from which a record was released in 1961, and later recordings appeared of, among others, Philomel and Piano Works.

Influence

In 1958 his article appeared in the magazine High Fidelity, to which the editors gave the title Who Cares if You Listen?. It became a famous and controversial text about composers as researchers. Babbitt stood far from pop, but his influence was broad: among his students were the theatre composer Stephen Sondheim and the jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a section of Philomel and see whether you can remember a melody, or whether the music works more like a pattern of sounds that returns differently each time.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Categories: Artists