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Other authors named Milton:
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Author's popularity: 8
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Popularity: 10
Vote: | As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media. |
Popularity: 9
Vote: | The new limitations are the human ones of perception. |
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Biography
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Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. He is particularly noted for his pioneering serial and electronic music.
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.
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.
In 1947, Babbitt wrote his Three Compositions for Piano, which are thought to be 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.
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 Synthesiser. Unlike many composers who saw electronic instruments as a way of producing new timbres, Babbitt was more interested in the degree of precision he could get in performances by synthesisers, impossible with human performers.
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 magnetic tape and musical ensemble. Since his experiences with electronic synthesisers, his pieces for conventional instruments have sometimes been so complex as to be almost unplayable.
External link
*Schirmer.com: Milton Babbitt
* NewMusicBox: Milton Babbitt in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, 2001
*Gregsandow.com: A Fine Madness Village Voice, March 16, 1982
*Furious.com Milton Babbitt talks about "Philomel"
Listening
*NewMusicJukeBox.org: Milton Babbitt
*ArtoftheStates.org: Milton Babbitt
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Milton Babbitt".
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