Birthday Boy

Twelve-tone music pioneer and composer Milton Babbitt celebrates his 90th with – what else? – a concert.

By: Michael Redmond
   As he prepares to celebrate his 90th birthday, Milton Babbitt has become a superstar. Or something like a superstar. Performances celebrating the composer’s birthday are taking place all over the country — the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, and conservatories and concert halls near and far. Such is the demand for seats at Princeton University’s birthday celebration on May 21 that the music department — where Mr. Babbitt taught for decades, retiring in 1984 — has been forced to restrict attendance to an invitation-only audience.
   Mr. Babbitt is a composer whose music is known to relatively few of the Tchaikovsky-loving public but whose significance is such that a Google search of his name yields 550,000 hits. Open the Cosmic Dictionary to the listing for New Music — incredibly advanced, tough to understand, impossible to whistle — and there you will find Mr. Babbitt’s photo illustrating the entry.
   A Princeton resident since 1938, Mr. Babbitt has been the poster boy for the Music of the Future for 50 years now, ever since a maliciously written headline in High Fidelity magazine ("Who Cares If You Listen?") spawned the myth that he is contemptuous of popular taste. This just cannot be true for a fellow who speaks admiringly of Irving Berlin’s songs, has an encyclopedic appreciation of jazz and the Big Bands and who still mourns the exodus of the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City.
   It is certainly true, however, that Mr. Babbitt feels no obligation to recompose the music of Brahms or even Stravinsky, who was a friend of his. He is a passionate defender of a revolution in musical thought developed in the early 20th century by Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Schoenberg’s new musical language is based on the use of all 12 tones of the chromatic scale, independent of any grounding tone, or "tonic." One might call this the General Theory of Relativity in sound. Twelve-tone music is also known as serial music. The 12 tones can be arranged in almost half a billion "rows" or "series," opening up radically new musical possibilities.
   To give some idea of how ahead of the curve Mr. Babbitt was, the doctoral dissertation he wrote in 1946, "The Function of Set Structure in the 12-Tone System," was declined by the Princeton University committee that reviewed it. The committee did not decline Mr. Babbitt’s opus because it was no good; they declined it because they didn’t understand it — and they said so. The university made good on its reputation in 1992 by accepting the dissertation and awarding Mr. Babbitt his Ph.D. It certainly didn’t hurt that by that time he had already been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for his life’s work in 1982 and been named a MacArthur Fellow (the so-called "genius grant") in 1986.
   Born on May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia, Mr. Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Miss. Mathematics and music were plentiful in his family background.
   Recently relaxing in the study of his Princeton home (across the street from a baseball diamond, appropriately), the man who has been quoted as saying he remembers "the lyrics of every popular song between ’26 and ’35" recalled his first exposure to 12-tone music.
   "Every summer it got very hot in Jackson, and my parents would send me to stay with my grandparents in Philadelphia," he says. "My uncle, Frank Potamkin, was a pianist-composer who studied with Leo Ornstein and learned a lot of contemporary music. One day when I was about 10 years old he played some Schoenberg piano pieces — the Op. 11 or Op. 19 pieces, I don’t recall — and asked me what do you make of this. Well, I didn’t make anything of it, but I never forgot. I remember wondering what the hell was this all about."
   Fast forward into the 1930s, when Mr. Babbitt had met Schoenberg and "studied every note" of the orchestral score of the composer’s Variations (Op. 31). Mr. Babbitt turned out in the New York Public Library for the now legendary New York premiere of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet (Op. 37) by the Kolisch Quartet. "It was hot, and I remember the noise that the buses were making outside on Fifth Avenue," he says. Many sources report that this performance turned Mr. Babbitt into a card-carrying serialist. Not so, he said, although it was a milestone.
   Mr. Babbitt is also a seminal figure in the development of electronic music, dating back to the late 1950s, when he was hired by RCA to work with the Mark II Synthesizer, the mother of all synthesizers in use today. He was fascinated by the total control a synthesizer affords a composer — unprecedented accuracy of pitch and rhythm, an enormous palette of new timbres — and created groundbreaking works for synthesizer solo and for synthesizer with voice, synthesizer with conventional instruments.
   Like many composers, Mr. Babbitt is a stickler about pitch and all the other elements of music — rhythm, dynamics, duration. Years ago, he stopped a music writer during intermission at an orchestra concert in Morris County that was being conducted by Paul Zukofsky, one of his students. "When was the last time you heard an orchestra in perfect tune?" Mr. Babbitt wanted to know. He was pleased as punch that Mr. Zukofsky had insisted on setting this standard — more pleased than the orchestra’s musicians were, one suspects.
   It would be difficult to overstate Mr. Babbitt’s influence on his students. Although few share his rigorous esthetic, most are fiercely devoted to him personally, having been challenged by him to re-think the structure of music from the ground up. He is still teaching two days a week at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, where he has been on the faculty since 1971.
   "My life at Juilliard has been a joy," he says. "For all that I love Princeton University and am grateful for all the university has done for my life, I still love Juilliard in a special way."
   In class, "we look at Mozart, Beethoven, any composer that interests us, and find out what makes the piece tick. We account for every note. I especially like to take pieces that the students may have contempt for. What I do is very influenced by Heinrich Schencker (historically important music theorist, 1868-1935). I’m grateful to Schencker for the things he enabled me to see. It’s too bad, though, that for Schencker, music ended with Brahms."
   Mr. Babbitt’s students range all over the musical map. One of the most famous is theater composer Stephen Sondheim, who has sent him a very special birthday tribute — two CDs, privately produced, of Mr. Sondheim performing his own songs, from childhood to maturity, "starting as a little boy at the piano. I was never so touched."
   It appears that history has not recorded that Milton Babbitt had a hand in the composition of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.<</i>br>
   Mr. Sondheim, who is credited as the show’s lyricist, was left by Bernstein to smooth over some kinks here and there. "Steve came to me and began playing through the score, and I was able to give him a modulation he was looking for," he says. "You know, I thought ‘Tonight’ was a dreadful song. Dee-dah, dee-dah, dee dah-dah-dah dee-dah."
   It seems that he hasn’t changed his mind.
   Mr. Babbitt is a fountainhead of anecdotes about the 20th century’s musical greats. Many of his stories are still told only "off the record." But he did sign off on two involving Bernstein, whom he admired. Bernstein once dutifully assured Mr. Babbitt that he had stayed up "all night" studying one of his scores — but there was no score for Bernstein to study, Mr. Babbitt knew for certain. Another time, Bernstein was in the midst of rehearsing Babbitt’s Relata II with the New York Philharmonic and stopped dead, asking, "Milton, where the hell are we?"
   "Bar 425," Mr. Babbitt replied, score in lap.
   "We’re that far into it?" said Bernstein, amazed.
   How does Mr. Babbitt feel about all the birthday hooplah?
   "I feel old." He smiles. "I won’t play games with you — of course I’m flattered. All these honors — I received an honorary degree from Juilliard. It’s unprecedented for a faculty member to receive an honorary degree."
   Last year Mr. Babbitt lost Sylvia, his wife. They had been married for 66 years. He remembers arriving in Princeton with Sylvia when "it was a lovely college town, then, not built up at all. The university had only one proctor — he would go around campus telling students to turn down their radios. There was very little music in Princeton in those days."
   Princeton was "an armed camp" during World War II. "You saw every possible representation of the military, and good food was hard to come by," he recalls. "You could have lunch in Lahiere’s for a dollar. A lot of the faculty ate at a place called Renwick’s, which was upscale, but not as upscale as Lahiere’s. I’ll never forget the day that Renwick’s announced on the menu that they were serving horsemeat."
   But Princeton’s true hot spot in those days was "the Balt" on Nassau Street, Mr. Babbitt recalled — Baltimore Quick Lunch, in full.
   "The Balt got me through the war. I was working in Washington then, and Sylvia would stay there when I came up to Princeton, and so I would eat at the Balt. My faculty colleagues would sit there and we would talk until 2 in the morning. It was run by a fast-order cook named Mack, and you could order scrapple — I love scrapple, I’m from Philadelphia — and the most wonderful doughnuts you can’t get anymore."
   Mr. Babbitt’s government work during the war was strictly hush-hush, so hush-hush that he was issued fake non-military ID papers. As a result, he couldn’t shop in the PX, he recalled — the military commissary where many rationed or scarce commodities could be bought.
   Mr. Babbitt’s favorite Balt story involves the famous logician Alonzo Church (1903-1995). "A story made the rounds that a student passed Church outside the Balt, deep in thought. He stopped the student to ask whether he had seen him entering the Balt or leaving the Balt. You see, Church wanted to know whether he’d had lunch."
   The Balt’s gone — and so is another Princeton classic, The Annex. "Sotto is a very good restaurant," said Mr. Babbitt of The Annex’s successor, "but very upscale. Where we go in Princeton now for a bite to eat and a few drinks, I don’t know."
   Perhaps such a place should be found for Mr. Babbitt to let his hair down in following Princeton University’s birthday concert, which will feature soprano Judith Bettina, violinist Curtis Macomber and pianist Robert Taub in Babbitt works composed from 1946 to this year, as well as music by Bach and Scriabin.
   And somebody, please — remember to bring the scrapple.