By: centraljersey.com
Milton Babbitt, a famed composer and Princeton University music professor whose mathematical expertise guided his creation of complex, modernist soundscapes that influenced generations of artists and scholars, died Jan. 29 of natural causes at the University Medical Center at Princeton. He was 94.
Mr. Babbitt, who was Princeton’s William Shubael Conant Professor of Music Emeritus, joined the university faculty in 1938 at the age of 22 and retired in 1984. He was a driving force behind the growth of Princeton’s Department of Music and was a mentor whose students produced compositions and scholarly work in genres ranging from the avant-garde to the Broadway stage.
"He was one of the founding fathers of music as an academic discipline. But first and foremost, he was a brilliant composer whose music speaks for itself," said Paul Lansky, a Princeton music professor who was a student of Mr. Babbitt’s.
A pioneer of electronic music, Mr. Babbitt championed "cerebral music" that forced listeners to carefully follow his structurally complex compositions. His works – which included seminal pieces such as "All Set" (1957), written for a jazz ensemble, and "Philomel" (1964), which combines synthesizer with soprano voice – were performed and studied worldwide. Mr. Babbitt’s approach to composition was an extension of the "serial" method pioneered by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in the early 20th century in which a particular ordering of the 12 notes on the Western scale is used as the basis for the pitch organization of the whole piece. Utilizing his mathematical background, Mr. Babbitt was one of the first to expand this serial order approach to other elements, such as rhythm and timbre, in developing his diverse catalog of compositions for chamber ensembles, vocal works, orchestral pieces and instrumental soloists.
"It was his knowledge of math and theory that allowed him to make a convincing argument that music was not just this sort of touchy-feely thing – you could either do it or you couldn’t – but that there was a lot of craft and skill and even computation involved," said Steven Mackey, a professor and chair of the music department at Princeton.
When Mr. Babbitt joined the Princeton faculty in 1938, just three years after earning his bachelor’s degree at New York University, music classes were taught in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Princeton’s music department was established in 1946, and 15 years later it became one of the first in the country to offer a Ph.D. in composition.
Mr. Babbitt, whose father and brother were mathematicians, also taught in the mathematics department at Princeton during World War II. While his mathematical approach was a signature of his own compositions, as a teacher he embraced a wide range of subject matter, focusing on areas such as jazz and popular music, in addition to abstract modern compositions.
In addition to teaching at Princeton, Mr. Babbitt was on the faculty of the Juilliard School in New York City from 1971 to 2008. He also had private students, including the Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim.
He helped to establish and co-directed the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, which housed the RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer, the first American machine designed for the production of electronic music. The machine, which stood 7 feet high and 20 feet wide, was the vehicle for some of Mr. Babbitt’s most satisfying moments as a composer beginning in the late 1950s.
After he joined the Princeton faculty in 1938, Mr. Babbitt continued to study under the Princeton professor and renowned composer Roger Sessions, who had brought him to the university after working privately with Mr. Babbitt in New York. Mr. Babbitt earned a master of fine arts degree in 1942, and then set out to write a doctoral thesis. Mr. Babbitt completed in 1946 a highly technical dissertation on the mathematics of the 12-tone system pioneered by Schoenberg. Though it was lauded by Princeton mathematics professor John Tukey, who was one of its readers, the dissertation was rejected by the music department, which then only offered a Ph.D. in historical musicology, not in theory and composition. Though it is now considered a groundbreaking work, music scholars of that time did not understand the relevance of Mr. Babbitt’s thesis.
However, nearly 50 years later, Mr. Babbitt’s dissertation was resubmitted by his colleagues Lansky and Claudio Spies, who felt his work deserved recognition. Mr. Babbitt’s thesis was reviewed again by the music department, and his Ph.D. was bestowed in 1992, one year after he received an honorary doctorate from Princeton.
The honorary degree was among many honors and awards received by Mr. Babbitt in recognition of his contributions to American music and scholarship. Included were a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1986 and a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1982 for "his life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer."
Born May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia, Mr. Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Miss. He began composing and playing the violin as a young boy and graduated from high school at age 15.
Mr. Babbitt is survived by his daughter, Betty Ann Duggan, and two grandchildren, Julie and Adam. A campus memorial service is being planned for later this spring.