Milton Babbitt

Biography

Milton Babbitt represents a technologically and intellectually sophisticated approach to music. He acknowledged in a notorious 1958 essay that music of a certain level of sophistication guarantees for its aficionados a high degree of “musical and societal ‘isolation’” and said that this divergence is probably “not transitory.” He may have overstated the extent of his isolation. He was born in Pennsylvania, raised in Mississippi, and began his studies with the violin at the age of four, soon thereafter taking up both the clarinet and the saxophone. He was attracted as a young man to jazz and theater music and his important teachers included Philip James, Marion Bauer and Roger Sessions. He wrote several articles on twelve tone music, including descriptions of serial time-point technique. When electronic music captured his attention in the late 1950s he worked with RCA as a consultant on their Mark II Synthesizer.