Milton Babbitt

Many consider Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt to be the preeminent figure in post-World War II American music. Beyond the extraordinary power of his music, he is also, as he says, "somewhat known as a talker." In fact, he is renowned as an energetic teacher and inspired lecturer. In 1983 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Babbitt presented a concise summary of his most essential musical insights in a series of lectures and seminars. These are gathered here, presenting for the first time in book form a comprehensive overview of the subjects that have formed the core of his teaching for the past forty years. Babbitt's central concern in these lectures is the twelve-tone tradition with which he is so closely identified. His discussion of this tradition ranges from close consideration of specific compositional problems to frank evaluation of his own position in that tradition. In his characteristically penetrating way, Babbitt discusses the most controversial issues in twentieth-century music, from serialism and atonality to the responsibility of the listener and the place of music in the university. Until now, few have had direct exposure to Babbitt's ideas. In Madison, he spoke to a variety of audiences and, because of the pedagogical context, his presentation was direct and explanatory. This volume preserves the dazzling constructions and spontaneous excitement of his spoken language. At the time of publication, Milton Babbitt was William Shubael Conant Professor of Music Emeritus at Princeton University. He has been showered with awards during his long and distinguished career, including the Pulitzer Prize (1982) and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (1986). He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has grappled profoundly with central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. In the history of music theory, there has been only a small handful of figures who have produced work of comparable stature. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a priceless primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right. Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete, authoritative, and fully accessible--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

In this celebration of Milton Babbitt's art, Andrew Mead explores the development of a central figure in contemporary American music. As a teacher and writer, Babbitt has influenced two generations of students, including such notable musicians as Stephen Sondheim and Donald Martino. He has helped establish the study of music theory as a serious academic pursuit, and his articles on Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and the twelve-tone system constitute a seminal body of research. But Babbitt is first and last a composer, whose works are, in Mead's words, "truly music to be heard." With Mead as a guide, we discover the strong emotional and expressive charge of Babbitt's music that is inextricably entwined with its structure. Babbitt is a twelve-tone composer, unabashedly so, and it is precisely his profound understanding of Arnold Schoenberg's epochal insight that gives Babbitt's music its special quality. By examining the underlying principles of twelve-tone composition, Mead allows us to appreciate Babbitt's music on its own terms, as a richly varied yet unified body of work. In achieving this purpose, he provides an excellent introduction to twelve-tone music in general. Without relying on professional jargon, he lucidly and succinctly explains Babbitt's complexities. A catalog of compositions, a discography, and a bibliography complete a book that will interest performers, music theorists, and music historians, as well as other readers who are enthusiastic or curious about contemporary musical works. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

On Milton Babbitt, Schenkerian -- Construction, Cognition, and the Role of the Surface -- The Seam in Babbitt's Compositional Development : Composition for Tenor and Six Instruments -- The Surface and the Series in Composition for Four Instruments -- Poetic Form and Psychological Portraiture in Babbitt's Early Texted Works -- Completeness and Temporality -- Babbitt's Gestural Dialectics -- Afterword. "Anything Vital is Problematical".

This is a sustained inquiry into the thought of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. Milton Hindus considers the subjects that most interested Babbitt: ethics, literature, education, and social and political conservatism in the United States. In their most general sense, his concerns were man and his nature as the root of all social order. For Babbitt, efforts to improve social conditions must begin and end with the individual human being.In rejecting notions that society is primarily responsible for moral deficiencies in the individual, or that the individual is bom good only to be corrupted by society, Babbitt places responsibility squarely with the individual. As Hindus shows, Babbitt sees human beings as a mixture of good and evil impulses, shaped by what he called "the inner check." Virtue is thus a result of self-discipline, reinforced and confirmed by habit.Babbitt's thinking, emphasizing as it does proven values and accepted wisdom, calls upon us to advance ourselves by rediscovery of the lessons of the past. Hindus demonstrates that Babbitt has much to offer us as we consider contemporary social and political issues. In contrast to those who emphasize avant-garde postures and fashionable ideologies, as well as those conservative followers of outdated theories and dead-end formulas, Babbitt's reinvigorating spirit inspires new insights.Although there have been a number of studies of Irving Babbitt and the New Humanism, Hindus is singular in his combination of detailed consideration of a number of Babbitt's books with his own essays on contemporary issues, approached in what Hindus calls a Babbitian spirit. Like Babbitt's own writings, this book is addressed to the general reader. It will be of particular importance to teachers of comparative literature and those interested in the connections between literature and social thought and philosophy.