Composer Milton Babbitt is now decomposing.
From the New York Times:
Milton Babbitt, a Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94 Milton Babbitt, an influential composer, theorist and teacher who wrote music that was intensely rational and for many listeners impenetrably abstruse, died on Saturday. He was 94 and lived in Princeton, N.J.
Paul Lansky, a composer who studied with Mr. Babbitt and was a colleague at Princeton University, where Mr. Babbitt remained an emeritus professor of composition, said that Mr. Babbitt died at a hospital in Princeton.
Mr. Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description.
Although he dabbled early in his career with theater music, his Composition for Orchestra (1940) ushered in a structurally complex, profoundly organized style that was rooted in Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method.
But Mr. Babbitt expanded on Mr. Schoenberg’s approach. In Mr. Schoenberg’s system, a composer begins by arranging the 12 notes of the Western scale in a particular order called a tone row, or series, on which the work is based. Mr. Babbitt was the first to use this serial ordering not only with pitches but also with dynamics, timbre, duration, registration and other elements. His methods became the basis of the “total serialism” championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers.
Mr. Babbitt began exploring this path in Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948), and adhered to it through his entire career. He composed prolifically for chamber ensembles and instrumental soloists and created a substantial and varied catalog of vocal works. He also composed a compact but vital group of orchestral pieces and an enduring series of works for synthesizer, often in combination with voices or acoustic instruments.
Minor nit: "Although he dabbled early in his career with theater music" -- he loved show tunes and would be giving a class and just start playing some song from a popular Broadway show. One of his students was Stephen Sondheim...
He was also fortunate to have access to the worlds first dedicated fully programmable audio music synthesizer, the RCA Mark II (the Mark I was just a test bed for circuit design and not a usable instrument).
Babbitt's Occasional Variations on the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer:
A titan in the world of experimental music -- he will be missed...
Posted by DaveH at January 30, 2011 10:34 PM