A High Priest of Music: Milton Babbitt

In the big and wild ecology of music, there is a rarefied strata where composer/scientists explore the most complex of musical worlds. 

It’s not any different from literature and other forms of arts and culture, and all you have to do is pick up Finnegans Wake to understand what I mean.

In arts education, it relates to issues of English language arts or mathematics, where our greatest challenge as educators (and society) is to move from a flat world of literacy or numeracy (simple decoding of text/language and numbers) into a much more complex and expansive realm where literacy and numeracy become art. This is in fact, the core of what makes the Common Core Standards aspirational.

Just as quantum mechanics or The Waste Land isn’t for everyone, the same might be said about the music of Milton Babbitt, a composer whose work inhabited that rarefied world of the complex and deeply intellectual (but still with feeling) in music. It’s true, there are some who said that composers like Milton didn’t actually hear what they were writing. Don’t believe everything you hear (or don’t hear)!

On this past Saturday, January 29th, 2011 my friend Milton Babbitt, died at the age of 94, and when I heard the news I winced. Milton Babbitt was that composer/scientist, a high priest of music, and I can assure you, the likes of which will not to be seen again anytime soon. That’s right, the old saw is true: with Milton Babbitt, they broke the mold.

Lots of obituaries will focus on Milton’s music and rightfully so. Instead I would like to talk a bit about the man. But first let me say that I have never had an iPod that didn’t have Babbitt’s Philomel on it.

Milton personified a cohort of composers from another time and place, all with formidable minds and spirit. I encountered a few when I was student at Juilliard, and in addition to Milton, they included such giants as Roger Sessions (one of Milton’s teachers) and Vincent Persichetti. And of course, there were others of the period like Leon Kirchner and George Perle. At 102 and still composing, Elliott Carter is often the first person people think of in this regard.

Although each one of these composers were very different, they were all united by a fierce intellect, a search for quality, commitment to rigor, and immense talent. I took classes with both Sessions and Persichetti. And, I performed in the pit for the New York premiere, and ultimately what was one of the few performances to date of Roger Session’s opera Montezuma, arguably one of the most difficult works of music ever composed.

I first met Milton during my initial year as executive director of The American Music Center. I took a trip up to the Eastman School of Music to spend some time with my friend Jim Undercofler, which happened to coincide with the awarding of a honorary doctorate to Milton Babbitt. Milton, Jim, David Zinman, David Liptak, and I all had dinner together. 

I knew well the reputation Milton had acquired as a lightning rod and priest of atonal music. So, I was a bit uptight about spending time with him. Okay, I was intimidated, I admit it. He could not have been nicer, and although it had been many years since he had been on the board of The American Music Center, he spoke about the AMC as “our” AMC. There was a kindness, wit, warmth, and power of intellect that was inspiring. And, essentially, he was the sort of guy who liked to shoot the shit, or kibitz, as they say.

(Milton had received both the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction, in 1984, and its Founders Award, in 2006.)

That night at Eastman, Milton gave his acceptance speech and I have rarely if ever heard such a combination of power, incisiveness, and humor, that by all appearances was completely extemporaneous. And that voice, I loved that deep baritone of his with its great rhythm that was a wonderful conveyance for his encyclopedic mind.

One of the things I have never forgotten about that speech, was the funny and sad, but true observations of how all the names for the music field to which Milton belonged were horribly lacking. Milton went on to list each one and their respective shortcomings:

1. Concert Music
2. Serious Music (yes, I kid you not…)
3. Contemporary Classical (an oxymoron)
4. New Music
5. Classical Music
6. 20th Century Music

There were a few other times that I had dinner with Milton, at a budget Chinese restaurant near Juilliard. The conversation could change on a dime, and if you weren’t careful, Milton might leave you in the dust. One moment it was Schoenberg, the next moment it was baseball, the next moment it was the lack of support for composers, next musical theater,and then it could just as easily shift to beer.

The people who compose this sort of music are becoming fewer and far between. But don’t be mistaken and think that their work only lives in the Academy, for Milton had his quite a group of musician fans, not the least of which was James Levine. A great investment was made to perform Milton’s works, similar to the effort that might have to be made to read The Sound and The Fury or listen to John Coltrane’s Meditations, but the effort has a great payoff.

We need these composers/scientists, just as we need our Faulkners, Joyces, Melvilles, and Ernico Fermis.

I’ll close this little entry for Milton Babbitt, by recalling the great pride, care, and admiration he evinced during his long tenure chairing the BMI Young Composer Awards. I watched him many times, announce the award, and shake the hand of each winner, and you could see how much being part of this community meant to him and how tickled he was to look at the young composers with their careers in front of them. That look on his face was priceless…

Rest in peace, Milton Babbitt.

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For those interested in learning more, I would suggest that you read the interview with Mliton in NewMusicBox.org.

Or, buy this really great book of inteviews with some of the greatest composers of the 20th Century, including Milton Babbitt: Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experiemental Composers., by William Duckworth.