BABBITT, MILTON

born May 10, 1916, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. in full Milton Byron Babbitt American composer and theorist known as a leading proponent of total serialismi.e., musical composition based on prior arrangements not only of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale (as in 12-tone music) but also of dynamics, duration, timbre (tone colour), and register as well. Babbitt attended public schools in Jackson, Miss., and later studied at New York University and Princeton. His teachers included composer Roger Sessions. Babbitt became a member of the music faculty at Princeton in 1938; he also taught mathematics, an interest evident both in his elaborate theories of composition and in his works themselves. He taught also at the Berkshire Music Center and at the Darmstadt (Germany) Internationale Ferienkurse and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959 award). His interest in electronic music brought him the directorship of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Babbitt's Composition for Synthesizer displayed his interest in establishing precise control over all elements of composition; the machine is used primarily to achieve such control rather than solely to generate novel sounds. Philomel (1964) combines synthesizer with the voices of live and recorded soprano. More traditional in medium is the 1957 Partitions for Piano. Babbitt wrote chamber music (Composition for Four Instruments, 1948) and film tracks (Into the Good Ground, 1949) as well as solo pieces and electronic works and published many articles on 12-tone and electronic music.