Open your ears to Milton Babbitt

He had a rich life but died an unjustly neglected American composer.
It is easy and commonplace to think of Milton Babbitt, who died on Saturday at 94, as a composer of unfathomable contradictions. He wrote formidable music of unprecedented structural complexity yet had a background in jazz and popular music of the '20s and '30s and an encyclopedic knowledge of Tin Pan Alley songs.

He became known for an essay published in 1958 as “Who Cares if You Listen?" (not his title), yet he cared so much for the listener that he devoted his life to “enhancing" listening, to expanding what the ear could hear and apprehend, and to giving of our most sensitive sense organ an evolutionary shove.

His theoretical writings could be impenetrably thick, yet he was one of music's great wits and the most wonderful musical raconteur I knew. He gave thorny pieces hilarious titles—"Four Play," “The Joy of More Sextets," “Around the Horn," “Swan Song No. 1."

He was accused—by critics, performers, audiences—of caring more about form than content, yet one of his most famous students, Stephen Sondheim, once said that the revelation in studying with Babbitt was learning that the way to the heart was through the head. Spend time with Babbitt, and you, too, might find intoxicating pleasure in complexity, be it in 12-tone music (of which he was America's incomparable master) or beer (of which he was a connoisseur).

But since nothing about Babbitt's mind, work or being was easy or commonplace, these different sides were not, in fact, contradictions. They were representations of a complete mind, a complete composer, a complete man. Babbitt didn't oscillate between opposites, he encompassed them.

Yet of all the great American composers, he was and continues to be the hardest sell. He never managed to persuade the vast majority of performers and audiences that caring if they listened as well as caring about musical integrity were possible and necessary.

Babbitt was a proud academic who taught at Princeton (where he knew Einstein), and he approached music as a scientist approaches nature. He made discoveries, advanced knowledge. He was a pioneer in electronic music in the early '50s, when that required the use of sophisticated room-sized equipment. He was also a pioneer in producing music that flickered with the speed, intricacy and convolutedness of thought.

When accused of writing music only for the ears and minds of experts, Babbitt was always ready to defend expertise. Where would, say, medicine be without it? One could also add that not football, not hip-hop, nor the stock market is for anyone ignorant of their intricacies.

But the fear of Babbittry has been hard to counter among the public and performers. A quarter-century ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned a piece for string orchestra from Babbitt, which he titled “Transfigured Notes" (a pun on Schoenberg's “Transfigured Night"). Riccardo Muti, then music director in Philadelphia, told me that he took the score with him on a ski trip to learn but that a perusal of it was enough to get him to throw his hands up in the air and hit the slopes.

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Lagniappe by Milton Babbitt, for solo piano. Babbitt is one of the most important composers of the Serialist movement, and, along with Carter (and to a lesser extent Wuorinen), represents what basically amounts to America's response to what Boulez was doing over in Europe. Just a little piano piece, but it's one I really like, so I thought I'd share. It was written specifically for the performer here, who is Robert Taub. This recording comes from a set of complete piano works, and this particular piece is a juxtaposition of his earlier, more rigid 12-tone style, and his later contrapuntal style.