Biography

Milton Babbitt

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Milton Babbitt was born on May 10, 1916 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is known for Alice Cooper: You and Me (1977), Alice Cooper: (No More) Love at Your Convenience (1977) and C'è musica & musica (1972). He was married to Sylvia Babbitt and Sylvia Miller. He died on January 29, 2011 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

He was a professor emeritus of music composition from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
He was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He began playing the violin at 4 years old and later played the clarinet and saxophone. He enjoyed playing jazz and theatre music too.
He was a 16 year old student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1932. In 1933, he became a composition student at Marion Bauer and Philip James at New York University in New York City. He studied privately with Roger Sessions. In 1938, he was invited to join the Princeton Composition Faculty in Princeton, New Jersey. He succeeded Sessions as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music in 1965.
He was also on the faculty of Juilliard School where he began teaching in 1973. He also taught at Salzburg Seminar in American Studies; the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in Massachusetts; the new music academy at Darmstadt, Germany; and the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts.
His students have included Mario Davidovsky, John Eaton, and Stephen Sondheim.

Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained other forms of activity? The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.
If you know anybody who knows more popular music of the '20s or '30s than I do, I want to know who it is. I grew up playing every kind of music in the world and I know more pop music from the '20s and '30s, it's because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down the arrangements; we stole their arrangements; we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next night.
The medium provides a kind of full satisfaction for the composer. I love going to the studio with my work in my head, realizing it while I am there and walking out with the tape under my arm. I can then send it anywhere in the world, knowing exactly how it will sound.

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