Milton Babbitt—the influential experimental composer who took an uncompromisingly intellectual approach to music and championed composition as a rational, mathematical pursuit—died over the weekend. He was 94.
As the New York Times notes in its obituary, Babbitt was a self-described “maximalist,” a term he adopted to distance himself from fellow experimental, albeit more minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Babbitt’s music was anything but minimal, building on Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method to create a system known as “total serialism,” organizing notes, dynamics, timbres, duration, and the like into rigidly structured rows that formed the basis of his work. His explanations of his approach were typically impenetrable—the NYT quotes one program note that refers to “models of similar, interval-preserving, registrally uninterpreted pitch-class and metrically durationally uninterpreted time-point aggregate arrays”—and Babbitt became notorious for not kowtowing to those who couldn’t fathom it after writing a 1958 article for High Fidelity titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” (The headline was substituted by an editor for Babbitt’s original title, “The Composer As Specialist,” to Babbitt’s objection.) In it he argued that advanced composing was a field akin to mathematics or philosophy, to be chiefly created for and appreciated by specialists.