RIP Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt: Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962-1964)
From the album New Electronic Music from the Leaders of the Avant-Garde
The American composer Milton Babbitt died on January 29, 2011. Apart from his highly challenging music, Babbitt was most notorious for his 1958 essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” (originally entitled “The Composer as Specialist”). In spite of the controversy it engendered, this piece was a thoughtful and by no means polemical investigation of the socio-asthetic status of the avant-garde composer. Babbitt ultimately argued that the composer of advanced music should accept and even embrace the relative inaccessibility of her work, and that this music should be seen as an analog to other domains of highly specialized cultural practice, whose value isn’t conjoined to their ease of understanding. Babbitt’s article made him into a bête noire of contemporary music, and the reaction to his arguments gave rise over the years to some highly dubious manifestations of aesthetic populism, which sought to ground the cultural value of music in its so-called “social significance.” But the increasing specialization of musical subcultures in both popular and art music over the course of the late 20th-century, with its concomitant potential for both esoteric insularity and hybridized border-crossings, has in my opinion vindicated many of Babbitt’s claims.