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Milton Babbitt Born 10 May 1916, Philadelphia. Babbitt, one of the principal composer/theorists of the post-Schoenberg era, was raised in Mississippi (and often refers to himself as "a Southern boy"). He was educated at New York University and studied privately with the American composer Roger Sessions, whom he followed to Princeton. A gifted mathematician, he developed the notion of combinatoriality, where partitions of 12-tone rows interact with those of other rows that contain the same pitch classes. He also invented much of the terminology we use to describe modern 12-tone technique: pitch class, time point, and, especially, the five parameters of a sound event (pitch, duration, intensity, timbre, envelope). Babbitt was also a pioneer of electronic and computer composition, composing Philomel and other major works with the RCA Synthesizer, given by RCA to Princeton and Columbia. (This machine was one of the first of its kind, an enormous battery of components that used vacuum tubes and filled a room; the Sound Blaster card in your computer nowadays does most of the same things.) He is one of the distinguished composition teachers of our time, with students ranging from disciples of serialism to Stephen Sondheim. Works Works with Tape
Orchestra
Chamber Music
Piano
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