AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

1916–2011 American composer An enthusiastic exponent of modernism, Babbitt is an influential teacher. In a famous essay, ‘Who cares if you listen ?’, he argued that modern composers should not address the mass concert audience but, like scientists communicating research to their fellows, a specialist, almost private one. Strongly influenced by Schoenberg and Webern, he ...

• Instruments
• Electronic

way since the world’s first one – the American RCA Mk I, made in 1951, whose bulk occupied a laboratory. To play it, composers such as Milton Babbitt (a fan of Mk II) had to tap in punched-tape instructions – there was no keyboard. Synthesizers became available commercially during the mid-1960s when two innovators, Donald Buchla and ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The world’s first synthesizer was the American RCA Mk I, made in 1951, whose bulk occupied a laboratory. To play it, composers such as Babbitt had to tap in punched-tape instructions – there was no keyboard. In 1964, Robert Moog (1934–2005) developed the first commercially successful synthesizer. It was capable of generating a wide range of sounds ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

In the 1950s, the American composer Babbitt was the first composer to work on a synthesizer which the US company RCA had developed. The resulting Composition for Synthesizer (1961) was Babbitt’s first fully synthesized work. It was followed in the same year by Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesizer, and then Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962–64). Babbitt appreciated the ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

known for his film music. Recommended Recording: Cornish, English and Scottish Dances, London PO (cond) Sir Malcolm Arnold (Lyrita) Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Milton Babbitt | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical
• Lyricist

b. 1930 American composer and lyricist Sondheim studied with Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) and Babbitt. Early work as a lyricist for Jules Styne’s (1905–89) Gypsy (1959) and Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957) brought his name to public attention, but it was not until Follies (1971) that he achieved recognition as a composer. His work is marked by a biting wit ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

of higher education created a natural home for composers as teachers within universities, and this served only to heighten their isolation from the social mainstream. Some, like Milton Babbitt (1916–2011), styled themselves as ‘specialists’, their audiences inevitably consisting of other ‘specialists’. But that composers themselves felt contemporary social conditions limited their audiences did not make their activities politically insignificant. ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

Western classical music since the seventeenth century, because it placed great emphasis on harmonic subtlety and tensions between keys, had been less interested in melodic flexibility (a maximum of 12 notes to the octave, while Indian music uses 22) and in rhythm (regular division into bars, normally of two, three, four or six beats; Indian ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

the Darmstadt courses and at the Donaueschingen Festival, as well as in Paris and Cologne. Its strength was increasingly felt in the US as well as Europe, with Babbitt, Wolpe and Carter all evolving individual lines of development. The most striking instance of its impact, however, was on Stravinsky, widely regarded as the greatest composer ...