Biographical Note
Born in Philadelphia in 1916, Milton Babbitt studied composition with Marion Bauer and Philip James at New York University (B.A., 1935), and privately with Roger Sessions. When Sessions took a teaching position at Princeton University, Babbitt followed him there and joined the faculty in 1938. He continued his studies, earning an M.F.A. in music in 1942. This began an enduring relationship with Princeton, including a brief stint as a mathematics teacher during World War II, from which Babbitt finally retired as professor emeritus in 1984. While at Princeton, Babbitt served as director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center from 1959 to 1984. He also taught composition at the Juilliard School of Music beginning in 1973, and gave guest lectures at numerous institutions of higher learning in both the United States and abroad.
Babbitt was honored in 1982 with a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer," and in 1986 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded him a Gold Medal in music in 1988. He served on the editorial board of Perspectives of New Music and was president of the American branch of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM). In 1992, he was awarded a Ph.D. from Princeton for a paper he had written in 1946 concerning Arnold Schoenberg's compositional method. The university had deemed the work unworthy at the time of its writing. Babbitt passed away at age 94 on January 29, 2011, in Princeton, New Jersey.