Milton Babbitt Encounters Academia (and Vice Versa)

By Brian Harker


Although Milton Babbitt's vinegary manifesto "Who Cares If You Listen?" has elicited plenty of commentary—pro and con—thus far it has not received a proper historical setting. for years, the inflammatory published title (supplied by the editor of High Fidelity, contrary to Babbitt's wishes) framed the article as a sour-grapes rebuke of the concert establishment for not appreciating his music. Babbitt's original title, now restored in numerous anthologies, placed the emphasis slightly to one side. "The Composer as Specialist"—this was the title he submitted, the concept he wanted to promote, and the role he claimed for himself. Just as the university shelters and sustains advanced mathematics, philosophy, and physics, he wrote, so it should "provide a home for the 'complex,' 'difficult,' and 'problematical' in music." The unhappy tone of the article, however, suggests that Babbitt's vision of a nurturing academic "home" as yet lay unfulfilled. Writing in 1958—twenty years after joining the Princeton music faculty—he could only say that the process had begun. "And if it appears to proceed too slowly, I take consolation in the knowledge that in this respect… music seems to be in historically retarded parallel with now sacrosanct fields of endeavor."