Milton Babbitt

Composer Milton Babbitt's influence on contemporary music is inestimable. His innovative use of the human voice, his infusions of electronic tape sounds into live performances, his serial compositional techniques and pioneering work in synthesized sound, all broke new ground in the music world. His compositions, with their twelve-tone structures, complex mathematical tonal combinations, and synthetic sounds, offered up with Babbitt's cerebral explanations, evince serious purpose, energy, and wit.