The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt

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by Milton Babbitt,

Edited by Stephen Peles, Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead and Joseph N. Straus (ed.)

Princeton University Press

Due/Published November 2003, 504 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691089663

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has addressed central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a significant primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right.

Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete and authoritative--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

"Babbitt is one of the principal makers of postwar musical thought and expression, whose importance for musical composition, theory, and pedagogy in the United States is beyond that of any other individual. This anthology of his writings will stand as a major monument of late twentieth-century musical thought and history." -- Benjamin Boretz, Bard College