The composer’s early years were marked by what may have struck the outsider as a hesitation between two professions: those of a mathematician and a composer. He showed a precocious interest in and talent for both, proceeding to study and then to teach them at universities.

Milton Babbitt is one of the pioneers of serial and electronic music; he played an important role in the development of the synthesizer and was one of the founders of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studio.

According to Paul Griffiths, his “music has crystalline intelligence, charming humour and repose, which it maintains despite, very often, a great deal of activity. In lectures and theoretical articles he has been a vigorous proponent of serialism, and his works do not disguise the fact. But they take the battles as won, and clothe the labour in grace.”2

Babbitt’s replies came in two letters, on January 19 and March 11, 1983. I forget why he made the remark in parentheses in the very first sentence, but I am including it for it might throw light on his personality and his self-assessment in the world of music. The replies are, I find, unique in their inspiration by mathematical logic, certainly as far as composers featured in this book are concerned.

Thank you very much for your flattering inquiry; I am honored to have been thought (if only afterthought) of in this regard, and to be included among such eminent thinkers about music.

I.

By international coincidence, I just heard Lutosławski repeat this story at dinner last night, and again—to a group of students—at the Juilliard School this afternoon.3

I am probably as voraciously selfish in my mode of listening to music as any other composer. However unaware one may be at any given moment of that disposition, one is always listening to music for what it suggests, intimates, and initiates for you, as a composer. But perhaps it reveals something, or more than something, of how I listen and how—and why—I compose, that no mere moment in a work has ever had that effect upon me, but the processes I, often suddenly, infer in a work, have.