Composer, educator, and theoretician Milton Babbitt passed away Saturday.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptiveca...milton-babbitt
He was one of my favorite composers, a big influence on my chamber music as well as my bent/angular avant-jazz pieces. I took a master class in string quartet writing with him when I was in grad school at the New England Conservatory, and it really opened my eyes to the necessity -- and viability -- of audible motivations for compositional decisions. iow, it's not enough to say "I made this note an F# because that's the next note in the series" (or, for the non-serialists, the equivalent would be "I made this note an F# because that's an acceptable tension on this chord"). It also has to
sound like it's what you want to happen musically; you have to make the architectonic relationships in your composition
audible, not just gimmicks or crutches or processes that you use to generate material.
He was a genius, a total nerd, and yet a very warm funny human being with a huge heart. I will miss him tremendously.
