Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, studied mathematics before committing to music, and spent his career teaching at Princeton. He believed composition could be as rigorous as research, and he wrote music of dense, intricate patterning, cheerfully unbothered that its audience was small. A magazine famously ran one of his essays under the title Who Cares if You Listen?, a headline he did not choose and disliked.

He was also a pioneer of electronic music, working from the late 1950s with the room-sized RCA synthesizer in New York, one of the first machines that could realize a score exactly. Among his students, improbably, was the Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim, and Babbitt kept a lifelong encyclopedic love of American popular song.

Start with Philomel, for soprano and recorded tape, where the myth of a woman transformed into a nightingale becomes a duet between a live singer and her own electronic echoes.