George Tsontakis just wrote to tell me that Milton Babbitt died this morning, just in time for me to get his death date into both my Ashley book and my introduction to the new edition of Cage’s Silence. I’ve written so much about him that I don’t have much left to say; it was a love-hate thing. I was looking up a reference in one of his Perspectives articles just this morning. The one time I met him (I was representing the ailing Nancarrow on a Babbitt/Nancarrow panel) he didn’t seem too thrilled. He was certainly a sharply-defined character. Had he not lived, we should have had to invent him.
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
