Babbitt, Composer Who Mixed Complexity, Jests, Dies at Age 94

It’s ironic that the composer Milton Babbitt, who died in a Princeton hospital yesterday at the age of 94, shared his surname with Sinclair Lewis’s archetypal emblem of American narrow-mindedness. For Milton Babbitt was everything George F. Babbitt was not.

Though a committed disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, whose recondite 12-tone method of composition he extended, Babbitt was a generous spirit who over six decades imbued American music with welcome whimsy and superlative craft.