Teaching Composition in Twenty-First-Century America: A Conversation with Milton Babbitt

MS: I have twenty-six questions for you today. We might even add a few as we go on. mb: Well, at my age twenty-six will be enough. MS: Do you use a particular methodology in teaching composition? mb: Absolutely not. None whatsoever. You know, Marilyn, we're probably going to have to define these things anyhow. It depends what you mean. If you mean what I do now, which is to have students come to Juilliard only one on one, no composition classes, no composition seminars, the answer is certainly not. If you go back to my earlier days at Princeton, you could call methodology what began with species counterpoint and took students through various phases, through analytical work and so forth yes, that would have been methodology. But it wasn't even so in that case. It really depended on the group of students, as now it depends entirely on the individual student. ms: Well, were you involved in that curriculum at Princeton? Did you feel like taking them through the species counterpoint and . . . ? mb: Well, we designed that ourselves. Mainly Ed Cone and I did it all. Because remember these were very small classes. This was Princeton, you know, where we had very small classes for anything that was technical. Most of my students were not music students. They were either general students with some background in music or they were the few specialists. When you get to graduate school, that's a different thing, because then I certainly only work with them one on one.