BABBITT, Milton

Credit Arnold Schoenberg with inventing an entirely new language for music—a revolutionary reordering of tonal possibilities—but credit Milton Babbitt with extending the serial idea to musical dimensions other than pitch—duration (including rhythm), register, dynamics (attack), and timbre. The result of this logical extension of Schoenberg's ideas was a twelve-tone music of unprecedented structural complexity, in which every note contributed to several kinds of serial relationships...