Generating New Musical Works in the Style of Milton Babbitt

Abstract

Milton Babbitt is noted for composing twelve-tone and serial music that is both complex and highly constrained. He has written extensively on a variety of topics in music and his writings have had a profound and lasting impact on musical composition. In this article, we first review in detail his compositional process and the techniques he developed, focusing in particular on the all-partition array, time-point system, and equal-note-value strings used in his later works. Next, we describe our proposed procedure for automating his compositional process using these techniques. We conclude by using our procedure to automatically generate an entirely new musical work that we argue is in the style of Babbitt.