Art & Creativity Quote by Milton Babbitt

Babbitt isn’t politely asking for solitude; he’s proposing an escape plan. The phrasing is almost bureaucratically severe: "total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal". Each stacked adjective tightens the screw, turning what could be read as elitism into a strategic retreat. He frames it as "service" to both composer and music, a deliberately utilitarian justification that sidesteps romance about the concert hall and goes straight to outcomes: survival, integrity, development.

The intent is defensive but not timid. Babbitt is writing from a mid-century moment when advanced, academically inflected modernism (serialism, high formal complexity) had a shrinking social contract with the general concert audience. The public sphere demands legibility, spectacle, and the reassurance that your attention will be rewarded on familiar terms. His subtext: that contract is already broken. If a composer keeps auditioning for mass approval, the music gets pressured into compromise or, worse, into being misunderstood as failure rather than a different kind of success.

The "private performance and electronic media" line is the tell. This isn’t a hermit fantasy; it’s a rerouting of infrastructure. Electronics and recording promise a distribution system less dependent on traditional gatekeepers, patrons, and the rituals of the concert hall. It’s also a subtle redefinition of audience: from the anonymous "public world" to smaller, self-selected listeners with the patience and curiosity the music requires.

There’s irony here too: withdrawal is pitched as progress, and isolation as communication. Babbitt’s wager is that modern music might flourish only after it stops begging to be liked.