Avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt dies at 94

Composer and Princeton University colleague Paul Lansky told The Associated Press that Babbitt died yesterday at a hospital in Princeton. Lansky says he doesn't know the cause of death.

Babbitt joined the Princeton faculty in 1938 and became a professor emeritus of music there in 1984.

He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1992 at age 75, 46 years after his dissertation on the 12-tone system of modern composers was rejected. The university said Babbitt's dissertation was so advanced for its time that no one in the school's music department could understand it.