A first time for everything

''Concerti for Orchestra" is the first work the Boston Symphony Orchestra has commissioned from Milton Babbitt, one of the dominant figures in American music for more than half a century. Surprisingly, it is also the first work by Babbitt that the orchestra has ever programmed.

But music director James Levine is no stranger to Babbitt's music.

The two men met in 1965, when Babbitt came to the Cleveland Orchestra for the premiere of his ''Relata I." Levine, then assistant conductor in Cleveland, helped with the preparations, and Babbitt was impressed by his command of every detail of the complex score. The two men have been friends ever since.

Babbitt was present on the momentous occasion of Levine's debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1971, when the 26-year-old conductor led Puccini's ''Tosca" without rehearsal. The composer recalls that he and his wife, Sylvia, were seated with the Met's general manager-designate, Goeran Gentele. They agreed that something extraordinary was happening; during the second intermission, Gentele disappeared, returning to exclaim, ''I've signed him up."

Babbitt is now 88 but still formidably alert; far-reaching intelligence and wit and charm still flow spontaneously from him. You have the feeling that no matter what subject comes up, he will have something pertinent and surprising to say.

Composition has been at the center of his career, but he has also been an important teacher and mentor to younger composers. His interests and accomplishments are wide-ranging; he played violin, clarinet, and saxophone and is expert in mathematics, computers, jazz, baseball, the Broadway musical, and classic American pop singing.

Babbitt's music is complex and difficult, and it has, perhaps unfairly, a reputation for being forbidding. ''Who Cares If You Listen?" was the title a magazine editor placed over a Babbitt essay decades ago, and ever since, the composer has had to live with the consequences of something he never wrote or said.

When it is well-played, Babbitt's music glistens and coruscates like the composer's own personality; it extends the world of musical possibility. He expanded Schoenberg's 12-tone technique in every conceivable direction, while abandoning the old bottles into which Schoenberg and his colleagues had poured their new wine; he sought new forms to match the advances in technique. In 1982, Babbitt was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for ''lifetime achievement," and he has hardly slowed down since then.

He is familiar with the experience of having his music declared unplayable -- a pioneer in electronic and computer music, Babbitt found ways to circumvent that problem. And sooner or later an inquiring soloist or ensemble would come along and play Babbitt's piano music, chamber music, or orchestral work.

Back in the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra announced the premiere of ''Transfigured Notes" twice, and canceled it twice. But composer/conductor Gunther Schuller performed the work with Boston freelancers in 1990, and Levine has scheduled it for a future BSO season. Today students take Babbitt's music in stride, and on Jan. 19 New England Conservatory students will present a free, all-Babbitt chamber-music concert in Jordan Hall.

BSO artistic administrator Anthony Fogg says he ''doesn't have a clue" why previous music directors avoided Babbitt's orchestral music, but points out that Babbitt's chamber music has been featured at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

Schuller does have an idea.

''Very few conductors venture into Babbitt territory -- either they are afraid of the music or don't like it and revile it, and they know that most musicians in the orchestra will either not understand it or hate it, or both. For myself, I have to say every time I have conducted Babbitt has been a great thrill, to get inside that music with those marvelous sounds and textures, and the incredible variety within each piece.

''Milton has managed to do something that almost no other composer, except maybe Bach, has done to such an extent: the technique is the content of the music and the content of the music is the technique -- a perfect symbiosis. The way he writes it is the way it has to come out."

Levine's loyalty to Babbitt's music has never wavered. He has asked Babbitt to write an opera (''No, thank you" was the composer's response). In 1990, he recorded Babbitt's ''Correspondences for Strings and Tape" and in 1998 commissioned his Second Piano Concerto for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The commission for Babbitt's ''Concerti for Orchestra" was one of Levine's first requests after he was named music director.

Babbitt says that he has heard that Levine has called ''Concerti for Orchestra" ''a piece of cake."

''A nutcake, maybe," he jokes. ''The piece doesn't represent a new departure; the musical syntax remains the same, but the music doesn't revel in difficulty. The whole piece unfolds in the same tempo because I wanted the changes of tempo to be built in compositionally. What I wanted to write was a real ensemble piece -- at one point I wanted to call it 'Chamber Music For Orchestra.' It moves through small ensembles within the orchestra."

Not all of Babbitt's music is in his most advanced style. After World War II, for example, he composed a musical based on Homer's ''Odyssey" intended for Mary Martin and Broadway -- but she was diverted by ''South Pacific" and the project collapsed.

''Did I finish it?" he laughs. ''About 11 times."

He has some funny stories about producers demanding that he write a song in calypso style for a character in Homer whose name is Calypso, but overall he found the experience an exercise in humiliation. Three of the songs have been published, awakening curiosity about the rest.

Asked whether there has ever been any crossover among his various interests, Babbitt confesses with a smile, ''My show tunes incorporated techniques from other fields of music." But mostly he resents the way others have sought to find crossovers, particularly between his advanced mathematical explorations and his music.

''To describe music as 'mathematical' is a form of dismissal," he says, ''but to me, I don't think there is the slightest relationship between the two, apart from the fact they both use numbers. But this has been going on a long time. When Brahms's First Symphony was first played here in Boston, a critic called it mathematical music extruded from a diseased brain."

James Levine leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere performances of Milton Babbitt’s "Concerti for Orchestra" in Symphony Hall tonight, tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday night. Tickets $27-$105. (617) 266-1200 or www.bso.org.