Bethany Beardslee Winham and Chris Winham

Composers & Computers

Followers of this podcast will remember two central characters from Season 1: Milton Babbitt, the Princeton Music professor and avant-garde composer who was an early devotee of electronic music; and Babbitt’s protégé, Godfrey Winham, a composer whose work at Princeton made it possible for the masses to hear music made on a computer.

Both men had one partner in common: Soprano Bethany Beardslee, one of the great voices of her generation. For Babbitt, Beardslee’s voice brought his compositions to life. Winham married Bearsdslee, and they had two children before his tragic passing in 1975.

Beardslee, still alive at age 98, could not be reached for the main Season 1 podcast. But after it was aired, we got in touch with their son, Chris, who set up a microphone so we can interview her. In this remarkable interview, she looks back at a time when Babbitt and Godfrey Winham – as well as Beardslee herself -- were changing the sound of music. Chris contributed his own memories of his father during the conversation.

Beardslee, who was born in 1925 in Michigan, is best known for her collaborations with prominent mid-century composers such as Babbitt, Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez, George Perle and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. She delivered spot-on performances of atonal composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Contemporary composers came to reply on her to perform their challenging works.

“Were there no Bethany Beardslee, she could not have been invented,” Babbitt once said of her. Beardslee’s career spanned the early 1950s to the late 1990s. She received an honorary doctorate from Princeton in 1977.

A prominent vocalist, there have been many interviews with Beardslee over the years, and we discuss her career during our conversation. But few prior interviews have focused on her memories of her late husband, whose story we told in Episode 3 of Season 1, “The Converter.”

Godfrey Winham was the first recipient of a doctorate in musical composition at Princeton. Beyond his advances in music generation software, digital speech synthesis, and the development of reverb for art’s sake, he was also a fascinating character.