Correspondences is a striking example of the rigid serial (twelve-tone) style of composition that was regarded as "progressive" in 1950s and 1960s. The music consists almost entirely of isolated and unpredictable tones, durations, colors, and, dynamics—momentary sparks and bursts of sound-color. Babbitt was born in Philadelphia in 1916, but was brought up in Jackson, MS. His father was an actuary, leading Milton to study mathematics. Eventually he shifted to music (though his critics will say that he never left mathematics). In 1946 he wrote a unpublished paper, The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System that is, according to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "the first formal and systematic investigation of [Arnold] Schoenberg's compositional method."

Babbitt emerged as one of the most rigorous and influential composer/teachers in the United States. He applies the idea of sets of numerical values to all aspects of his music. The opposite of John Cage, he seeks to control every aspect of the music, and has defined "interpretation" as merely the performers making decisions about certain parameters of the music that the composer did not bother to specify.

Once Princeton became a co-member of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, with its massive and pioneering RCA music synthesizer computer, Babbitt found that he could create music that was entirely pre-controlled. Sometimes, as here, he combined pre-taped music from the synthesizer with the sounds of live performers. Significantly, by having the live musicians play in strict correspondence with the tape, he exerts complete control over the tempo of the live performance, since it has to stay locked in to the sounds of the pre-recorded tape. Having achieved this result, Babbitt had little apparent interest in the subsequent development of music synthesizers, and continued to use the RCA machine some years after its was supplanted by Moog and other analog synthesizers. "He's like a cryptographer who'll talk about the structure of the Japanese codes but won't tell you whether their planes are in flight toward Pearl Harbor," remarked Greg Sandow in 1982 article in New York's Village Voice.

In an article in High Fidelity magazine at about the time Correspondences appeared, Babbitt discussed the problem of a composer dealing with compositional ideas that had no appeal or meaning to the potential audience. The magazine provided the title, "Who Cares if You Listen?," which suggested an arrogance that Babbitt (who seemed like a cheerful "people person" on the sole occasion this writer encountered him) doesn't necessarily possess.

Surprisingly, if one does listen, without expecting the predictability of melodies, regular rhythms or dramatic/emotional ideas, this ten-minute succession of tones is highly engaging, a freely evolving mobile of sparks of musical color. To quote from Greg Sandow again (from another Village Voice article) Babbitt "frees each note to dance with any partner it finds."

There is unexpected joy in listening to this process work out, particularly in hearing the many completely new combinations of particular electronic sounds and string sonorities.

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