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.

In this episode, Stanley Jordan does something remarkable: He recreates a lost computer music composition, and premieres it here for the first time.

Part Pac-Man, part symphony orchestra, this three-minute piece is a testament to Jordan's early musical journey through technical terrain, setting the stage for a career in which he has used technology to create dazzling ear candy.

“Haydn Seek was a composition I made in 1980 while I was studying computer music at Princeton,” Jordan wrote. “It was spawned from an assignment in a composition class with J.K. Randall, in which we were to take an existing piece of music and compose a new one using something that we liked in the original.”

Jordan based his composition on “Piano Sonata in A Major” by Franz Joseph Haydn. He was also studying computer music with Paul Lansky during this period, so he decided to make his composition for computer.

“This was an exciting time because computers were just beginning to be used as musical instruments. At that time computer music was only available at academic institutions and most of the music was very abstract. I loved that stuff, but I was more interested in bringing something new to traditional forms,” such as "Switched on Bach,” he said.

Jordan loved how Haydn got so much material out of a few simple patterns. In “Haydn Seek,” he takes Haydn's original themes from the first movement, and expands on them in his own way, using more contemporary harmonies. At the beginning, everything is a condensation of Haydn's main themes, taken exactly as Haydn composed them.

But then he starts blending in his own new material, growing and expanding until the piece is completely his own, but still related to Haydn's original main theme.

The original version of Haydn Seek was incomplete and the materials were lost, so he recreated it here from memory, completing it using only compositional techniques and harmonic knowledge that he had at the time.

Stanley Jordan was about to play The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and with seconds go before cameras rolled, the sound wasn’t coming out of his guitar. His guitar tech was sweating bullets. Was he able to hit his mark? And what lesson did he learn from the experience?

In this second episode of Season 2 of "Composers & Computers," Jordan talks about his time at Princeton, including his work with two of his mentors, who were big names in the field of electronic music: Milton Babbitt and Paul Lansky. He discusses the time Dizzy Gillespie’s jaw dropped when Jordan took the stage during a concert at Richardson Hall with Benny Carter.

And he talks about why he went through the tedious process of composing music on a computer at a time that computers didn't easily generate sound.

“The idea was so thrilling for me, because I had this sound in my head, and I knew that if I could just get the right numbers, create the right code, I knew there was a way to realize that sound," Jordan said. "So I didn’t mind trudging through the snow at midnight. I think sometimes when something is challenging, I think it’s more meaningful.”