Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt

MAGNUSSEN

It's a pleasure to see you all, and a great privilege to introduce two very special Princetonians.  One was raised in Princeton and left for the West coast in his twenties; the other was born not far from here in Philadelphia and came to this town in his twenties, by way of the South.  They’re both composers and they both studied with that grandfather of Princeton composers, Roger Sessions.

                                    I’m very pleased that Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt have agreed to speak this afternoon, to reflect on their Princeton ties, and also to reflect on their formative musical experiences over the years.  They each have told me that they welcome questions, either during their talk or afterwards.  

                                    First, we have Andrew Imbrie, who studied with Leo Ornstein, Nadia Boulanger and Roger Sessions.  He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and he has taught at University of California at Berkeley and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  His childhood home here in Princeton looks out onto Marquand Park.  

Thanks very much.  The name Institute for Advanced Study has always impressed me.  It also reminds me of Albert Einstein who lived in a small house on Mercer Street close to Hibbin Road, where my family lived from the time I was six years old.  I used to see him out walking with his sister.  Each of them had long white hair and wore shapeless overcoats so that from behind they looked like twins.

Early years in Princeton

Princeton was my hometown since I was six years old.  I was born in New York City in 1921.  My father, Andrew Clark Imbrie, was a businessman who had graduated from Princeton in 1895 and served as secretary of his class for over half a century.  He was so fond of Princeton that as soon as he could he moved here and commuted to New York until his retirement.  I should tell you that my son, Andrew Phillip Imbrie, is the fifth generation in our family to graduate from Princeton.  The first was Charles Kisselman Imbrie, class of 1835.  At that time Princeton University had about 170 students.  

In New York, before moving to Princeton, I began my piano lessons at the age of four with a fascinating Armenian woman named Ann Abajian.  She not only taught her students simple melodies to perform, but encouraged us to invent little tunes of our own which we would then perform at our annual concert.  For this reason, it never seemed strange to me to be a composer; it was just a natural phenomenon.  Ann Abajian was herself a pupil of Pauline and Leo Ornstein, who at that time lived in New York but later moved to Philadelphia.  Leo Ornstein was, during the 1920s, considered not only a great pianist, but an up-and-coming contemporary composer recently arrived from Russia, whose name was mentioned in the same breath with Stravinsky and Schoenberg.  He was born in 1893 and lived until 2002. 

I continued my piano lessons first with Pauline and then with Leo.  My mother took me by train from Princeton to Philadelphia for a music lesson every Saturday morning.  Although Leo Ornstein did not attempt to teach me what I needed in the way of counterpoint or harmony, he nevertheless encouraged me.  Ultimately, my mother took the advice of some friends in Princeton and sent me to Fontainebleau during the summer of 1937, when I was 16 years old.  The Princeton friends accompanied me and kept an eye on me.  There I studied with Nadia Boulanger, along with several other American students slightly older than I was.  

Work with Sessions

Immediately upon my return to Princeton, I began private lessons with Roger Sessions, who at that time was teaching at the University.  I brought him a few counterpoint exercises carefully written in ink, bar lines drawn with a ruler using all the various C-clefs, as Nadia Boulanger had taught her rebellious pupil to do.  Roger found the usual parallel fifths and other awkward spots, but instead of a lecture on discipline, I was treated to the spectacle of a composer at work.

Before my eyes he drew lines through the offending passages and penciled in elegant solutions.  My inner response: “Why didn’t I see that?  If he can do it, why can’t I?”  Counterpoint had become a live subject.  At the end of the lesson Roger chuckled.  “Don’t bother next time with ink or ruler or C-clefs, just do twice as many exercises.”  

The composition classes at Princeton and Berkeley brought together a group of 10 or 12 students clustered around a piano.  The student was expected to play, to give some impression of the sound of the piece in progress.  The rest of us were asked to comment – or rather, we commented, whether asked or not.  I recall nothing particularly personal about our remarks.  Each of us was trying to put a finger on whatever seemed unclear or momentarily unconvincing.  After some debate, Roger would get to the bottom of the problem, stating it in such a way that the student’s sensibilities emerged intact, while a principle was made clear.

This teaching of a group was valuable because we all participated in that critical process which every composer must eventually rely on in testing his own work.  By trying it on others, we avoid the disturbances caused by our own egos, and when it was our own turn to be the scapegoat, the struggle to hear our own music more objectively began to seem worthwhile.

Roger did not impart a style or set of techniques other than the traditional fundamentals.  We all knew who his favorite composers were, past and present, but a disparaging remark about a composer not on that list might well elicit from him an eloquent defense.  He cared not if a composer had a style.  He was interested only if a composer had style.

The disarming informality of his teaching never interfered with our sense of the keenness of his perception of musical discourse.  His ability to pinpoint the hesitancies and obscurities in our music seemed to us nothing short of uncanny.  His method was to some extent Socratic.  He would ask what our intentions were.  Where did this phrase end and this next one begin?  To the student who helplessly replied, “I wanted it to be vague like Debussy,” the response was, of course, “Debussy is never vague.”