Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt, Page 10

BABBITT:

And then there was a great flux. Things changed considerably. I left Princeton, and did other things in New York. Wrote a – (to Andrew Imbrie) you wrote a musical comedy. Did yours ever succeed? Was it ever produced?

IMBRIE:

Well, do you mean the one I wrote in Berkeley?

BABBITT:

Yes.

IMBRIE:

Or do you mean the one that I wrote in the Army?

BABBITT:

Right.

IMBRIE:

They are different. The one in the Army we never did do. The one in Berkeley was not a musical comedy in that sense. It was in my own style.

BABBITT:

Oh, well. That doesn’t count. Well I wrote one. I wrote a musical comedy for a rather famous star, which, again, we auditioned for weeks and months and months ’cause I had been in popular music and jazz all my life. And, well I think, while I’m telling you this I’ll give you an aside about Ed Cone since many of you, I know, knew him.

While Ed was in the Army – when he got into the Army, he had terrible eyes. I have terrible eyes, also. But neither of us, of course, was deferred because of eyes at that point. They weren’t deferring you because of eyes. But when Ed got in they were about to send him overseas and they tried to fit him for a gas mask and they couldn’t. He couldn’t wear a gas mask with his eyes. So they put him in special services. And this meant that he had to play piano for various ‘acts’.

Now, Ed was not the one to play popular music. One day my wife and I were in our apartment in Washington and Ed was stationed at Ft. Meade, right outside of Washington. And he turned up one day, knocked at our door. We knew he was there and he was PFC. He knocked, and he said, “Milton, do you know something called Stardust?” Well, to ask me if I knew Stardust, I don’t have to tell you. It’s like asking Zubin Mehta if he knows the Song of India. The thing is that I knew Stardust and, though I’m not a pianist, I can play Stardust. So, Ed says, “You’ve got to teach it to me.” He said, “There’s a man here in the Army in Special Services who does an act called ‘muscle control’. And what he does is make the muscles move all over his body to popular songs. And he wants to do it with Stardust and I don’t know Startdust.” Well, Ed knew the complete works of almost any composer you can think of, but not a note of Hoagy Carmichael. So we sat that day and I taught him Stardust. Only a few months ago he reminded me that he still knew Stardust.

Okay. An aside.

When I came back to Princeton – that was about 1950 and all the smoke had cleared and a lot of change had taken place here. Much had changed. We moved into Cuyler Hall. We had a little place that you could call a music building. It was almost impossible; there was no way to keep one sound out of the room of the next sound. But we did begin to build a faculty of people whom you would know. Roy Dickinson Welsh had retired and things were in transition and very much in flux. We didn’t have a real chairman. I’m telling you this because I know many of you knew these people. But then we did get a chairman. Arthur Mendel became the chairman. And we began to get back to work again.

Now, a number of issues came up and I’ll just do them in succession because Andrew’s referred to a couple of them. The people who came along and created these issues: First, a man named Godfrey Wynham. A brilliant young Englishman who came here as an undergraduate in 1954 and he really was an extraordinary man. Unfortunately, he died at a very early age. He was married to the singer Bethany Beardsley, who I’m sure many of you knew. And he came here – from England – with a great knowledge of many, many things, but not much of a knowledge of the music of Schoenberg, and so forth. He had been working with Hans Keller in England and, therefore, learned a little bit about Schoenberg. He wanted to know more about Schoenberg, more about 12-tones, more about the electronic stuff. He turned out to have been a hell of a genius; an extraordinary man who could learn anything by himself in practically no time. Well, everyone recognized this fact and he was one of the first people to create things from the computer and to write new computer programs and new software for the computer. He could do almost anything musically except he wasn’t much of a performer. And he got to the point where he had finished his degrees.

He got the so-called MFA, which is what we gave as the terminal degree in music at that time. That’s what Ed Cone and I got as graduate students. We were allowed to be graduate students while we were teaching – that’s another complex matter, which I didn’t think was worth mentioning at this point. It’s not even worth remembering. But he got his MFA and he wanted a Ph.D. And these bloody musicologists were getting all the jobs because they had Ph.Ds. Ohio State University would ask for somebody to teach elementary theory and we’d suggest some brilliant young composer. And they’d say, “Well, he doesn’t have a Ph.D. We can give Ph.D.s. We can’t have a person that doesn’t have a Ph.D. teaching our Ph.D.s. Forget it.” So he’d send a musicologist out there to teach elementary harmony and he’d have a hard time keeping one day ahead of the class in the (Walter) Piston harmony book. So this was a matter of great contention.

So, what happened, anyhow, was we had to fight for the Ph.D. and it was quite a fight.

The battle took place, of course, you can imagine mainly from the – I don’t want to indulge in musicology baiting here because some of my best friends are musicologists. But it was a battle that involved all kinds of principals. And I cannot go into them here. But in order to induce this, I wrote a Ph.D. thesis, which became a scandal because it looked mathematical to non-mathematicians. So they brought in as a referee, John Tukey.

How many people here knew John Tukey? Nobody knows John Tukey? John Tukey was a great, great mathematician who died a few years ago. He was on the faculty. When I got here he had just begun the faculty and we sort of lived our Princeton lives together, even during the war when I was doing work in what was then Fine Hall, the old Fine Hall. He was doing things there too and we saw each other all the time. We were very close friends. He read this and he wrote a report saying, “Of course you should accept it and in fact it even has some new results in finite group theory.” That didn’t help in the music department. They turned it down. That was a cause celèbre.

And Godfrey Wynham was all set to go back to England. Well, I won’t elaborate that anymore, but the fact of the matter is we fought and we fought and we got a Ph.D. for Godfrey Wynham. Not for me; that doesn’t matter. I got mine later after I’d gotten an honorary degree. One of those funny things, but I don’t resent it at all; it just wrecked my life at that point [laughter]. The truth is there was a principle involved here and the Godfrey Wynham’s of the world could get Ph.D.s now and could get jobs equally with the musicologists.