Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt, Page 3

IMBRIE:

After the war: Berkeley

The war came to an end before we could put it on stage.  I was shipped to northern California, awaiting a trip to the Orient.  But by that time I had been in the service for over four years, so that I had the option of staying in the United States until released to civilian life.  While in northern California I would occasionally be granted a weekend pass and would take a bus to Berkeley, where Roger Sessions was then teaching.  As soon as I became a civilian, I went back there to continue my studies with him and received a Master’s degree from the University of California.  At that time, universities were desperate to hire young instructors, since a wave of students were arriving from the Army and Navy to resume their studies.  Both Berkeley and Stanford offered me a job.  (Nowadays every job opening at a university has about 500 applicants).

Naturally I accepted the offer from Berkeley because of Roger Sessions.  In those days, many universities insisted that all faculty members must have a doctoral degree.  At that time, Ph.D. degrees were only given to musicologists.  Composers were not considered to be scholars.  Fortunately, the University of California allowed people like us to be hired if they were considered to have the equivalent of a doctorate “in training and experience.”  Many years later, Princeton – I hear this from Milton (Babbitt) – many years later Princeton finally awarded doctorates to composers under the influence of Milton Babbitt.  The story goes that at a faculty meeting, Milton asked for permission to award such a degree to composers, whereupon a member of the mathematics department responded that this was an interesting idea, since his department was about to offer a doctorate in the history of mathematics.  As a result, other universities had to follow suit.  Thus, I was in a strange position of awarding Ph.D. degrees to composers without having one myself.

Before accepting the position at Berkeley, I asked to postpone it for two years so that I could spend the time at the American Academy in Rome.  This was a wonderful experience.  At that time, right after the war, Italy was enthusiastic about discovering what was going on in the arts elsewhere after the war.  There were concerts involving the music of foreign composers, and our music was played over the radio.  We got to know Italian composers of our own age and compared notes with them.  They were very pleased at our attempts to learn Italian and the atmosphere was most friendly.  At the same time, the Academy supplied the artists of all kinds with the necessary equipment that allowed us to pursue our creative purposes without interruption (unless we wished to interrupt ourselves by taking sightseeing trips all across Europe).  

More recently, I have received the impression that many composers were anxious about being away from New York and that they would be forgotten.  In my own case, I was fortunate in knowing that I had a job waiting for me in California.  I did return to Rome in the 50s and 60s, and stayed at the Academy as composer-in-residence.  

The musical events in the San Francisco Bay area at that time were active and stimulating.  There were a few organizations devoted to the performance of contemporary music.  Roger Sessions was teaching at Berkeley and Darius Milhaud at Mills College.  Now, as you probably know, Mills is a women’s university, but it accepts male graduate students as well.  Sessions’ students often went to Mills to sit in on Milhaud’s classes, and his students likewise often joined us in Berkeley.  We became good friends with one another. (Sessions and Milhaud were good friends, as well.).  We could not help contrasting this situation with that of New York at the time, where one had to belong to one camp or another; either the 12-tone composer or the ‘Americanist’ gang.