Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt, Page 7
BABBITT:
I want to get back to that because that’s my meeting with Roger, but as a result, Roy Dickinson Welsh was brought to Princeton to give a couple of lectures. And remember Princeton is a Presbyterian school and there’s no great tradition of Presbyterian music. If you were at Columbia – oh, the great tradition of the music of the British court, of course. That was Keene ’s College in Columbia, (which) had one of the first music departments with Edward McDowell as the chairman – that ain’t bad. And other schools did too, but not Princeton – no music department. There won’t be any music around here except a church organist, and you may remember those days. There was an organist who gave an elementary music course.
And when it was decided that something should be done, they went out and got this man who had written this book called The Appreciation of Music. That was Roy Dickinson Welsh. And he gave lectures. He gave a couple of general lectures and they were wildly, wildly successful. He was a very, very successful lecturer. He was from the old school of lecturing. His gray hair – I have gray hair but it doesn’t do the same things that his did – and he was kind of a pianist. He always made the same mistake playing the opening of the Fifth Symphony every time, (he didn’t play the augmented sixth chord, but he played a first-inversion of a c-minor triad), but nevertheless, he played it every year, and he was a great success. And he was told that he would be allowed to hire – not with tenure; on a tentative basis – a composer and a historian.
Well, a composer…he had no relation to contemporary music. He had gone to the University of Michigan in music education (and was very much aware of it throughout his whole life at Princeton, by the way), and went and taught at Smith College where he gave these wildly, wildly successful appreciation courses. Nor did he have any further pretensions about it. He was not a composer, lived very little the life of contemporary composition. Well, whom did he hire? He hired this man he knew because he was at Smith College and Roger was brought up in that part of the world in North Hampton and East Hadleigh. So that was one composer he knew about. He knew the family and Roger was out of a job – hire Roger Sessions.
By such fortuities – and I know what fortuities mean, not fortunate – that fortuities, he therefore became the composition teacher at Princeton.
Now, that’s why I’m concerned about mistakes in books and misunderstandings. When I finished my university career – I will talk a little personally now – and I had my bachelor’s degree in music and the routine, good, solid, call-it-what-you-will academic musical training, I finished in 1935. (1935, by the way, by accident, was the year that Roger Sessions came to Princeton for the first time to teach). But I didn’t come here. I had heard about Roger Sessions on the inside. He had mainly an underground reputation. Oh, he had had a symphony played by Koussevitzky and he had had a work played here and there, but he is by no means a popular composer, or even a well-known composer.
A dear lady named Marion Bauer, who had written a book on 20th century music (which is what brought me to Washington Square College), told me that he was the man for me. So I went to see Roger Sessions. Roger Sessions at that time was living from hand-to-hand; I don’t think the mouth got in there very often. It was really that bad. [to Andrew Imbrie] Did you know him then? He was living on the fourth floor over the Grand Beret Piano School on the east side of New York and he was living in a room that was the attic room and you couldn’t really get into it because in order to have a piano so that he could teach, he had been allowed to have a Moore double keyboard piano, which was larger than the room. So in order to squeeze into the room, you had to squeeze around the Moore double keyboard piano and sit on the little couch. That’s the way Roger was living and that’s the way it was when I went to talk to him.
The first time that I saw Roger, I walked up the – I was terrified, of course. I was 19 years old. I was from the deep South (which was omitted, I’m sorry to say, in my biography) and New York still had its terrors for me, though I loved it. And I asked Roger if I might study with him. Well, I had already been told I should bring some compositions ’cause I wrote some and I brought sort of a string quartet. We all had these things, except that I had a piece which I called Generatrix, which was very much a steal from Varèse, who lived down the street from where I went to school in New York and whom I saw quite often. And who, again, intimidated me.
So I began with Roger by showing him these three pieces. He looked at them. And he says, “Why do you want to study. You’ve been through all this academic stuff. You’re composing.” I said, “Look, I want to begin from the beginning. I want to re-understand.” Because we were just beginning to read about Schenker. Israel Sitkowitz, an American composer of great distinction had written an article in, of all places, a magazine called Modern Music, about Schenker. And I wanted to know about this. So I said,” I want to begin from the beginning.” He said, “Well, that’s wonderful. I’d like to begin with the beginning from somebody. I’d like to re-understand things myself.” He said, “But how long do you think you can do this?” I said, “Well, my father will finance me for at least as long as graduate school will be. I don’t want to go to a graduate school. Graduate schools are full of ethnomusicologists.” That’s what you were told to do. “Be an ethnomusicologist and you’ll have a living.” So, I would not have had a living as an ethnomusicologist – I’m afraid of bugs.
So I said I can certainly afford to study for three years in New York. I was a lucky fellow. This was the depths of the Depression, remember– 1935, and I was fortunate. So, he said, “Well, that’s wonderful. What would you like to have written at the end of those three years?” I didn’t tell him quite the truth. The real truth first would have been the Schoenberg Orchestral Variations, which I was studying constantly. But I knew that Roger was having at least equivocal feelings about Schoenberg’s music at that time. He didn’t know quite where he stood with regard to it. I knew that from other people who were studying with him. David Diamond mainly. So, I said, “Well, I’d like to have written a Stravinsky Octet and the Copland Piano Variations.” He said, “Well, the Octet you’ll be able to write; the Variations of Copland won’t take you that long.”