Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Andrew Imbrie and Milton Babbitt, Page 9

BABBITT:

Now to tell you what music was like in Princeton at that time is difficult for you possibly to understand, just physically.  The music department was not a department.  It was not allowed to be a department.  It was a section under Art and Archaeology by a bunch of art and archaeologists who had no desire to have any kind of music around them.  We lived on the top – do you remember this, Andrew? – the third floor of McCormick Hall.  We lived on the third floor of McCormick Hall, which is still the Art and Archaeology building.  We had Roy Dickinson Welsh, who, fortunately, was shorter than I am, or when he went to his little desk in the corner, would have suffered a severe accident as he sat down.  This was his office of the chairman.  Across the hall was a little closet for the part-time secretary.  We, who were teaching – there were two of us who were teaching the elementary stuff, and Roger was teaching elementary harmony, more or less, too  – had no place to meet students.  We met them on the steps.  We met them wherever we could get together somewhere.  We had no offices as such, which I think will take me to the next part of the story ’cause it involves Andrew indirectly.

This is the way things went.  They went this way for four years of mild torture as far as professional work was concerned.  (I should say as pedagogical work was concerned.)  We were writing our music and we were managing that and we were teaching a great deal.  We were being overworked and underpaid.  But look – we had a job and it was the Depression.  Well, four years went by and, like Andrew, my life ended.  In fact, the university life and music ended.  Nobody was here after that time.  The only civilians on the campus were a few engineers who were temporarily deferred because they were going to be doing important work (whatever you wish– defense work or war work).  Andrew and I went off in more or less the same place to do different things.  And there was nobody left except the two senior professors for whom they had to have something. (By that time they were tenured).  So Oliver Strunk taught German and Roger Sessions taught American History and they kept their jobs.  Nobody else associated with music was around the university.

So, a very funny thing happened to me – and this I tell you because, again, it will involve indirectly Andrew and his University.  The strange thing happened to me – I do not know what strange powers were at work.   

One day when I was in Washington I got a notice – not from Princeton University, but from the United States Army, telling me to go back to Princeton University and teach mathematics.  Now I had taught a little mathematics the last term – by the last term, I mean, the term of teaching between Pearl Harbor and when we all left – and during that term I did some mathematics.  Ed Cone did some mathematics.  Any of us who had gone beyond, let’s say, differential equations, were teaching mathematics.  And they needed us badly.  Suddenly I was called back to Princeton. 

I couldn’t find a place to live again just because – it pains me to think about him for a little while – I had no place to live.  My wife and I had given up our apartment.  She was in Washington working; I had been in Washington.  In fact, everybody was in Washington.  Ed Cone had left his apartment here; had left it empty because he hoped to come back to it.  He was in the Army.  So I came back and lived in his apartment and – I’m sorry.  I’m sorry – I’m not given to exhibitions like this, but we lost Ed just about a week and a half ago and he was my oldest and closest friend.  I’m very sorry.  In any case, I lived in his apartment and then I taught mathematics.  All those two years I taught mathematics and wasn’t given a moment to think about music.