11. PNM and the Ph. D.
In the mid-fifties while I was on the faculty of Brandeis University, Benjamin Boretz was a graduate student of mine in theory and composition, and I once told him about the little music periodical I had edited while I was a graduate student at Harvard, The Musical Mercury—a magazine of modest proportions which could still be found tucked away on the least frequented shelves of a few libraries, but otherwise was pretty much forgotten. I have always been under the impression that after I told him about myown experience Ben found the idea of a student editing a magazine (other than just a school publication) while still in college very intriguing. Lincoln Kirstein's literary magazine, Hound and Horn, which he published and edited while at Harvard, provided a precedent for something quite prestigious, and after a very brief gestation period my student came up with aplan to do just that in collaboration with two fellow Brandeis music students, Barclay Brown and David Burrows.
But although he worked hard to find a sponsor he had not yet succeeded at the time he and his classmates received their M. F. A. degrees, and so they all went their separate ways. He continued his efforts, which looked promising while he was studying in California, but as the end of the decade approached he still had not succeeded, and when he entered the Ph. D. program at Princeton he persuaded me to agree to be editor of his projected periodical and he would be associate editor. I believe my prestige as a writer and my journalistic experience helped, and so did some lively promotion on the part of Milton Babbitt, for we succeeded in getting the patronage of the impressive Fromm Music Foundation.
With the foundation as our backer we had the further advantage of getting Princeton University Press to publish us. This was obviously not going
When we adapted Paul Fromm's choice to our music magazine, Perspectives of New Music (PNM), none of us, including representatives of Princeton University Press, caught the peculiarity of using “of” rather than “on” or even “in.” Recently I came across a clipping in my files of a piece in theNew York Times announcing the new publication as “Perspectives in New Music” (italics mine). Boretz and I have always thought we were responsible for the doubtful grammar. But since reading the Times piece I have occasionally had the fantasy that something could have happened en route toor from the press or maybe just at the typesetter's machine in the composing room that resulted in the preposition being switched without our noticing it. This was a kind of wish fulfillment. Perhaps it was merely that Eric Salzman, author of the Times report on the forthcoming periodical, just naturally assumed we must not have meant “of.”
I still cannot get over my absolutely impromptu response when the editor of the press asked us if we had a logo and I came up on the spot with the suggestion we use Stravinsky's drawing in one of the books of his conversations with Robert Craft in answer to a request to make a visual representation of his recent music.[1] Promotional ideas of this nature are not my forte, but it turned out that not only, or so I have thought, is it a hand some piece of art, but it has mnemonic properties, and it is now, by people in the know, recognized more as an icon for PNM than as a visual representation of Stravinsky's music. Over the years not everyone connected with PNM (most of them serialists) has been exactly elated over the associations this logo brings in its wake. It once got us unexpectedly into trouble. Evidently Luigi Dallapiccola was not impressed by Stravinsky's conversion to serialism though it was pretty complete by the sixties. When the Italian master was approached for an article he was very indignant about our soi-disant avant-garde periodical having a neo classicist's emblem on the cover and turned us down.
Fromm made a big point of assuring everyone that it was his policy to remain in the background where any of his benefactions (mainly, of course, commissions to composers) were concerned. But this was a commitment he did not really honor in our case. He was very much in evidence whenever there was a press photo opportunity. Also, on one occasion he sides tepped the proper authorities and solicited an article from lannis Xenakis which Ben, who was sole editor at the time, found fault with. It was one of a number of events that precipitated a crisis. This particular crisis, which occurred after my retirement from the editorship, had a salutary effect which even Ben welcomed, since it brought Edward T. Cone in as co-editor to share the burden and exert the kind of authority toward our sponsor that Ben himself (still relatively young at that time and without a prestigious academic position of his own) admittedly lacked. (In 1969, when the crisis was sufficiently past, Cone became advisory editor briefly.)
Crisis was endemic to PNM on all levels and it was one of the provocations for my early resignation while the fourth issue was being prepared. I could tolerate neither the time required nor the emotional strain exacted to cope with the perennial objections. In addition to our sponsor there were others with whom I was obliged to contend. The publisher, for example, was vigilant lest we make improper inroads on the scholarly dignity of Princeton University Press. The editor of the press once tried to get me to strike out the phrase “twelve tonery” from a review by an English contributor on the grounds that it was too “cute.” Then there was the editorial board—no list of names as window-dressing this. They were all composers, typically members of Fromm's stable, each with his (they were all male) own axe to grind and eager to impress his own view on the magazine. They were constantly vigilant for that moment when their own music might be an eligible subject for coverage. They were a board that wanted meetings to put their two cents in; they were not satisfied with being, in the usual way, merely a prestigious name on a roster (which is what I now am, by the way, on the Musical Quarterly board and I wonder why I persist). And of course, we also had the inevitable objections from the readership; there was still the highly debatable platform of serialism in the public arena as well as the studied linguistic obscurity that I discussed in chapter 6.
Not least of all my concerns were the time and energy I spent ironing out disagreements with Ben. Everyone knows that coeditors disagree and have always to reach some compromise (W. H. Auden had recently resigned from the prestigious British literary magazine Encounter because, I believe, he could not get along with Melvin Lasky). Ben had been passionately
I had trouble understanding, and therefore editing, some of the articles we were to publish, and it was a handicap living at such a distance from Benand Princeton University Press—before the days, it is important to take into account, when we all had access to express and priority mail, fax, and e-mail. (I realize now with proper refereeing and editorial assistance an editor does not have to understand every article published.) Capping all the time-consuming matters I have listed, there was bitter disagreement as to the size of each issue. I had no idea when I signed on that issues would be over two hundred pages. I had the size of Die Reihe in mind (a far more compact German periodical). I certainly did not have time for the number of pages Ben wanted and I did not think that in those days we would find enough material of suitable quality to fill them.
I should not leave this recital of woes, however, without adding that underneath our disagreements lies a strong bond, philosophic and humanistic, between Ben and myself, and it lasts to this day. It seems to me this has been what enabled us to have the most bitter disagreements while remaining friends and loyal colleagues and never losing our respect for each other.
In any case, I had always felt it was Ben's periodical. He had had the idea and he was passionate about it. My publishing days were behind me and I now had to have time for composing and teaching. I had come on board, as I have said, mainly because I thought I could lend some of the prestige I had acquired by virtue of my writing and editing experience for whatever it was worth so that he could get backing, and also to help him get started with the benefit of my own knowhow. (This was the fourth magazine I had edited.)[3] While I was altogether frustrated by the antagonistic forces surrounding me, it was not without reluctance that I decided it better to resign and leave it all to Ben. I had actually spent almost five years on PNM—about two years preparing for its appearance and about the same time editing it, and I was rather pleased with some of the results: the format we achieved and the general feel of the magazine. I did retain my association as a member of the editorial board.
In the early sixties around the time when PNM was being founded, the universities were beginning to recognize composition as a legitimate subject
PNM was published by Princeton University Press from 1962 up to 1972, and it was Princeton University's music department that spearheaded the movement in 1961 for the Ph. D. in music composition in Ivy League or Ivy League-level institutions. The leading figures in this movement were Babbitt and the musicologist Arthur Mendel. One of the most cogent arguments was that the intellectual aspect of composition had been acknowledged when it was admitted into the university curriculum. (After all, as I have already noted, in the medieval university music had been part of the quadrivium, the four higher fields of learning: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music.) But once it had been admitted, it was treated as second-class. Some time earlier, as a compromise, the Master of Fine Arts degree had been introduced in a few places as a terminal degree for composers or theorists as the Ph. D. had been a terminal degree for musicologists. People did not always recognize the M. F. A. as a more advanced degree than the simple M. A., however, nor did it meet the requirement of the Ph. D. that universities and faculties strictly observed in hiring. Doctorates of one kind or another were being offered here and there in the United States, and in the Midwest it was as soon available to a tuba player as to a composer. This new initiative proposed by the caucus of Ivy League professors aimed at a degree that would not simply be any doctorate but a Ph. D. supported by prestigious institutions.
Mendel, chairman of the Princeton music department as well as the senior composer, Roger Sessions, were at first opposed to the Ph. D. in composition, but they soon went along with the idea, and Mendel organized and chaired a committee made up of the chairmen of a half dozen major
The institutions that joined Princeton to weigh the merits of the Ph. D. in composition and/or theory were the University of California at Berkeley, Brandeis, Columbia, Yale, and Harvard. Princeton instituted the degree while deliberations were still going on in the other places. Among the factors that favored its adoption at Princeton were the already existing Ph. D. for creative work in architecture and the testimonials from the mathematics department that it would never consider a dissertation in the history of mathematics appropriate for a Ph. D. candidate in its field: the candidate must “create new mathematics.” Other universities in the, so to speak, caucus followed Princeton's example in their turn. This all transpired in the early sixties.
The objection to the Ph. D. for composers was of course a subset of the claim that composers had no place in the universities in the first place. There was a curious notion abroad that the more composers became a part of the university enclave the more they would be composing music that was difficult to hear and therefore to play, and the less they would be composing for the public at large, which was already sufficiently burdened by the intellectual challenge that new music imposed on its listening capacities. But what this notion seemed to ignore is that despite all the good will and free rehearsal time that the university can provide, its student performers for the most part, however talented and on the way to glory, are not professionals and would almost inevitably leave something to be desired in their performances, though things have been getting better. (Only in the few topflight conservatories do they approach the standards of world-class performers.) I have heard the contemporary American composer's relation to the university compared with that of medieval and Renaissance composers to the monasteries which provided the choirs and instruments for the performance of the music written during those times. Nothing could be further from the truth. The composers today work hard at teaching for their sustenance and do not have people with professional skills to perform their work such as the monasteries offered.
The composer in the university suggests the ideal situation of the “composer in residence” that enjoyed a brief vogue at mid-century but that too is a mistaken notion. Composers on university faculties now have enervating teaching hours and administrative responsibilities and have to do their composing in the spare time that other faculty members use for their own research and writing projects. And of course like other members of the faculty the composers must produce, and this means having performances and publications of their music, as well as, since the advent of the Ph. D., scholarly papers. Not that these scholarly papers were not sometimes required before the Ph. D. In the forties when I was reviewing for the New York Herald Tribune I was once approached by members of the music department of a distinguished southern university that was looking for a composer but had to have one with qualifications that would get him or her accepted by the university committee that passed on all appointments. Those qualifications included the candidate's having published scholarly articles with footnotes. It seems that since I wrote articles with footnotes they were confident that I was a composer with a good chance of getting past the university screening board. Department members urged me to apply though I was perfectly content at the time in my reviewing job.
PNM's affiliation with academe and with its Ph. D. program in composition in particular became unmistakable—in the unlikely event that it had previously escaped anyone's attention—barely a decade into the periodical's tenure when Boretz began to publish dissertations in installments of rather substantial length. I was apprehensive. I realized that often dissertations were published as books with very little revision. But in general the dissertation demonstrates knowledge and achievement, and literary fineness of style is not a requirement. Also, even in installments they are likely to be very long and top-heavy. As a member of the editorial board I made my objections known. A redeeming feature was that Boretz, who started the practice with his own thesis for Princeton, Meta-Variations,[5] was circumspect in his choice of the other authors of dissertations, namely, Philip Batstone and Godfrey Winham, distinguished minds and excellent writers. That Boretz ventured no further than this in the area was, I suspect, partly owing to the difficulty I had feared of his finding suitable material. What dissertations he had already published nevertheless contributed to the dissension in an editorial board that, as I have indicated, was not content with the usual role of providing a rubber stamp and did not feel altogether comfortable with the direction PNM was taking. As Boretz put it, in a “Conversation about Perspectives” that John Rahn invited him and myself to
In 1971–72 things came to a boiling point, and though there had been two or three earlier crises that Boretz managed to survive, this was a real stalemate since he was adamant about publishing (in installments) a piece about the same length as the dissertations that Fromm and several members of the board violently opposed. It was written by board member and Princeton professor J. K. Randall and its title was “Compose Yourself—A Manual for the Young.”[7] Members of the board considered it a work of literature—not unlike a long poem, for example. But they thought of PNM as a journal devoted to theoretical, analytical, and critical writings on contemporary music, not a journal devoted to creative work, musical or otherwise. Randall pointed out that it was an “attempt to apply compositional concepts to words and to extra musical as well as musical issues and behavior.” Publishing Randall's “creative literary piece,” even if the subject and method were musical, the argument went, would be like publishing a lengthy musical composition, which was not PNM's reason for being. Moreover, what hit Fromm, in the eyes, at a time when it was far from the commonplace expression it is today, was the occurrence of the four-letter F-word. His reaction to this story, strengthened by his growing disaffection with Boretz and the confirmation of his resolve by a few board members, was such that just almost a decade into the life-span of PNM Fromm decided he would no longer support it.[8]
In sympathy a number of the original board members resigned,[9] though not enough of them to deplete the board noticeably since by 1970 the original core of eleven, who never lost their proprietary sense, were servingalong with six new members. The spring-summer issue of 1972 (vol. 10, no. 2), which started out with the first installment of the Randall, containeda discreet note, the idea of the Princeton University Press editor, that readin part: “This is the first issue that appears without the direct sponsorship of the Fromm Foundation, which has decided to devote its efforts elsewhere in the future.” One of Fromm's last acts as a benefactor of the periodical was to insist that the first installment of the Randall be held overand not published as scheduled in the double issue of 1971 (vol. 9, no. 2,
The remaining board members were generally in a panic and were urged to use their academic connections to find support for PNM. But it finally turned out that with scarcely a glitch in the transition PNM continued under Ben's aegis, and as a subscriber you would have had to look very closely at the small print preceding the title page to learn that fact since nothing seemed to have changed. The move to the new venue was as smooth as it could be and scarcely evident to the world outside. The address soon became Bard College, where Ben at that time was starting his long tenure. (As well as the address the college provided office space.) Of no small consequence in contributing to the smooth transition was the fact that Ben was not unprepared for the turn that events took. We had both from the beginning been aware of Fromm's history as a benefactor of tiring of projects and people and of cutting off support without giving them sufficient time to recoup. Consequently Ben had the idea of establishing what he called a “survival fund.” He would put away a little savings as the periodical received each stipend. Added to an annual donation from Princeton University that did not cease, it made it feasible to keep going.
With regard to board members who resigned during this crisis Boretzhad this to say: “Of course some members of the Editorial Board saw their connection with Perspectives primarily as a connection with Paul Fromm, and when Paul Fromm left Perspectives they were eager to detach themselves too to demonstrate—to manifest—that connection. Those who didn't leave the Editorial Board at that time were conspicuously resisting the hierarchization of their loyalties…”[10]
In spite of the defections, with the number of new appointees over the next four years the original number of eleven that constituted the board more than doubled by the time PNM moved to Bard; the editor was no longer constrained by a majority that represented the interests of Fromm and the composers qua composers. In the decade that Boretz continued as editor it gradually became obvious that he was being seduced by new directions in contemporary intellectual thought. I became most convinced of this after flipping through the double issue of 1981–82 (vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2) and being puzzled at first when I came across over fifty unnumbered pages with nothing but artful shapes created by inkblots and, in extra-large print, four to about fifty words per page (occasionally just the inkblot). The text started, “If I am a musical thinker…” and I assumed it was by Boretz
Once having become aware of this typographical inventiveness you inevitably noticed other, if at first less striking, instances of the same order: not only graphics but variegated type fonts. It became evident that this was part of a deliberate tendency, an aesthetic movement with a touch of Surrealism and one that could be traced back to “Compose Yourself” of J. K. Randall who with that explosive contribution had not only precipitated the schism between PNM and the Fromm Foundation but had established its author as one of a new movement's pioneers. In addition to Boretz the movement had as a prominent representative Elaine Barkin, who had beenPNM's mainstay as guardian of its superstructure since her appointment to the staff in the mid-sixties, first as editorial assistant and then as co-editor.(Barkin had been another of my graduate students in composition at Brandeis at the time when Boretz was there.)
Boretz has identified the new tendency as “non-verbal discourse,” leaning heavily, to achieve its end, on the use of graphics and distinctive typography for the “performance” of each article. The practice escalated in 1979, and since Barkin remained as co-editor it still had a sponsor when Boretz retired and John Rahn took over the editorship. Though she in her turn decided to retire in 1983 it was not until 1985 that PNM returned toa single format with standard typeface for every article. It was inevitable that the transition took a while since there was a backlog of contributions that had been commissioned during the interregnum of “non-verbal discourse.” Rahn retained the idea of some graphics in the form of reproductions in black and white of paintings and such by various artists. They helped relieve the gloom of the heavy, gray, scholarly articles.
I do not want to leave the subject of PNM without adding a few words with regard to the singular camaraderie among most of the original eleven board members and the hangers-on who were invited to join them within an environment that seemed to be charged with an energy emanating from Princeton and ultimately from Milton Babbitt. He was something of a guru to us in the sixties much in the way that Aaron Copland, pro selytizingquite a different music, was to a different generation in the thirties. Despitethe almost internecine behavior when there were disagreements on PNMwe had a sense of belonging together that went beyond our experience as