Milton at the Princeton Seminars: A Remembrance

- 361 Milton at the Princeton Seminars: A Remembrance Carlton Gamer The first of the Princeton Seminars in Advanced Musical Studies was held in the summer of 1959. At that time, the Department of Music, prior to taking up residence at its yet unfinished new home in the Woolworth Center of Musical Studies, was housed in Clio Hall, a white marble temple in Ionic style erected in 1893 by the Cliosophic Debate Society1 , Clio being the Muse of History, it seemed at once odd and appropriate that it was her eponymous dwelling within whose cool, formal, classical, and somewhat austere confines such proceedings would be taking place--odd in that by their nature the seminars were to deal with developments regarded by many as constituting a radical break with the past; yet appropriate in that those same seminars were to continue the tradition of thinking seriously in and about music that had been a hallmark of the modern era from its inception. That tradition was well personified in the seminar faculty, the core of which was the Princeton triumvirate of Roger Sessions, Edward Cone, and Milton Babbitt, with Sessions as its dean. Those three were joined by Ernst Krenek and a succession of distinguished visitors: Vladimir Ussachevsky, Allen Forte, John Tukey, Robert Craft, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Edgard Varèse. Spurred, perhaps, by the realization that the seminar fellows were a group of bright, ambitious emerging composers ready to focus their collective attention on anything and everything that was brought before them, the faculty and visitors shone, and on occasion they dazzled. Milton, for his part, was in his element. I had made his acquaintance a couple of summers before, during my private study with Sessions, but it was not until his first appearance in the seminar classroom on August 17, 1959, that I was able to observe him in his performance mode. Each of the faculty had chosen a range of topics to be addressed in the course of the seminar. Milton’s had to do with aspects of music and mathematics, which he briefly outlined at the start: The first week was to be devoted to logical propositions and group theory; the second to electronic music; and the third to information theory and related issues. Then, speaking without notes in long, complex, well-formed sentences replete with subordinate clauses, connectives, diversions, free associations, parenthetical digressions or humorous asides occasionally addressed to someone in the class whom he already knew by name (”Henry, this will be of particular interest to you”)--his words tumbling forth uninterrupted even by his turning to write on the blackboard--he launched into an hour-long metatheoretical disquisition on the nature of theory in the abstract and of music theory per se; on the formal framework of a theory; on primitives, rules of term formation, operators, and propositions; and finally on the commutative group axioms (closure, associativity, existence of identity and inverse elements, and commutativity) and the ways in which each of these might be interpreted musically. Having previously studied some elementary symbolic logic, set theory, abstract algebra, and combinatorics, I was able to follow all this without too much trouble, but there were some in the class who were lost. That day a few of us got together to help each other out before Milton’s next - 362 Carlton Gamer lecture. Our small group quickly evolved into a floating cram session that met in one or another of our rooms at the Graduate College throughout the remainder of the seminar. Someone produced a copy of The Score containing Milton’s article “Some Aspects of Twelve-tone Composition,” which was then circulated among us in samizdat fashion2 . Milton’s subsequent lectures on group theory, equally dense and delivered in the same manner, covered such matters as permutations and their composition; pitch-class and order-number permutations in music; permutation groups; commutative and non-commutative groups; combinational versus permutational systems; elements and operations in the twelve-tone system; adjacencies and invariance, aggregates; combinatoriality; all-combinatorial and semi-combinatorial source sets; trichordal, tetrachordal, and hexachordal combinatoriality, and derived sets. He illustrated his points with sets such as that of the Schoenberg Fourth Quartet (his...