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. . . It is only proper that
the university,
which—significantly—has provided so many contemporary composers
with their
professional training and general education, should provide a home for
the “complex,” “difficult,” and
“problematical” in music. Indeed, the process
has begun; and if it appears to proceed too slowly, I take consolation
in the knowledge that in this respect, too, music seems to be in historically
retarded parallel with now sacrosanct fields of endeavor. In E. T.
Bell’s Men
of Mathematics, we read: “In the eighteenth century the universities
were not the principal centers of research in Europe. They might have become
such sooner than they did but for the classical tradition and its understandable
hostility to science. Mathematics was close enough to antiquity to be respectable,
but physics, being more recent, was suspect. Further, a mathematician in
a university of the time would have been expected to put much of his effort
on elementary teaching; his research, if any, would have been an unprofitable
luxury. . . .” A simple substitution of “musical
composition”
for “research,”
of “academic” for “classical,” of “music”
for “physics,” and of “composer”
for “mathematician,” provides a strikingly accurate picture of
the current situation. . . .
Milton Babbitt
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