Even before the twentieth century was over, the argument began: was the post-war American composition scene a milieu of such conformity that serial methods constituted a ‘hegemonic practice’?Footnote ¹ Or was it a period of freedom and eclecticism? Joseph N. Straus argued that the former position is part of a ‘myth of serial tyranny’. Using the empirical mode of enquiry, Straus showed that between 1950 and 1969, ‘whether one is inquiring about academic positions, performances, publications, recordings, prizes and awards, or attention in the press’, serialist composers made up a minority of American composers, and therefore they could not have inflicted such tyrannical pressures as the ‘myth’ would have us believe.Footnote ² But numbers can only tell us so much. In a response to Straus's contentions, Anne C. Shreffler echoed what Straus himself acknowledged: ‘Statistics […] cannot measure prestige.’Footnote ³ Statistics ‘cannot show what is […] influential or peripheral’, she added, and ‘cannot deal with pieces of music and their reception or the ideological associations of style’.Footnote ⁴ This article will integrate Straus's and Shreffler's perspectives by focusing on two interrelated means by which this myth was built: through the awarding of prestige in the forms of grants and commissions, and through the ideological associations of the serial method.

The power of influence may not be measurable in numbers, but we can begin to trace it by examining the accrual and circulation of prestige. Studies from disciplines outside music can help us understand how prestige is built, bestowed and lost. For example, James English's study of literary prizes, The Economy of Prestige, argues that the prize system accords to certain works cultural value (prestige), which then circulates according to the rules and logic of an exchange economy. These processes, he argues, reconfigure the cultural field. Given their role in administering funding, private foundations formed part of the system for accruing and circulating prestige, especially during the cold war.Footnote ⁵ In this article I will look at the myth of serial tyranny as a symptom of a broader ideological shift that, according to Greg Barnhisel, ‘capitalized on the conjunctions of government, business, and elite cultural institutions (museums, foundations, and universities) particular to America’.Footnote ⁶

The Rockefeller, Ford and Fromm Music foundations were the largest institutions awarding commissions and grants to musical ventures during this period. The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) offered grants to institutions through three large programmes: a composer-in-residence programme, for which symphony orchestras selected a composer to observe rehearsals and meet with performers and administrators, but the orchestra was under no obligation to perform the composer's music; the symphonies-go-to-college programme, which extended a symphony orchestra's season in order to enable them to spend time on the campus of a local college or university and to perform and participate in panel discussions; and the ensemble-in-residence programme, which paired chamber groups with colleges and/or universities where they would perform contemporary and traditional repertoire. The Ford Foundation (FF) also had three major programmes in music: creative artist grants, which enabled performers to commission work from a composer of their choice; the composers-in-schools programme, which placed composers in public schools to teach and write music for the students; and an experimental opera programme, which awarded grants to four large opera companies, allowing them to commission new work by American composers.Footnote ⁷ By contrast, the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) was devoted solely to music and gave commissions to composers directly, in addition to funding concerts at institutions such as the Berkshire Music Center.

Unlike the founders of the more bureaucratic Ford and Rockefeller foundations, Paul Fromm (1906–87), the progenitor of the FMF, sought the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers and accepting their advice. Fromm worked with and helped composers, providing both financial and infrastructural support for their particular musical discourse. Although not without creating vicissitudes and tensions, he thus played a vital role in propelling certain kinds of new music into institutions such as universities.

Beginning in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, composers participated in a well-organized movement to institutionalize particular ideals of what new music could and should be in America. During the post-war period, when many more Americans were attending college on the GI Bill (and, in response, colleges and universities were expanding and adding academic departments), this institutionalization assumed the guise of an academic discipline and aided the legitimization of certain beliefs about music. Those beliefs explicitly, though not exclusively, pertained to the serial method, and were assisted by the rise of a scientific discourse that came to inform compositional practice.Footnote ⁸ The concomitant ideological claim that serial music reached towards a new level of theoretical clarity and new terms of intersubjective musical communication, and that it represented both creative and political freedom, also gained rhetorical momentum. Many composers regarded themselves and were regarded as ‘composer-theorists’, and at a time during which government funding for scientific research increased exponentially, composers who wrote serial music attained a degree of institutional power that they did not have before.

The epicentre of this activity was Princeton University's music department, the first to offer a Ph.D. degree in composition (the programme began in 1961; women were admitted from 1970). Straus acknowledged the uniqueness of the Princeton music department: after reviewing the faculties of the 39 schools offering a doctorate in composition in 1970, Straus observed that ‘only at Princeton can one plausibly claim a serial dominance’.Footnote ⁹ Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions (Babbitt's teacher) were ‘the principal figures’ in this department and ‘commanded an appropriately disproportionate share of attention and prestige’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fromm's relationship with the Princeton University professor Babbitt influenced his foundation's activities at a pivotal moment during this period, and vice versa. Yet thanks to Fromm's foundation and his personal relationships with these men, their sphere of influence was not limited to Princeton.

Using documents found in the FMF archives, which were only recently catalogued, this article will look at the mechanisms of Fromm's patronage, particularly that associated with serial composition, and will focus on the origins of the FMF-funded journal Perspectives of New Music (PNM), which was one among many means through which Fromm and a handful of composers gained influence on the American contemporary music scene. This article aims to show how prestige was constructed and circulated through Fromm's network and PNM, and to examine the ideas that gained prestige through this social distribution.

Paul Fromm and the Fromm Music Foundation

Fromm, an amateur pianist and classical music enthusiast, had dreamed of starting a foundation devoted to contemporary music since his teenage years growing up in Germany. A German Jew, he fled to America in 1939 and soon afterwards founded two wine- and liquor-importing firms in Chicago. He had promised himself that, once he was financially able, he would express gratitude to the United States for having provided him with refuge and citizenship. Fromm was involved in many philanthropic endeavours, though the FMF was the only foundation that he ran.

Unlike his other charitable work, Fromm saw his aid to new music as more of a personal project – a project to build a culture such as the one he had left behind in Germany – than a civic responsibility. Indeed, he differentiated his support for contemporary music from his support for community and social service organizations. When he spoke about his cultural mission, Fromm remarked: ‘This is not social work […] the composer […] deserves our thanks.’Footnote ¹¹ The perceived poverty of contemporary classical music culture in America mandated him to act. Fromm described his goal for American music – that of integrating contemporary music and American musical life by supporting both the production of new music and its dissemination – as undeniably ‘utopian’.Footnote ¹² With this as the core of his mission statement, Fromm established the FMF in 1952.

When Fromm designed his philanthropic organization he abjured the bureaucratic approach of larger foundations like the FF and the RF. In comparison with the larger foundation officers, he was a true connoisseur. For instance, as his and Babbitt's relationship developed, Fromm wrote to the composer:

This last comment probably refers to the way the larger foundations structured their grants to fund contemporary music activities. If any of their grants stipulated the commissioning of a composer, this was done through a performer, who became the actual recipient of the grant and the person who then chose whom to commission. By contrast, Fromm was able to give commissions directly to composers, to take risks on whom to commission and to make adjustments according to a composer's requests. This ‘freedom’ set his foundation apart, and he capitalized on it throughout his life: in a 1965 letter to Helen Carter (Elliott Carter's wife), Fromm remarked: ‘Commissioning and performing are inseparable elements for the Fromm Foundation. The hit and run, as it is practiced by the large foundations, belongs to the baseball diamond.’Footnote ¹⁴ His personal involvement was key to his and the FMF's success. American composers active during the second half of the twentieth century attest the continued imprimatur of a ‘Fromm Prize’ and Fromm's ability to create opportunities for them at pivotal points in their careers.

During the first few years of operation, however, Fromm was fairly hands-off with the FMF's activities, delegating much of the work and decisions to the musicologist Siegmund Levarie, who worked with a board of advisers and external score-readers (almost all of whom were Chicago-based immigrant musicians) to select compositions for recording and publication. Fromm soon grew frustrated with his board's antipathy towards the 12-note method of composition. Additionally, he wanted his foundation to sponsor activities of different kinds, and it was as a consequence of this that he became more involved. In 1956 he initiated a relationship with Aaron Copland, then the head of the composition department at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Berkshire Music Center, which ran the orchestra's Tanglewood summer festival. Fromm suggested to Copland that they collaborate, leading to the first concerts of contemporary music co-sponsored by the FMF and the Berkshire Music Center. (This series eventually became known as ‘Fromm Week’.)

This collaboration was renewed in 1957, when Copland selected Babbitt to be that summer's ‘visiting composer’, as he believed Babbitt would meet his manifold needs. Copland recalled that ‘this appointment meant giving up [Serge] Koussevitzky's idea’ that the position should be filled by a European, but ‘the need for a leading serialist was pressing’. Babbitt was thought suitable because he figured as a bridge between European and American compositional concerns. Copland noted that ‘most [students] were feeling the influence of Webern and his present-day followers’ but ‘they worried about having an audience for their music’ and were anxious about their futures.Footnote ¹⁵ Webern may have been on their minds because that year Robert Craft recorded Webern's complete works. Babbitt may have claimed to have looked more towards Schoenberg than towards Webern as his model, but he could teach serial techniques and, importantly, electronic music, also being practised with fervour in Europe. With Babbitt's help, young American composers could then be equipped to compete with the European avant-garde in a global contest for cultural prestige. But it was not clear how they might receive support in the US except from private foundations, of which Babbitt had not, up to that point, had a very positive experience.

Babbitt's concern with this question, as well as his work with Copland, made him well positioned to advise Fromm. Having taken stock of his foundation's achievement thus far, Fromm decided to renew his commitment to young composers, and Babbitt was the obvious man to furnish advice. The support was reciprocal: Fromm and his foundation provided valuable public relations as well as financial backing for Babbitt as he worked to establish a Ph.D. degree in composition and to spread his ideas about serial composition.

Milton Babbitt and the Fromm Music Foundation

Babbitt's early contact with Fromm's foundation had been inauspicious. When the FMF first solicited recommendations for composers in 1952, Babbitt's colleagues Arthur Mendel, professor of musicology at Princeton, and Erich Itor Kahn, a German-Jewish émigré like Fromm, recommended him to the foundation.Footnote ¹⁶ Babbitt received an impersonal invitation to submit his scores for evaluation, but surmising that his music would not be of interest to the board listed on the masthead, he did not respond. When the foundation sent a second request, Babbitt responded only to explain why he would not be sending a score.

When Babbitt came to Tanglewood in 1957, he had an entirely different experience with the foundation. He took a room at the restaurant and inn Chef Karl's, a choice that turned out to be serendipitous.

‘True devotion’ was Babbitt's phrase, but reflected Fromm's German-Romantic view on culture. Fromm had a liberal humanist European outlook and believed in the concept of the autonomous artistic subject as a bearer of universal, transhistorical values and the Romantic narrative of artistic individualism and progress. ‘A composer must create by inner necessities and not under the pressure of deadlines,’ Fromm told Elliott Carter in late 1956.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, he had a practical outlook on the realities of being a composer.

For instance, Fromm, whose personal interests included music by the Second Viennese School as well as by Igor Stravinsky, professed to make his decisions not on the basis of style, but on the basis of need. He told Babbitt he had recently determined that American composers needed time, money and ‘appropriately prepared representations of [their] music in performance’. He felt this type of support was needed most by the composers of ‘music with which his board had been least concerned’ – or, in Babbitt's words, ‘the most demanding, difficult, intricate music’.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Fromm understood that most composers in the US had to teach in colleges and universities in order to make a living, his support encouraged them and their musical values without treating composition as an academic discipline per se. For instance, after he returned from Tanglewood he arranged for the FMF to subsidize the printing costs of publishing Babbitt's Three Compositions for Piano (1947), the first work that Babbitt wrote after formulating his set-theoretical approach to 12-note composition.

But when Babbitt met Fromm he hinted that he was going to take a step back from seeking private foundation support and instead pursue the establishment of an advanced university degree in composition. Babbitt outlined his view in a talk at Tanglewood that summer, ‘The Composer as Specialist’, subsequently published in High Fidelity magazine in February 1958 as the notorious document ‘Who Cares If You Listen?’ Musicological accounts of this article have tended to concentrate on the tendentious comparisons that support Babbitt's argument – not least that between contemporary avant-garde composers and professors of theoretical physics. Yet Babbitt also gave special mention to the politics of arts funding bodies, which, to his mind, evidently did not share the openness of their relatives in the natural sciences. ‘Perhaps we should not have overlooked those pockets of “power” where prizes, awards, and commissions are dispensed, where music is adjudged guilty, not only without the right to be confronted by its accuser, but without the right to be confronted by the accusations,’ he remarked sarcastically. Babbitt later added that ‘the various institutes of advanced research and the large majority of foundations have disregarded this music's need for means of survival’.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, this lack of foundation and university support had already prevented Babbitt from pursuing what he regarded as important research.

In the mid-1950s, Babbitt wanted to compose electronic music using the synthesizer owned and housed by the RCA record division and Sarnoff Research Lab. RCA and Sarnoff agreed to make the synthesizer available to Babbitt and a few others during the summer of 1956 – if they ‘could secure foundation and/or university support’.Footnote ²¹ Soon after, though, Harry Olsen, the inventor and director of the synthesizer, told Babbitt that the RCA synthesizer was being used ‘constantly to turn out commercial jazz, composed and arranged by two staff directors at Victor’ and he ‘did not see how serious research and composition could be undertaken on the machine under these conditions of very little time and constraints of all sort’.Footnote ²² This experience brought home to Babbitt the need for composers like himself to have institutional – and thus financial – backing.

Although Babbitt taught in the mathematics and music departments at Princeton, he and his fellow composers lacked the institutional recognition of their musicological colleagues. The desire to gain access to the RCA (or his own) synthesizer, combined with the historical inequity between composers and musicologists (a source of frustration for Babbitt since at least 1946, when he attempted to submit a music-theoretical study to the music department as a dissertation that would fulfil the requirement of a doctoral degree, but was refused), made the creation of a Ph.D. degree in composition all the more urgent. This degree would signify that universities regarded composers on an equal footing with musicologists. Such prestigious institutional recognition would provide composers with financial security, offer protection from market demands and confer respect for music composition as a research-based practice embodying a level of rigour, accuracy and responsibility akin to that of scientific disciplines.

To be fair, musicology itself was a rather young discipline in the US; thus Babbitt's calling attention to a comparative inequity between his field and his colleagues' is couched in extreme terms, even given the history of the Princeton music department. In fact, the path by which Princeton's ‘Division of Music’, founded in 1936, became a formal department of music in 1945 is similar to how the Ph.D. degree in composition was later established: with the influx of external funds (from the ‘Friends of Music at Princeton’) and by expanding their research activities. The music department then struggled to attract many undergraduate majors – there were only 12 between 1945 and 1948 – but, as Mendel pointed out, the physics department did not attract many more. ‘The difference’, Aaron Girard writes in his article ‘Music as a (Science as a) Liberal Art at Princeton’, ‘was that the graduate program in music [history], although prestigious’, by the late 1950s ‘could not claim to rival Princeton's enormous federally funded, and internationally regarded scientific programs’.Footnote ²³ Despite his criticisms of private foundations, as Babbitt had no guarantee that full university recognition would be forthcoming, he decided to pursue Fromm's support.

It is clear, then, that Babbitt and Fromm had similar concerns. They worried about American composers’ livelihoods, they wanted to change the relationship between composers and performers, and they were eager proponents of difficult ‘modernist’ music. Fromm, however, wanted American composers to have a position in American public life that put their music in contact with more listeners. In many respects, Fromm wanted to create an American classical music culture equivalent to the German one he had left behind – an elite, high culture. As evident in ‘The Composer as Specialist’, however, Babbitt seemed to have given up on such a dream. To him, the closest thing America had to an existing elite culture in the Sputnik era (probably the only one it was going to get, and, moreover, one that was expanding rather than contracting) was housed in the university.

While both Fromm and Babbitt spoke of seeking to alleviate a ‘need’ in the American contemporary music scene, there were important differences in their attitudes. Fromm directed his patronage towards the composer's need for resources – time, money and musicians to perform their music – whereas Babbitt spoke and wrote about music's supposed need for survival. But it is not music that has needs, but rather people, and Fromm intended his patronage to revitalize the avenues of communication between composers, performers and listeners. Instead, Babbitt directed Fromm's patronage towards projects that supported composers and their concerns, often without consideration of performers and listeners. Their collaboration led to the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, which the FMF underwrote, and to Fromm's employment of Babbitt's protégé Benjamin Boretz. This in turn led Fromm's foundation to sponsor a new journal, PNM, which it supported for a decade. Fromm framed his sponsorship of these activities in terms of his goals, but over the course of their friendship Babbitt directed his generosity in ways that would buttress the case for composition's place in academia.

The Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies

Before leaving Tanglewood, Babbitt told Fromm about an event he wanted to hold that would draw composers from across the country to Princeton University to participate in lectures, discussions and workshops about composition and theory. Fromm probably saw how sponsoring Babbitt's event would benefit the FMF. Having his name attached to a gathering like this would give his foundation publicity and provide him with access to a large number of composers from across the country, young and well established. And it was hardly a bad thing to have the Fromm name associated with an Ivy League university. Moreover, Fromm wanted to be a member of a musical community. Babbitt's proposal to Fromm for the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and the collegial way in which Babbitt related to Fromm were, in some ways, an invitation into his world.

For Babbitt, Fromm's monetary investment in the seminar was also a symbolic investment – his financial capital converted into cultural capital: it would demonstrate to Princeton University administrators that private foundations and people outside the discipline, indeed, outside academia altogether, were interested in his work. Furthermore, Babbitt had developed a specialized language for his new musical concepts, and although he had students who would spread these ideas, an event like this supplied a larger, more dispersed audience, and therefore more vehicles to disseminate his ideas beyond Princeton. For both Fromm and Babbitt, then, the seminar was a personally and ideologically charged enterprise – a rallying point and a public platform.Footnote ²⁴

Many American composers regarded the first Princeton seminar as an event of great importance and unique among the activities sponsored by private foundations. In a proposal to the Princeton president, Sessions explained that the seminar would be for postgraduate work, presenting it as an alternative to the ideologically ‘doctrinaire’ composition courses offered in Europe, perhaps referring to the Internationales Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt. (Although there was some diversity among those who attended at Darmstadt, the American impression of what was being taught there was that it was sectarian.Footnote ²⁵) Sessions also used cold-war rhetoric that promoted the university as a protective space for an open society, and mentioned that Babbitt would give a series of lectures entitled ‘Scientific Theory and Music Theory’ that covered logical propositions and group theory, electronic music and information theory.Footnote ²⁶

Many point to the first Princeton seminar as the origin of the journal PNM. The April 1960 special issue of the Musical Quarterly, devoted to ‘Problems of Modern Music’, featured articles drawn from talks given at the first seminar by Carter, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Sessions, Ernst Krenek, Babbitt, Edward T. Cone and Allen Forte, prefaced by an editorial note from Paul Henry Lang and an introduction by Fromm. In this introduction, Fromm described the ‘purpose and promise’ of the seminar.Footnote ²⁷ Fromm recalled the event as very stimulating and proclaimed that it gave young participants ‘a rallying point, an assurance of inclusion in our musical culture’.Footnote ²⁸ Two years after the issue was published it was reissued as a book, Problems of Modern Music.Footnote ²⁹ Both publications served to disseminate the ideas discussed at the seminar, allowing people who had not been able to attend to become familiar with the topics presented there.

However many readers may have been inspired by these texts, many of the seminar participants evidently wished to continue the conversations they had begun there. Boretz even remembers that Babbitt had talked a lot at the seminar about Boretz's efforts to start a magazine devoted to contemporary music. In fact, in retrospect, although this issue of Musical Quarterly represented for some the beginning of such a journal, the birth of PNM has a much longer and more complicated history.Footnote ³⁰ This history is important because of the primary role PNM played in distributing seminal texts about serial music. Additionally, there is currency in the notion that it was Babbitt who came up with the idea for the journal. Examining the relationships of the specific individuals who conceived and enacted PNM illuminates the nuances and conflicts in the topography of American composition at this time and allows us to see how certain reputations were built. As a result we can gain a better understanding of the intellectual history of the field of music composition and music theory in the US.

The genesis of PNM

About nine months before the first seminar, Fromm exchanged a series of letters with his friend the composer Lukas Foss about Foss's interest in starting a publication devoted to contemporary music.Footnote ³¹ Near the end of 1958, Foss asked whether Fromm thought Levarie would make a good editor-in-chief for such a venture.Footnote ³² Fromm replied in the negative:

As alternatives, Fromm suggested Craft or Lawrence Morton, the director of the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles.Footnote ³⁴ Foss held both men in high regard, but noted that Craft was

Foss decided to pursue Morton.

Even though Fromm did not take much interest in the project, Foss continued to write to him about the magazine. In a letter from February 1959, Foss reported to Fromm that he had appointed Morton as co-editor of the nascent journal, and for a managing editor he had in mind Boretz, whom Foss described as a talented composer and critic, familiar ‘with all the recent trends’. There were some obstacles to launching the magazine, however. ‘There are 3 or 4 [UCLA music department] faculty members who refuse to be convinced, frankly, because they feel left out’, Foss told Fromm.Footnote ³⁶ Nevertheless, Foss enclosed the ‘original proposal of Boretz's’. Foss did not make it clear that the idea for this magazine had been Boretz's all along. Fromm did not know Boretz, so he forwarded Foss's letter to Babbitt and asked him for his opinion on the matter. Babbitt said that he knew Boretz ‘very well; I served as his “spiritual advisor” here in New York’, he explained. He thought Boretz would be good for the job.Footnote ³⁷

In actuality, Boretz had tried to start this magazine four years earlier, when he was a master's student at Brandeis University. While studying with Arthur Berger, Boretz wrote a good deal about pieces and records, and local concerts of new music – sometimes ‘just because [he] wanted to’, sometimes for assignments. They were ‘sort of in the form of pseudo-reviews’, he recalled.Footnote ³⁸ Inspired by Berger's editing of a musical publication while still at college, in 1955 Boretz began talking to two of his friends about how there was not much to read that was written by young composers for young composers. ‘And I said “Why don't we start our own magazine?”,’ Boretz recalled. The three men spoke to Berger about the idea, who referred them to Copland. Copland pointed out that Modern Music, a well-regarded magazine similar to the type they wanted to start, had folded because of lack of funds. Copland did not see any reason why they would be more successful.

Berger also suggested that Boretz talk to Babbitt about the magazine, as Berger believed that he would be a good ally to have for the project. Boretz had read all of Babbitt's publications and had often discussed them with Berger. According to Boretz, ‘Milton was a legend at Brandeis’, although many people were apprehensive about the things Babbitt was saying and doing.Footnote ³⁹ Boretz, though, was inspired by Babbitt's mode of enquiry and his writing about music. ‘Most of what was written about music seemed to image it as either vacuous or frivolous, or unspecified and speculative. […] It was misrepresenting what you experienced,’ Boretz later recalled.

Writing about music had always been as important to Boretz as composing; this was one reason why he held on to the dream of starting a magazine for so long, but also it was something he had in common with Babbitt.

The three Brandeis students decided to meet with Babbitt, who thought the magazine was a great idea.Footnote ⁴¹ Unfortunately, ‘Milton was the only one except Arthur [Berger] who was supportive’ of them, Boretz remembered.Footnote ⁴² The real problem, however, was that Boretz had no money with which to start the magazine. For the time being, then, the project lay dormant. Soon Boretz received an offer to teach and do graduate work with Foss at UCLA.

Boretz's experience at UCLA was mixed, but ended up being formative to his ideas about the relationship between composers, musicologists and academia in general. Boretz hated parts of Los Angeles so much that, soon after arriving, he told Foss he was leaving. Foss then asked Boretz what might attract him to stay. One of the things he wanted was ‘to have a magazine. We could publish stuff we write, we want to read,’ he explained to Foss. ‘The next thing I knew,’ Boretz recalled, ‘I was sitting in the office of the chairman [of the UCLA music department], who was a wonderful guy – Robert Nelson. And he was very interested.’Footnote ⁴³

A proposal, including a roster of potential board members and proposed topics and articles, was accepted by the University of California Press in spring 1958 – at least six months before Foss even wrote to Fromm about the magazine idea. The plan was that the magazine would be run from the UCLA music department. With cooperation and support from the UCLA Office of the Dean of Performing Arts, Boretz and the pianist Joe McGinnis were going to plan a concert series to complement the publication.

By the summer recess everything seemed set, although some details still needed to be ironed out. Boretz told the music department faculty that, while they finalized the plans, he would return to New York. That autumn, Nelson reassured Boretz that the magazine and the concert series were really going to happen. In addition, they had a two-year faculty appointment for Boretz (until then he had been something like a lecturer).Footnote ⁴⁴ But Boretz had become comfortable back in New York City and was hesitant to leave again.

He turned to his mentors for guidance. He called Berger and Babbitt and asked them what they thought about the offer. Babbitt and Berger both said, ‘Go for it. Sounds good. This is an offer you can't afford to refuse.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Unpersuaded, Boretz decided to meet with Nelson, who had travelled to Boston for the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Berger lived there, and Boretz asked Babbitt to come up from New York as well. They advised him to get everything down in writing.Footnote ⁴⁶ Boretz asked this of Nelson and returned to New York City to resume waiting. It was during this interim period, in February 1959, that Foss wrote to Fromm about selecting Boretz to be the magazine's managing editor.Footnote ⁴⁷

As it turned out, Babbitt and Berger delivered sound advice. Soon after Nelson gave his word to Boretz, Walter Rubsamen, a musicologist on the UCLA faculty, returned from Vienna, where he had spent his sabbatical. Informed of the plan for a new ‘composers’ magazine', he asked his colleagues how they thought they were going to pull off such a project. Rubsamen was not convinced by their plans. It is not clear what really quashed the magazine project at UCLA, but not until July 1959 did Foss inform Fromm of the magazine's fate. Foss still believed in the project, but he was due for sabbatical and doubted that the department would start the publication in his absence.Footnote ⁴⁸ Now without a reason to stay in LA, Boretz decided to apply to Princeton for graduate school. ‘I only went to Princeton’, Boretz later told Berger, ‘because of the failure of the Perspectives thing at UCLA and Milton said, “Well, why don't you come to Princeton?” Sort of as a refuge.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Fromm meets Boretz

Fromm met Boretz personally later that year: he had asked to have a conversation with each of the 25 composers who had been invited to attend the first seminar, and Boretz was among them.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘I know that somewhere in the course of my conversation with him, I mentioned to him my interest in this magazine,’ Boretz remembered, but Fromm did not seem interested in having his foundation fund the project.Footnote ⁵¹ Therefore it surprised Boretz when Fromm wrote to him later that autumn, asking Boretz to help him write his introduction to the ‘Problems of Modern Music’ issue of Musical Quarterly.

Shortly after they finished writing the essay (Fromm gave Boretz lines and ideas; Boretz composed the prose; they edited it together), Fromm asked Boretz if he would move to Chicago to work for the foundation.Footnote ⁵² From June 1960 Boretz was Fromm's right-hand man, assisting him to a degree unmatched by any of Fromm's previous associates. Fromm asked Boretz to evaluate compositions the FMF received, to write speeches, letters and articles for him, and even to take care of more personal matters – for instance, to supply him with musically detailed opinions about compositions his composer friends sent to him. Fromm wrote letters to Boretz with requests such as the following: ‘I listened to Arthur [Berger]'s Quartet. Frankly, I was unable to establish a relationship to the music. Would you feed me a few lines which I can work into a letter to Arthur?’Footnote ⁵³ Soon Boretz made most of the decisions – administrative and aesthetic – for the Fromm Music Foundation.

Schneider resigns

At around this time, the violinist Alexander Schneider, who had become Fromm's de facto executive assistant at the foundation after Levarie resigned, felt that he should end his formal relationship with the FMF. Fromm's hiring of Boretz may have precipitated Schneider's resignation. Not that Boretz was Schneider's exact replacement – Fromm asked Boretz to do many things he did not ask of Schneider, such as write for him; but the passive-aggressive tone Schneider took with Fromm when informing him of this decision suggests that he was hurt at being supplanted:

Fromm's reply was sympathetic. He first addressed what he believed was the real cause of Schneider's resignation – Fromm's dissatisfaction with the programme of an FMF-sponsored concert that Schneider had organized. ‘An honest difference of opinion (and I do not deny that it exists), cannot endanger our friendship,’ Fromm wrote, referring to the concert.Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, Fromm insisted that, since the FMF-sponsored concerts in New York City had been, and always would be, ‘an important part of our program’, Schneider had been ‘indispensable’, and Fromm declined to accept his resignation. Fromm concluded by addressing Schneider's quip about ‘beatniks’:

Schneider may have been a ‘dear friend’, but if it was important to Fromm to be connected with contemporary music composition, he needed a young composer for his adviser. Boretz did not offer him the prestige that Schneider may have held, but Boretz did provide a key and sustaining connection with Babbitt.

Despite what Fromm promised Schneider, however, Boretz did influence future FMF programmes. Although not always – or even often – of the same mind as Fromm, Boretz quickly became important to the foundation. If Schneider had connected Fromm with Copland, which proved a boon for the foundation, by then Copland's influence was on the wane. Now Fromm brought Boretz, an important but not uncomplicated surrogate for Babbitt, into his network.

‘A massively unequal confluence’Footnote ⁵⁷

Fromm's relationship with Boretz was quite different from his relationship with Schneider, partly because of the gap between their ages. Boretz did not consider Fromm a friend. On the contrary, his first few months working for Fromm were difficult. ‘I went to Chicago. I worked for the Foundation for a while. I found it intolerable,’ Boretz said. What was ‘intolerable’ was Fromm's administrative style. ‘He was quintessentially hierarchical in his way of thinking […]. I was a young person, or young adult, however I would have characterized that. So his relationship to me was kind of like I was a […] nephew or something.’ Boretz felt demeaned by Fromm's dictatorial manner, explaining that ‘he wasn't mean. But he was bossy, definitely. […] He used to yell at people in his office’ and was like a ‘European tycoon’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Furthermore, Boretz felt that Fromm was asking him to serve in ways that went beyond what he thought were his proper responsibilities as the FMF assistant, and he resented the fact that Fromm spoke badly of him behind his back. Hardly more than six months passed before Boretz quit. Boretz recalled that he told Fromm:

Boretz left the next day.

However displeased Fromm seemed to be with Boretz, the latter's abrupt departure upset him. Fromm realized he wanted – or needed – Boretz to remain his assistant, so he sought to appease him. As Boretz remembered,

And with that, Boretz reconsidered. Although it proved to be complicated, Fromm did, thanks to Babbitt's diplomacy, reconcile with Boretz – and Boretz benefited greatly. He accepted Fromm's deal to return to work for the FMF if it funded his magazine. The conditions under which this reconciliation took place led to one of the better-known activities of Fromm's foundation. PNM finally had financial backing.

Boretz, Babbitt and PNM

Babbitt may have acted as Boretz's mentor, but between them they offered Fromm different perspectives: that of someone interested in building an establishment of American music and that of someone who positioned himself outside it. What Babbitt told Fromm sometimes supported, but sometimes augmented and complicated, Fromm's work with Boretz. The relationship between Babbitt and Boretz was itself far from simple, and all three men received benefits from these partnerships. No matter how convoluted the relationships, only with the help of a figure like Babbitt and with the daily assistance of Boretz would the FMF have sponsored the composers and projects they did during this time. While Fromm still stood at the head of his foundation, much of the actual discussion and decision-making took place a thousand miles away, in New York City, where Boretz remained. (The distance seemed to help their relationship, at least temporarily.)

Although Babbitt and Boretz both wanted this magazine to exist, they had different reasons for that and different visions for it. Boretz greatly valued Babbitt's support, but the latter's championing of the journal was also somewhat complicated for him. On one occasion Boretz said that Babbitt's ‘relationship toward Perspectives became ambiguous at the Princeton Seminar’ and when Boretz eventually enrolled at Princeton for graduate school in 1965. When asked to elaborate, he said:

Boretz felt that Babbitt's support for his magazine idea got wrapped up in these aspects of the latter's behaviour, and this was what ‘really pissed me off the most’.Footnote ⁶²

Boretz described himself, and his vision for the magazine, in a very different way. ‘I have no patience with intellectual gamesmanship. Intellectual activity as a competitive sport, or music as a competitive sport, drive me up the wall – make me feel crazy,’ he said. ‘Because my whole (ontological) relationship to them is somewhere else. It just feels like it's coming from a different place. I've never thought of music in institutional terms, or of doing it as a professional thing.’Footnote ⁶³ Rather, Boretz saw the magazine as a way of building a community of disparate – and different – people who wanted to write about various kinds of music in various ways. Even if to most readers the first ten years of PNM do not demonstrate these particular goals, Boretz's main imperative was for it to foster a community that was representative of diverse musical practices. Like Fromm in many ways, Boretz sought a community of and for American composers, performers and listeners.

In contrast, thinking about music in institutional terms and ‘as a professional thing’ was exactly how Babbitt conceptualized his work.Footnote ⁶⁴ Babbitt thought of composing as an intellectual discipline. Furthermore, he wanted to form a highly specialized subculture that supported the practices and the beliefs he associated with ‘musical research’. Although Babbitt's only formal role with PNM was as member of the editorial board, he did perceive the possibility for this magazine to become a vehicle for his larger project for American composition, and influenced it in that direction. Indeed, from its inception, PNM served as supporting evidence in his case for a Ph.D.: it was a peer-reviewed journal of scholarly articles that demanded (and disseminated) specialist knowledge, and thus was similar to scholarly publications that fulfil the ‘publish or perish’ requirements of research universities. His continual role on the editorial board maintained his connection with Fromm and the FMF; and his closeness to the editors meant that he had an inside line to getting his latest piece of writing published in the premier (and only) journal for young American composers. Although Babbitt cautioned Fromm that composers tended to be self-promoters (‘Composers […] have no time for even the barest amenities when the prospect of seeing their names in print looms before them,’ Babbitt told him prior to Fromm's sponsorship of PNM Footnote ⁶⁵), it was useful for Babbitt to be close to so many people involved in PNM. It was also useful to be close to Fromm, as many began to take note that a number of Princeton students, former and current, were receiving commissions from the FMF.

Many publications that mention the journal, and even people involved with PNM over the years, erroneously believe that it was Babbitt who had the idea for and started the PNM. ‘People regarded me as being some kind of a stalking horse for Milton,’ Boretz explained in 2012:

The complicated genesis of the journal may also have contributed to the currency of the notion that Babbitt was the progenitor of PNM. Despite Boretz's (and Fromm's) intention that PNM should include articles about a variety of musical styles and ideas, the most potent evidence for claims regarding Babbitt's role as progenitor of the publication are the articles published in PNM's first decade, many of which reflected and furthered Babbitt's teaching – in particular his efforts to use scientific language and method to describe his compositional process.

Launching PNM

Even though the magazine was not his idea, once the FMF had pledged to underwrite it, Fromm sought to shape the magazine into an entity that supported and helped to carry out his mission. As it struck Boretz, ‘The projects that [Fromm] sponsored were mostly ideas that were proposed to him,’ but Fromm's level of involvement with foundation-sponsored endeavours varied depending on the activity.Footnote ⁶⁷ For instance, Fromm never told the recipients of his commissions how to compose. Even if he commissioned a string quartet or a concerto from a composer, Fromm was understanding and accommodating if they ended up writing for different instrumental forces.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, as Boretz put it, ‘I think his whole relation to being a patron was to be part of the world, to be personally engaged with these people.’ Sometimes this meant involving himself in their actual projects.Footnote ⁶⁹ Fromm's relationship to PNM was an example of this, if an exceptional one.

First, someone had to be chosen to help edit the magazine. Boretz had long intended that if his magazine idea got off the ground, he would ask his former teacher, Berger, to be his co-editor. Berger met Fromm a short time before Boretz did, while he was writing an article for High Fidelity in autumn 1958.Footnote ⁷⁰ Berger mentioned to Fromm that he had heard Boretz had spoken to Fromm about a magazine project. ‘I want you to know that I would be willing to be editor of an American periodical devoted to the latest developments in contemporary music in this country,’ Berger told Fromm. ‘Since these developments spring to such a considerable extent from your activities, I can well appreciate that you would be deeply interested in such a publication, and I should like very much to discuss it with you when you next come to New York,’ he added. ‘I remember in our first meeting […] we both agreed that such a magazine was very much needed in America.’Footnote ⁷¹ Berger wrote this letter more than six months before Fromm agreed to fund the magazine, but it may have influenced the former's future involvement with PNM. In his memoirs, Berger wrote that he believed ‘my prestige as a writer and my journalistic experience’ helped to get Fromm on board initially, although he also cited the ‘lively promotion on the part of Milton Babbitt’ as crucial.Footnote ⁷²

Fromm considered Berger's involvement desirable, but Boretz counted it as indispensable. Once it became clear to Boretz that the magazine was going to be funded by the FMF and published by Princeton University Press (PUP), he realized that it was important to him that the publication should have an identity separate from these institutions. Berger's involvement, he thought, would help.Footnote ⁷³

Shaping PNM: the title, the logo, the publisher

The FMF's decade-long sponsorship of PNM was marked by discord. The disagreements among the editors and the sponsor stemmed from the different conceptions they had of the magazine and their respective roles in it. Conflicts about everything from copy-editing to publication delays, from bloated budgets to which articles they should publish, reflected their larger ideas and wider frustrations about their niche in the contemporary music scene. (PNM launched at the same time as the ONCE Festival began and around when John Cage published his book Silence.)

That the magazine's identity might become the cause of conflict became evident to Boretz when Fromm called a ‘summit meeting’, as Boretz described it, ‘of all the biggies, in New York’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The co-editors were not included. Many of the people who did attend were asked to be on the first editorial and advisory boards, the former of which ended up including Babbitt, Berger, Boretz, Carter, Foss, Leon Kirchner, Billy Jim Layton, George Perle, Mel Powell, Gunther Schuller and Seymour Shifrin. Berger recalled this cast of characters in his memoirs:

Although they were not a homogeneous group, ‘most of the original eleven board members and the hangers-on who were invited to join them’, according to Berger, came from

In fact, Copland was on PNM's first advisory board, along with Krenek, Darius Milhaud, Walter Piston, Sessions and Stravinsky. That these men allowed their names to be on PNM's masthead can be read as an endorsement, and a powerful one. Combined, the members of these boards were a veritable who's who of émigré and American composers. Many of them, though not all, could be described as modernists. (Most composed with the serial method; Carter, Foss, Kirchner, Milhaud and Piston were important exceptions, although Milhaud and Piston were the only composers of tonal music.) Their eminence in American and international arts cultures and (of those who taught for a living) their positions as professors at schools including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Brandeis and Mills College were markers of prestige; their endorsements were means by which this prestige flowed to Fromm, the FMF and PNM.

With input from these men, Fromm, Boretz and Berger hashed out the magazine's particulars. To start with, they all had different ideas as to what publications they should emulate. Boretz remembered receiving letters from Fromm in which he asked: ‘Should we do this more like Show Magazine or more like Commentary?’ Boretz thought that Show was more relevant because it was an arts magazine. It was also published by an arts patron: Huntington Hartford. Additionally, Show was more of ‘a coffee table thing. It is glossy. It's […] pop culture […], highbrow pop,’ Boretz said, noting that Fromm ‘had something very different in mind’ from what he and Berger were imagining.Footnote ⁷⁷

Yet Boretz and Berger did not share a vision for the magazine, either. Berger remembered that his primary model for PNM was Die Reihe, the German music journal published by Universal Edition (English-language versions of the first four issues were published in 1959 by Theodore Presser). Berger liked Die Reihe's book-like format. He wanted to publish ‘something that would be more solid’ (presumably in form and content) than the Journal of Music Theory, Modern Music or Score – three other journals devoted to contemporary music.Footnote ⁷⁸

When Berger and Boretz discussed this in 1986, however, Boretz was surprised to hear that Berger thought they had modelled PNM on Die Reihe. Boretz's models were Score and Modern Music.Footnote ⁷⁹ The articles in Modern Music had been written mostly by composers who held a wide range of opinions and wrote in non-technical prose. Likewise, Score covered contemporary and historical music for a general readership, and about half of the articles were written by composers. The Journal of Music Theory, by contrast, included technical articles written by and for professional music theorists, and was not at all confined to contemporary music.

Even if Berger liked Die Reihe's format, he and Boretz had a shared disdain for its content. They were not alone; in Everett Helm's 1959 review for the Journal of Music Theory of Die Reihe's first four issues, he criticized the publication's narrow definition of contemporary music and its jargon-filled, polemical articles.Footnote ⁸⁰ (The first issue of PNM included an equally scathing review of Die Reihe by John Backus.Footnote ⁸¹) Once it got going, though, PNM resembled Die Reihe more than any of the other magazines Boretz and Fromm suggested.

Although their magazine ended up being nothing like either of Fromm's preferred models, Fromm did come up with its name. He liked the title of the Chicago radio station WFMT's publication – Perspectives – and wanted to name the magazine Perspectives of New Music. This was accepted by the editors, ‘although it was slightly ungrammatical’, Boretz acknowledged.Footnote ⁸²

Berger came up with PNM's logo. At one of their planning meetings he suggested that they use a drawing from Stravinsky and Craft's 1959 book Conversations which Stravinsky had made as a visual representation of his latest compositions.Footnote ⁸³ In his memoirs, Berger claimed that Luigi Dallapicolla thought it a blasphemous choice, as he was unimpressed and unconvinced by Stravinsky's recent conversion to serialism (though there is no evidence in the FMF archive to support this claim).Footnote ⁸⁴

At some point during this period, Boretz wrote a memorandum to PUP explaining the ‘need, purpose, and content’ of this new sponsored project and offering it for publication. The stated rationale for the publication focused on the lack of a forum in the US ‘for the serious appraisal of the most recent and important tendencies in new music’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This periodical would be ‘on the level of the scholarly professional journals’ and ‘a medium for significant and original writings by composers and others bearing upon theoretical, historical, practical, and esthetic aspects of present-day musical literature, as well as other articles having special meaning and value to the serious professional composer’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Mendel had helped Boretz to fine-tune this proposal and ‘smooth the path of PERSPECTIVES at the P.U.P.’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Fromm later insisted that he did not like the fact that PNM had become a scholarly journal, and had never wished it to be one. Yet perhaps the scholarly aspects that Boretz did highlight were in fact what had appealed to PUP. Fromm did appreciate the prestige the press lent to the project, but his support for the Princeton seminars and PNM established the FMF as interested in funding a particular kind of composer and compositional activity: a ‘scholarly’ kind, interested in all of the accompanying modes of behaviour.

Volume 1, issue 1

Once the contract with PUP was finalized, Berger and Boretz began to select articles for the first issues, and Fromm took a step back from the magazine. Boretz wrote to Fromm about the preliminary contents of the first issue in February 1962:

In the future, Boretz wanted the magazine to be even more diverse. He had talked to a number of editors of literary magazines about how to get fresh talent, and they confirmed what he had already experienced: it required a lot of legwork. ‘One simply has to go out and uncover the good people who are not yet well known, since they do not, by and large, autonomously submit their writings to journals, but in fact tend to avoid doing so.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Consequently, Boretz told Fromm, ‘If we are not to get into a rut, using the same Princeton–Brandeis–Berkeley–Yale contributors, I believe it will be necessary to do some ferreting work. I should imagine that places like Michigan, Illinois, Penn, Cornell, etc. should prove exploitable from our point of view,’ naming other universities known for their composition programmes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Slightly over a year later, in spring 1963, the first issue of PNM was sent to readers.

The first entry in the inaugural issue was a statement by Fromm. In his essay ‘Young Composers: Perspective and Prospect’, he used the language Boretz had helped him formulate when writing his piece for Musical Quarterly. Fromm noted that each of the projects undertaken by the FMF thus far – from the Fromm Fellows at Tanglewood to the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies – had ‘been designed to be a different kind of rallying point for composers, a particular guidepost on the way toward the restoration of dignity and vitality to their profession as well as to musical culture as a whole’ – in other words, to bring composers recognition within a larger cultural field. PNM would be another. Further demonstrating his ambitious hopes for the publication, Fromm also described PNM as a project that would work to fulfil the foundation's main prerogative of ‘opening avenues of communication between composers and interested performers and listeners’.Footnote ⁹¹ His reasoning was as follows: the lack of a publication like PNM had contributed to, if not exacerbated, performers' and listeners' ignorance of living composers and, therefore, of ‘new musical phenomena’. This was but one symptom of a larger problem –‘the deepening rift between artistic and commercial values’. This had led to composers being ‘denied the recognition commensurate with the importance of [their] function’.Footnote ⁹² Fromm hoped that ‘literate people in every field’, European and American, would use PNM to engage in an intensive, continuous interchange about contemporary music. As a result, PNM would help restore composers to a central position in musical life, and would ‘succeed in bringing music closer to the center of contemporary culture’.Footnote ⁹³ Fromm then warned of the potentially dire consequences if they continued to ignore the problems he had named: ‘If we allow the line of continuity from the present mature generation of composers to the next to be broken, there may simply be no new generation to take its place, and the very future of music in America will be precarious.’ Echoing Babbitt's final sentence of ‘The Composer as Specialist’, Fromm's editorial suggested that PNM might help prevent music from ceasing ‘to evolve’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet in contrast to Babbitt, Fromm's vision for this evolution included the (re)insertion of contemporary music into the public sphere.

Next came Berger's and Boretz's editorial note. They reiterated some of Fromm's sentiments, writing that they hoped their magazine would be a forum for exchange among disparate parties:

A journal like this could help those who were ‘deeply concerned with understanding and assessing the implications of new music’ and who might need help navigating the recent rapid development of complex ideas and re-evaluation of traditional assumptions, many of which were of ‘a highly specialized nature’. They ended their editorial by underscoring that they saw this publication as one orientated around composers and their work.

The first two entries in PNM thus put forth conflicting goals. Fromm's introduction focused on how the journal would provide an open avenue of exchange between composers, performers, teachers and listeners. In contrast, Berger and Boretz planned to publish articles orientated towards a small group of composers that would focus on ‘the orderly development of thinking’ and around discussions that would help ‘evolve linguistic modes of communication’ and probe ‘as deeply as possible into fundamental issues that by their nature must be treated concretely and analytically with sophisticated methods’.Footnote ⁹⁶ These different aims – one focused on broadening communication, the other on specifying and specializing communication – were at the heart of many editorial disagreements to come. What is more, these incompatible goals were among what music department faculty members discussed when considering whether there should be a Ph.D. degree in composition, what such a degree would entail and how it might change the economy of American classical music.

According to Martin Brody, Babbitt conceived of music theory as ‘a primary source of authority’ in the field of music, and a wider subscription to and implementation of this notion can be found in the pages of PNM. For Babbitt, ‘Scientific language [was] the sole, firmly required medium of the musical cognoscenti […], a foundational discourse in an otherwise foundationless configuration of practices,’ a universal in a world otherwise marked by plurality.Footnote ⁹⁷ The type of professional writing that reflected Babbitt's and Boretz's values was writing that used scientific analytical language. Not only was this important to the kind of investigations of music these composers wanted to conduct and encourage, but also using language of this sort was a way for composers to achieve recognition as thinkers and intellectuals. Employing this discourse was an effective political tool, as well.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet what happened to Fromm's ideal open communication when composers were ensconced in the ‘mightiest of fortresses’ (i.e. the university),Footnote ⁹⁹ and when writing such specialized prose became a requirement? In the early 1960s this was a heated topic of debate, and with its first issue PNM placed itself at its centre.

Beyond the front matter

The rest of the first issue included (among others) seven articles – by Krenek, Karlheinz Stockhausen (an interesting choice, given that he was co-editor of Die Reihe), Babbitt, Carter, Shifrin (a composer who taught at UC Berkeley), Michael Steinberg (a music critic and teacher of music theory at the Manhattan School of Music) and Andrew Imbrie (a composer who had studied at Princeton with Babbitt and who taught at UC Berkeley) – that were devoted in varying degrees to ‘the relation of contemporary artists to tradition’. As the editors put it, this topic was ‘a problem that has seriously concerned composers for centuries, and that has been attacked with particular ardor in the last decade or so’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hinting at the recent mode of attack to which the editors referred, all of the contributors discussed the serial method of composition. A number of them also compared the current American and European musical scenes. Thus, whether implicitly or explicitly, almost all the authors addressed the social aspect of music production, focusing on either cognitive elements (exploring how compositional elements related to musical perception) or institutional considerations (where and by whom music is created and performed).

Many of the articles in the first issue are noteworthy because they helped define the position of PNM in the world of composition and theory: in particular, Babbitt's ‘Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium’ (pp. 49–79), John Backus's ‘A Scientific Analysis of Die Reihe’ (pp. 160–71) and Charles Rosen's ‘The Proper Study of Music’ (pp. 80–8). In Babbitt's article, he laid out his time-point system, a method by which one could correlate the ordering of the pitches of the chromatic scale with a vaguely analogous ordering of time values, thereby extending the application of the 12-note technique to the rhythmic dimension. Unlike Babbitt's system of duration rows, this system, he argued, had greater potential for coordination between the pitch and the temporal domains. The article thereby unveils one of Babbitt's most ambitious extensions of 12-note theory into the rhythmic sphere, and one that he associated with the possibilities of electronic music. Equally significantly, it was written in highly technical, scientific and metatheoretical language – another reason Babbitt's work would fit well with the idea of a Ph.D. programme in composition.

Backus's article was also written in highly technical language, as it was explicitly a ‘scientific evaluation’ of the German periodical: a physicist who studied acoustics, he had been asked to conduct this sort of review of Die Reihe on the basis of his training.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Given that fact, it was significant that Backus determined the language used in Die Reihe's articles to be needlessly ‘difficult and technical’ and ‘obscure’. Moreover, he argued, the majority of Die Reihe's authors misused technical vocabulary and employed the scientific method incorrectly.Footnote ¹⁰² Consequently, Backus described the writing in Die Reihe as ‘pseudo-scientific’, and wrote that as a whole it was a display of ‘nothing more than a mystical belief in numerology as the fundamental basis for music’.Footnote ¹⁰³ PNM, this implied, would display the opposite tendency. Verbal language, not just musical language, was important. Moreover, Backus's willingness to publish in PNM served as a stamp of approval, indicating that it was a journal in which an academic scientist thought it was worth publishing; that publishing in it might be recognized by academic administrators at his place of employment; and that PNM did, verifiably, promote the tenets of the scientific mode of enquiry.

One of the ways in which PNM did this was by publishing articles that used a rigorously theoretical approach to musical discourse – an approach that had been advocated by Babbitt since the mid-1950s and adopted by many of his pupils and colleagues. In texts such as his 1965 talk ‘Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History’, given for a lecture series sponsored by the City University of New York to inaugurate its doctoral programme in musicology, Babbitt explained his motivations for promoting a specialized discourse. Referring to the liminal position of American composers, who were not a part of mainstream culture and were also without an academic home suitable for their level of specialization, he contended that ‘one can determine that there are confusions about music’. These confusions could be understood only by looking at the way in which music is written about. As Babbitt pointed out, ‘Talk about music – particularly a brand of performative talk – largely determines what is performed and, therefore, what is heard and, therefore and necessarily, what is composed.’ Consequently,

This was because, as Babbitt explained, ‘compositions are read about before they are listened to’. From his point of view, this was why most new music was ‘often never listened to, for all that words about a composition can be evaluated only formally, logically, apart from the composition, and only upon comparison with the composition itself can they be evaluated even for mere accuracy of representation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Writing about music may be a routine means to learn about new pieces, recordings or composers, but Babbitt thought that most discourse about new music was empty, ‘undefined’, ‘meaningless’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘inconsistent’, ‘evaluative’, ‘unexamined’, ‘analytically unfounded’, non-explanatory or a matter of opinion or taste.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For instance, statements that a composition is beautiful, or that you like a piece of music because of its emotional effect, are not capable of being rationalized, tested or proven to be true or (more pertinently) false. The issue, in Babbitt's assessment, was that the ‘language system’ used in most statements about music were ‘not defined, or the statement and its negation may be differently relativized linguistically, so that conceivably they are not mutual negations but intentional and extensional overlaps’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In other words, they were vague and messy. Instead, as Boretz explained in his Ph.D. dissertation, it was necessary to specify ‘the terms on which discourse can be taken as intersubjectively intelligible’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This resulted in ‘constructive’ discourse, such as the one Babbitt prescribed, which was about more than just one's opinion or taste; it allowed one to talk about music in a way that is meaningful on his terms.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Babbitt argued that anyone who discussed music had ‘systematic obligations’ to attend to their ‘verbal presentation and discussion of music’, as he put it in a 1961 talk.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This entailed recognition ‘that there is but one kind of language, one kind of method for the verbal formulation of “concepts” and the verbal analysis of such formulations: “scientific” language and “scientific” method’.Footnote ¹¹¹ To talk about music in this way required using ‘observational’ rather than ‘theoretical’ or ‘meta-physical’ language. Assertions about music had to ‘satisfy criteria of intersubjectivity; which involve a definitional, reductional procedure’.Footnote ¹¹² This language and accompanying mode of discourse had a real criterion of correctness. One result of this was the belief that the discourse was impermeable by ideological persuasion or perversion, a powerful claim at any time, but particularly so during the cold war.

Babbitt acquired the foundational philosophies for his (scientific) mode of musical enquiry from the ‘Vienna Circle’ of logical positivist philosophers, whom he cited in his work.Footnote ¹¹³ Babbitt had been interested in logical positivism since before the Second World War, and his interest and the influence it had on his thinking about music was kindled further during and just after the war, when he was first summoned to Washington DC to work on cryptography, and then called upon to teach mathematics at Princeton.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Princeton mathematics department, which had been built into a strong research-orientated department by Henry B. Fine, was at that moment a hotbed of logical positivist enquiry.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the decade following the war, the department, which supported mathematical research without concern for its direct applicability, influenced and then endorsed Babbitt's case for the Ph.D. in music composition.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Concurrently, increasing cold-war tensions, piqued by the launch of Sputnik in 1957, underscored the importance of mathematical research and research in the other hard sciences.

As part of his metatheoretical approach, and to support the argument for the status of his profession, Babbitt argued that music composition and explanation, according to his principles, ‘actually constitute an empirical science’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The ‘pure “data”’ of any composition is ‘what is “heard”’, as Boretz explained in his Ph.D. dissertation, continuing: ‘Ultimately, it is the reasonable possibility that from this data the relationship properties embedded might be the “most favorably” inferable things that “justifies” the composer's “experiment”’ (the ‘experiment’ being the composition).Footnote ¹¹⁸ The material and the system are interrelated. In other words, a musical theory ‘should reduce to such a formal theory when uninterpreted predicates and operations are substituted for the terms and operations designating musical observables’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Babbitt's mode of composition and discourse, then, both fit into the scientific mode of enquiry.

This reframing of composition and music theory required that musicians change the sort of enquiry they conducted, as well as alter the language they used to talk about their work. Verbal formulations and methodological operations are and must be interconnected; theory should be both descriptive and prescriptive of practice. Or, as Boretz argued, ‘“Practice” is no more than what “theory” makes of it, so there is nothing distinct from the discoverable cognitive content of a given use of the phrase, “this piece”.’Footnote ¹²⁰

This may appear difficult to do with certain musics but, because of its logic and construction, the 12-note system (Babbitt argued) is a particularly penetrable and testable system; it ‘passed the “pragmatic test”’, as he put it, because of ‘the simple and demonstrably realistic perceptual assumptions of the system’.Footnote ¹²¹ Additionally, the 12-note system could be used to create what Babbitt called ‘contextual’ music: music from which one could derive laws that were applicable to all pitch (and perhaps other) parameters of the piece – laws that governed the work totally. Again, by analogy with Boretz's terms upon which discourse should be taken seriously, his description of 12-note music as contextual was also a way of asserting that the 12-note system was intersubjective and interrelational (in that all elements of a piece may be related to a single point of origin, namely the original 12-note row), and thus could be fitted into the ideal of aesthetically autonomous art.Footnote ¹²² Moreover, this is another way of saying that one could argue that all of the notes in a piece of 12-note music were unequivocally correct or incorrect, and verifiably so, without any allowance for style or taste. This was the same criterion that Babbitt and Boretz had for musical discourse and is why, in part, there was a feeling of moral fire behind using the 12-note method; it appealed to an idea that there was just one Truth (a mathematical truth: 12-note music can be considered ‘true’ because it is completely referable to its axiom) in an era of vagaries and insecurity. It also gave those who used this discourse (and PNM) a missionary motivation.

Peter Westergaard recalled that, when he was still an MFA student at Princeton, he had conversations with Babbitt about

PNM thus gave him (and his associates) a forum.Footnote ¹²⁴ Through PNM's publication of texts that used this discourse, the discourse associated with Babbitt received a far wider readership, both in the US and abroad, than it ever could have as the lingua franca of one music department.

PNM quickly became associated with this discourse, with Babbitt and therefore with Princeton (and, soon, the Ph.D. programme). This perception was reinforced by the fact that PNM was published by PUP, even though the press operated separately from the university. These associations led PNM to accrue the prestige accorded to Princeton (as well as the envy and enmity felt towards it), even if the journal was not formally related to Princeton's music department in the same way that the Journal of Music Theory was with Yale's music department.

PNM and the Ph.D.?

The other significant essays in the first issue, including Rosen's article ‘The Proper Study of Music’, as well as Joseph Kerman's response to Rosen's essay in a subsequent volume,Footnote ¹²⁵ demonstrate the competing interests involved in PNM: the Princeton music department's and wider institutional interests; Fromm's interests; and those of the editors, together and individually. Moreover, the conversation about the arguments contained within these essays represents Rosen's, Babbitt's and Kerman's interests in PNM becoming a tool for wider disciplinary and therefore institutional gains. Lurking behind Rosen's and Kerman's texts was the question of whether or not there should be doctoral degrees for composition.

Memories differ as to how the editors ended up with Rosen's text: either they asked Rosen to write something for PNM's inaugural issue, leaving the subject up to him, or Rosen told them that he wanted to contribute something. Regardless, Rosen argued in this position piece that the ‘proper study of music’ would be one dictated entirely by the interests and needs of contemporary composers. Furthermore, in institutions of higher education ‘the teaching of music should approximate more closely the teaching of mathematics’, in which the creation of new work is valued over historical work. In contrast, Rosen argued, in the current system musicologists and performers were parasites on composers (despite academic positions that would indicate otherwise), and their ignorance and lack of interest in contemporary composition threatened ‘the possibility of music's continuing to exist in anything except a mechanical form’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Music would be returned to its proper course of development, Rosen wrote, only if contemporary composition assumed a prominent role in music education.

Many read Rosen's article as a defence of the Princeton music department's creation of the Ph.D. degree in composition. In his ‘Reply’ to Rosen, Kerman even hypothesized that the editors or members of the ‘Princeton School’ put Rosen up to writing it. As evidence for his claims, Kerman cited Rosen's ‘reference to degrees for “creative work”’ as indicative of Princeton's new doctoral programme for musical composition, and the preponderance of articles in PNM's first issue by Princeton graduates. ‘If the article wasn't politically inspired,’ Kerman wrote, ‘its very innocence gives it weight: a manifesto placed in a foundation magazine by a brilliant, ostensibly neutral alumnus from outside the academy, written in a style certain to impress Committees on the Humanities.’Footnote ¹²⁷ This looked like only one thing to Kerman: propaganda on behalf of one party of a national (if not perhaps a very stirring) academic quarrel. To be sure, Kerman had possible political interests and affiliations of his own: he received his Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton and taught at the music department of the University of California, where the faculty were debating the institution of a doctoral degree in music composition and/or theory.

It was apparently not the case that the editors or composition professors on the Princeton faculty asked Rosen to write on this topic, and when Kerman sent his ‘Reply’ to the editors, they thought it would be respectful to show it to Mendel and Oliver Strunk, another musicologist on the Princeton faculty. Kerman's charges in the draft were more extreme than in the version PNM published. This early version had a subtitle – ‘Raising Questions of Guilt, Ideology, and Propriety’ – and included sentences such as:

Kerman continued in this vein:

Strunk had told the editors that he believed their publishing Rosen's article was an error, but he felt that publishing Kerman's response would be just as bad. ‘Of course Rosen's article reflected or parroted some of Milton's ideal’, Strunk wrote to Mendel, but that was not to suggest that Babbitt had instigated its writing.Footnote ¹²⁹ In May 1963, Cone spoke to Princeton's dean, J. Douglas Brown, about publishing Kerman's article. Brown told Cone that ‘he wants no public squabble involving the University’, Cone reported to Berger.Footnote ¹³⁰

The editors read Rosen's essay differently, though both found Kerman's reaction extreme. Berger remembered that the establishment of the Ph.D. at places beyond Princeton was ‘very much on our mind then’, and he had read Rosen's article in that light. Boretz was not sure that Rosen was making an argument for the Ph.D., but, as he explained to Berger, he interpreted Rosen's main point, in particular the last sentence (‘But those who wish really to study music should be taught composition in all of its contemporary forms: we may then hope and pray that the majority will never become composers’Footnote ¹³¹), as an argument that ‘everybody needs to hear music from a composer's point of view’. As to Rosen's motivations, in Boretz's estimation, he was ‘enough of a freelance provocateur to stir up the music-academic establishment entirely on his own account rather than for our benefit’.Footnote ¹³²

Boretz was attracted to Rosen's essay because it was ‘heavy’ and ‘polemical’, and felt that publishing an article that elicited a strong reaction was a good thing for PNM. ‘There were seriously held positions developing in the world that were not widely aired nor generally known or adequately articulated that we, uniquely, could provide an ample forum for,’ Boretz said. ‘And we unquestionably wanted to be a place where somebody like Charles Rosen could say what he thought.’Footnote ¹³³ This was the position the editors affirmed in the lengthy footnote that accompanied Kerman's ‘Reply’; they reminded their readers of the ‘urgent request’ they made to them in their first editorial: to ‘question ideas they find disturbing or provocative […], challenge what they read, and respond with […] contributions stimulated by [ideas and issues] they encounter here’.Footnote ¹³⁴

One reason why Boretz and Berger read Rosen's essay in different ways was that they had different opinions about the Ph.D. in composition and PNM's relationship to the degree. Berger was quick to see the connections between the two, although he did not think that PNM ‘explicitly’ supported the Ph.D. Rather, ‘PNM broached a number of subjects that would be of interest to those establishing the new programs.’ He also thought that the relationship between the Ph.D. and PNM was articulated in their first editorial note, in which he felt they had made clear that ‘PNM would be a vehicle for the learned articles that would be the university composer's response to the administration's demand for the kind of articles faculty members in most fields write to get academic advancement’.Footnote ¹³⁵ To be sure, what they proposed to publish in PNM – ‘literature that genuinely comes to grip with fundamental contemporary issues’, ‘extensive, detailed information, often of a highly specialized nature’, ‘subjects that lend themselves to such intensive treatment’, ‘responsible opposition’ and a new form of writing for composers – were means by which their profession could adapt to the publication- and research-based value system of universities.Footnote ¹³⁶ Berger's views on this may have been informed by personal experience: he was once approached by a university that was looking to hire a composer, but in order to be accepted by a university committee he had to prove that he had ‘published scholarly articles with footnotes’.Footnote ¹³⁷

Boretz said that he did not originally hope that his magazine would support the establishment of the Ph.D., yet his motivation to start a publication was related to the position of composers in universities:

Boretz added that the experience of trying to establish the magazine at UCLA strengthened his desire to do something to counter this ‘attitude’ towards composers. That was ‘really the first time that I ran head on with a musicologist saying, “we can't publish this magazine […] edited by a composer, because these people are not intellectuals, and they shouldn't be treated as respected, academic intellectuals”’.Footnote ¹³⁹ As a result of this experience, Boretz hoped that PNM would help earn composers respect within institutions. This was also among the reasons his colleagues pushed for the Ph.D.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The Rosen–Kerman debate voiced publicly the ideas that were expressed behind closed doors at UCLA, but now PNM's editors got to have a say.

PNM soon became a convenient organ for the discourse Babbitt and Boretz promoted and for the newly minted academic composer. This was a particularly important thing to have, because after Princeton established a Ph.D. programme in composition, other universities followed suit. Princeton was their model, and so was using this discourse in their writing. As Babbitt and Boretz argued, discourse can and does influence how music is perceived and thought about. Discourse is also a critical apparatus. It is only a powerful force, however, if more than a specialized clutch of composers – and performers and listeners, too – pay attention to it. PNM began to be regarded as the writ of fearsome theory, handed down twice a year. Those who were on the editorial board or who had their articles published in PNM were seen as a selective club, and it was a huge boon to anyone's academic career to have their work published in the journal. Using this intimidating and complex discourse paid off, then, as it performed and affirmed a certain power and prestige. One was more likely to be recognized by the established bodies of power and prestige (represented in and by PNM), and this recognition would increase one's own index of the same.

Amid or behind all of this activity was Fromm, an interesting hybrid in that he acted as a patron inside and outside the university. In the FMF's mission statement, Fromm explained that his foundation's goal was to position the composer at the centre of cultural life and to repair the composer's status as a ‘professional without a profession’. Through some of his aid, Fromm cultivated a different reality for composers. By funding the Princeton seminar and PNM, and by commissioning particular composers, Fromm supported music and a discourse about music that helped to create a kind of professional composer who would be paid to teach in universities and to produce work in forms recognized by universities, and who would as a result produce a new institutional foundation for American compositional practice. One might say that Fromm achieved one of his goals: to have composers employed as professionals. However, many of the effects of composers earning their support from the academy ran counter to Fromm's stated mission. This is demonstrated in a letter Fromm wrote to Foss in 1963, praising him for his decision to leave academia. ‘You made a good and courageous decision,’ Fromm told him, perhaps self-consciously contradicting Babbitt. ‘Composers belong in the mainstream of musical life and not in the ivory towers of universities. As conductor you will function at the center of musical activities and be able to influence and inspire the direction of public taste.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ But if Fromm understood that he and the editors thought differently about PNM and its relationship to the Ph.D., he did not voice his thoughts until later on, and not very effectively.

Fromm's disquiet amplified as people within the contemporary music scene shared with him their criticisms of the journal. For example, his friend John Garvey, a member of the Walden Quartet who worked in the University of Illinois School of Music, had expressed concern to Fromm that the FMF and PNM might come to represent only one kind of composition or point of view. Fromm sought to correct this impression.

But who were the ‘we’ here? On behalf of which institution was he speaking – the FMF or PNM ? The blurred boundaries between the two, at least in the way they figured in Fromm's mind, caused him anxiety and frustration for the following decade.

Fromm had more than just a monetary investment in PNM. He had invested his and his foundation's reputation, too, he felt. Consequently, he was more than willing to appease PNM's critics while also trying to live up to their collective intent to be ‘non-sectarian’ (and simultaneously fulfilling the goals he put forth in his editorial). ‘Non-sectarian’ did not mean uncontroversial, but neither did it imply mediocre quality. ‘It would be moral cowardice for us to respond simply by throwing our doors open indiscriminately, in the name of “open-mindedness”, which usually signifies “no-mindedness” or simple weakness,’ Fromm told Garvey. At PNM, he continued,

At the same time as he defended his editors to Garvey, Fromm felt increasingly conflicted about the publication. As PNM became known for publishing certain kinds of articles by certain kinds of composers, the FMF established a reputation for being interested in funding a certain kind of project and a certain kind of composer, whereas Fromm wanted the FMF to support a diversity of styles (just as he wanted PNM to publish articles that demonstrated diverse points of view).

Initially, Fromm was dazzled by the prestige of Princeton University, but over time he developed an increasingly uncomfortable relationship with academia. With the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and then with the FMF's sponsorship of PNM, Fromm and his foundation soon were linked to Babbitt and to academia in the public eye. Slowly Fromm realized that much of Babbitt's work – like the rigorously scientific language in which Babbitt's and his followers' ideas were couched – often came across as provocative, arrogant or elitist invective, and therefore ran counter to his foundation's mission.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Fromm became more active in the editing of the second issue, instructing the editors to omit certain articles they had planned to publish (another by Babbitt) and commissioning articles. He thereby worked actively to shape the journal to live up to his vision. One of the reasons his foundation continued to fund the journal was its contract with PUP, but Fromm also did not want to court controversy: it was not in the FMF's interest to appear to be mercurial or look like it might break a promise to fund a project. He did not want to ‘spend’ the prestige he had accrued, so to speak, but was cautious of his prestige losing value. Although he worried that publishing a journal with such a narrow focus might harm his foundation's reputation, he was shrewd enough to see that the FMF's involvement with PNM helped make the foundation's existence known to all of the journal's readers. Despite his continual disappointment in the journal's contents (which he did believe was jargon-filled, ‘sectarian’ and too full of ‘science in music’), he kept funding it, believing that the power of the purse would eventually yield enough influence. It never did.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

While Berger, Boretz, Fromm and the other men involved in PNM were embodying and acting out elements of generalized ideologies of post-war American modernism, we can see in what I have just described the enacted contradictions which are necessarily a part of an institutionalizing project such as this one. PNM as a medium was selling itself as an audience-broadening instrument that would publish diverse viewpoints (and was even conceived of as such by some of its creators); Fromm was looking to publish a prestigious artefact of intellectual or well-known elite culture; Boretz was looking for a community; Babbitt was promoting a ‘special’ music; Berger was, in a sense, the prototypical university man (and had been ensconced in such an institution for the longest). Their interests were different, but there were overlaps. Kerman's response to Rosen had a substantial impact in terms of polarizing the larger discussion within which these men were positioning their stakes; instead of the editors being seen for their internal differences, PNM was becoming known as a force for cliquishness and insularity, as it gave institutional respectability and textual permanence to a disparate group of people and their anything-but-mainstream tastes and impulses. A certain segment of composers who published in and read PNM now had an official forum and a place for it to happen, with all of the attendant legitimization and recognition that that entailed, positioning them as representative of a group larger and more broadly based than they actually were. They were ‘making and writing music history’, as Boretz said,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ albeit not in the way Fromm had wanted. Fromm, then, through his foundation, achieved all of these powerful ‘effects’, even if hardly any of them were what he intended. Yet even as Fromm threw up his hands in frustration with the prohibitive technical language used by the authors published in PNM, he did not connect these failures to the attitudes that he upheld and fostered. And so PNM continued and developed, promoting a certain type of music and musical discourse, and thus contributing to their symbolic and felt – if not empirically verifiable – dominance over the American contemporary music scene.