Interview of Charles Seeger

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1966

TUSLER

Dr. Seeger, for our first session today, would you like to start by giving some of the basic data about where and when you were born, some of your family background?

SEEGER

I was born on December 14, 1886 in a little house on the Calle de Buena Vista in Mexico City. My father was the son of a doctor and had been brought up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His grandfather was a doctor and had the same name as my father and myself-- Charles Louis Seeger, as it's translated into English, or Karl Ludwig Seeger, as it was brought to the United States by old Dr. Seeger in the 1780's. There was a strong tradition of "family." When I was a child, German education, German intellectual life, German music, German philosophy, literature and poetry, were very highly regarded, so that the feeling of having been part of a line of four Charles Seegers always figured rather strongly in my life. Old Dr. Seeger, who came here shortly after the American Revolution, came from a modest family in southern Germany. He had the advantage of schooling at the famous Karlschule, run by the autocratic Duke Karl Eugen of Wurttemberg at Stuttgart. Dr. Seeger was a contemporary of Schiller who ran away from the school with the text of Die Raeuber in his satchel. The school was for the children of the courtiers and retainers of the Duke, and the principal was a certain Georg von Seeger- I suppose my modest great-grandfather got into the school because he was some kind of relation to the director--a von Seeger. At any rate, the legend in the family was that we were descended from a knight who took part in one of the Crusades. These genealogies were really quite fancy. The name of the old knight was given as Gehardns von Seeg. And then there are five hundred years before another Seeger ( 1558-l664) was mentioned, [laughter] What happened in those five hundred years might be almost anybody's guess. At any rate, my father, brought up in Springfield, Massachusetts, his father dying when he was fairly young and his mother being left with only a small income, had to make his own way from the time he was sixteen. He graduated at the top of his class in high school. Some wealthy men came to his mother and said they thought he had great promise and would be glad to send him through Harvard College and the Law School. His mother drew herself up very proudly and said, "Seegers do not accept charity." So my father went to work in a bank. And as he watched the other men in the bank and more or less thought out what would be the possibilities of advancement, he realized that he would have to stay there until he was about fifty, when everybody else had died off, and then he could be president. [laughter] This didn't appeal to him, so that after he became engaged to my mother, that is, when he was about twenty-three, he decided he would strike out for himself. Being somewhat romantically inclined, he chose Mexico City. He went down there and he started in, partly in newspaper work and in railroad [work] and other things he could find; and he wound up three years later having founded the Seeger and Guernsey Company, an exporting and importing company between the United States and Mexico. So, after he was married to my mother, they went to Mexico City and I was born, as I say, in the little house on Calle de Buena Vista, which is now raised and the whole street's been changed in its shape. The arrangement was that my father's partner, Guernsey, would handle the Mexican end of things, and Father would take my mother and me to New York and handle the New York end. So this was done, and I left Mexico at the age of six months. I've often thought that the descent from the nearly eight thousand feet altitude of Mexico City to sea level by train overnight might have been the cause of my later deafness. I had a very healthy childhood. Father moved from New York City, where my brother Alan was born, in 1888 or 1889, to Staten Island where he rented a nice old house. My sister was born there three years after my birth. The ridge on Staten Island had a few of the old houses still standing on it, but it was mostly cut up into small city lots. Our lot was about four acres. We had a barn and a chicken yard and about an acre of vegetable garden, fruit trees, and berries, one or two cows, one or two horses depending upon need; we even gathered hay for feeding the horses and cows. It was an idyllic childhood. Father had a conviction that when he returned from business, business was out of sight and he would live with his family. Mother took care of us during the day with the aid of three or four servants. Everything went very smoothly until I was put into nursery school, or kindergarten as they called it in those days. I was flabbergasted by the experience, completely tongue-tied. They couldn't get a word out of me till finally at the end of one day, when I'd said nothing and there was a silence, I came out with the statement, "I have a very fine father in my house." [laughter] Mother and Father were deeply in love with each other and impressed on all of us children the overriding value of love. Apparently, love between people was a very real thing. There was a strange kind of a shadow or projection of it which was called God. All of us had very hazy ideas of what was meant by God . At one time my brother, who was in the habit of asking embarrassing questions, approached my mother and said, "Mother, I know all about religion; now tell me something about God." Well, Mother having been brought up, and Father too, as Unitarians-- that is, belonging to a church that was a kind of glorified lecture bureau, had the vaguest idea of what they meant by God. In fact, neither Mother or Father could give you the slightest idea of what under the sun God was, unless it was love. The atmosphere was very close in the family, and until we went to school there were no contacts outside. Visitors would come to the house and the children were, of course, always involved. When I finally went to school there was quite a break in my life 3 from then on I remember things very well. I can go back to my third year for a famous Christmas when my sister was born, and I remember her as a little pink rosebud in the arms of my mother, who I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. And [I remember] my getting a little train of wooden cars, railroad cars, for Christmas. Before that, my only memory is of a nightmare. This nightmare has always taken a very important place in my life. It must have been some time when I was very young. My mother and father, brought up as they were in New England and having lived most of their lives in small cities like Springfield, Massachusetts (my mother was brought up part of her teenage years in Cincinnati, Ohio), did not have anything like a world outlook. It was quite provincial, quite restricted to the personalities of their friends and the books they read, which were mostly novels. For some unknown reason. Father became interested in astronomy when I was very little. I remember him once, walking through the hall with his hands flung above his head, saying, "Oh, Elsie, astronomy, astronomy! " They had some books on astronomy, and binoculars, and they used to look at the heavens through these binoculars and try to learn something about the planets and the stars. This impressed me enormously, and when they told me about these huge bodies tearing through space and sometimes colliding, and these fiery planets, it made a very deep impression on me, such a deep impression that I used to have a nightmare. It came several times, and this was the nightmare: there was a beautiful blue sky with great pink and peach-colored orbs in it, and it was my terrible responsibility to keep them from collision or destruction in some way, with my own hands. I would wake up screaming because I couldn't keep them from colliding. The meaning of this in my own thinking and feeling was never clear to me until I read my first Freud, which was much later in Berkeley, California when I was already twenty-six. Then suddenly I realized I had been a breastfed baby for a full nine months, and the meaning of the situation immediately became perfectly clear. Now, the significance of this dream is that from a very early age my mind was turned outward into cosmological speculations and cosmological emotions. They were almost entirely individual for the first, oh, sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years of my life. I was unaware that anybody else had this desire to speculate on the relations of the largest things to the smallest things, as I did. I felt that I was very unusual in that respect and felt a little bit perhaps apart from the rest of my family and my friends, because these things occupied a lot of my thinking and daydreaming time. The astronomy enthusiasm of my parents faded away presently into other things, but with me it stayed on. What other things I should say of this early childhood in connection with this particular story is something of a problem for me at this moment. Father was definitely of an intellectual type, but he never had intellectual training. He was an all-around artistic personality. He could sketch very well. He played the piano and the organ. He composed some pretty little songs that I used to sing when I was a small child. He could write a very respectable sonnet. He could even write poetry in French, and he was very adept at languages. He read a great deal and was one of the most expert spellers that I ever knew--you couldn't stump him. My mother was exactly the opposite. If you had a letter from her it had no punctuation, no sentence formation, no paragraphs, no capitals except in strange places--and the spelling was something unbelievable. The combination of this almost completely uneducated mother, and a father who was born to go through the full academic routine and emerge with a Ph.D., was quite fascinating. He was very patient with her and made her laugh at her own mistakes, but nothing could shake her. Her own way of talking and writing was her own way--until the children grew up; and when the children grew up and began to spell properly and make sentences hang together and paragraphs that were paragraphs, she [laughter] became conscience-stricken, went to school with herself. so to speak, and improved her writing very much, as a little autobiography that she wrote later attests. It's quite a charming piece of literary style, although not what you'd call an educated literary style.

TUSLER

May I ask you what her name was and something about her background?

SEEGER

My mother's name was Elsie Simmons Adams. Simmonses, and Adamses, and Robinsons and Parsons and Homans and Thwings and Simpsons and Lincolns and Fosdicks and Fosters, and finally Elder Brewster, who came over in the Mayflower , make up her genealogical table. On my father's side, there are an equal number of Parsons, Whites, Pomeroys, Ashleys, Clarks, Kings, and others, but so far as we know, they don't go back quite to the Mayflower era. Mother was Bostonian practically entirely, and very Bostonian. Father was mixed, the Bostonian end of Springfield, plus the quarter German. Now, let's see, where did I get off on the genealogical end of things?

TUSLER

You were speaking about your mother and the autobiography that she wrote.

SEEGER

Oh, yes. Evenings were practically always spent with the mother and the father. Both my sister, three years younger, and my brother, a year and a half younger, were very bright children, and I think if we were to rank the three of us according to ordinary scholastic standards they would have been about on my age level, although they were younger than I. Both of them took to schooling--I didn't.

TUSLER

Why was that?

SEEGER

I don't really know why. I think it's because I was naturally rebellious and my bent was to music. I did not like to read. I was able to pass my examinations with very little trouble, and therefore I did practically no studying. I'd just leave it to the last minute, look over the books and squeeze by, sometimes with a fairly high mark, I'm ashamed to say. But my brother and sister went into schooling very seriously and got nothing but the highest grades. I got an occasional A, some B's or C's, and didn't give a hang. In one of the early days in school, they told us we were going to be able to study music. This was in the third grade and I was delighted--now I'd have a chance to study music. They gave us a book. I remember we sang the songs that were in the book with the teacher's help, and I said to the teacher, "But this is not good music." I've forgotten what kind of an argument followed, but I refused to ever sing again out of the book [laughter] and, of course, got away with it. Things went along that way. I was perhaps the intellectual laggard, after my father, my brother and my sister, I could always shut their mouths by going to the piano and they liked that very much and, of course, I liked that. And so I kept my status. When I was about seven. Mother and Father decided that I should have piano lessons, so they brought in a little piano teacher and she gave me some finger exercises and some little pieces. But here again I said, "But this isn't good music, scales aren't music." I refused to play them. So she disappeared, and a so-called better teacher came in--and the same thing happened. She finally persuaded me to play a piece called The Trumpeter' s Serenade by some imitator of Haydn; I thought it was an awful piece but I did want to please my father, so I played it. But I finally decided that I never would play it again, so she was sent off and no more efforts were made. My father played the piano in an only semi-taught way; he was very enthusiastic about Wagner's operas which had just been published in piano arrangement, so almost every night I remember going to sleep hearing the strains of The Ring and Tristan coming up from below. I used to have horrible earaches which they never did anything about except to pour laudanum in my ear and give me a hot water bag. These led to headaches, so that I would be in perfect agony in my bed and beg my father just to play more Wagner and then I could go to sleep, which I always did by the time he stopped playing. So I had a feeling of what music was. He also played very charming Mexican popular music, the danzas of those days, pieces that he had the music for, some of them, and also some that he had heard a band play and would come home and play by ear. Presently I was playing them by ear also. I did a certain amount of pretending at composition, but didn't take it too seriously. Things floated along musically until I was about twelve. I could play a little bit better and a little bit better just by myself, when my father bought some simple duets--Haydn, Mozart, Schubert--and then my music education really began. Every night I would wait for him to come home so that we could play a duet. We counted furiously, one, two, three, four, [laughter] one, two, three, four, 30 as to keep together, and the rest of the family would chime in sometimes, counting, just to make fun of us. [laughter] The general atmosphere was of a very tightly knit family in which example was the main way of teaching. You did what Father did, or the daughter did what Mother did. People who did anything else were not doing the right thing. There was no undue family pride, but the general feeling was that the world was composed of three classes of people: the Seegers, the friends of the Seegers, and the rest of the world. It was virtually a hierarchy of nobility. Neither Mother or Father ever defined this patented nobility in what you would call practical terms and would have been the first to deny it. It had nothing to do with wealth, nothing to do with what was called "the Four Hundred" in New York at that time or with what we would never call socialite distinction. It was a nobility that was completely founded on a certain moral-intellectual-emotional integrity. There were simply things that Seegers did not do; there were things that other people could do and the Seegers would tolerate them, and things that other people could do that the Seegers did not tolerate and did not approve of. It wasn't codified in any sense like that, but it was simply a matter of example. The example had in it the ingredient of free will. I remember one time (the gang always met in our barn and in fair weather spread out all over the place), and one day, my mother leaned out of the second-story window and said to our friends the Parmelee boys, "You boys go home and don't you ever come on our place again. We don't allow such language." I've forgotten what the language was; it was mild, nothing like the four-letter words which we're now so accustomed to, unless perhaps there might be a darn in it, or maybe a damn; but I don't remember it. We decided that that was unjust. So the next day we met at the Parmelees' house, and the next day after that at the Parmelees' house. Mother saw she had made a mistake, and she fixed it up with Mr. and Mrs. Parmelee so that their boys were allowed to come back on the place. [laughter] The general reading matter of children in those days was, of course, fairy tales, and we were chuck full of fairy tales. Of course, the fairy tales of those days more or less deified women unless they were witches; and men were of various kinds. This morality extended itself to our relations with all outside. For my sister, I suppose, all men were shining knights in armor, or at least fairy princes on horses that could fly through the sky. For the boys, women were angels. This attitude colored our relationship with the girls in our classes, which was one of utmost reverence and chivalry. The boys were called by the nicknames of their "girl," and the girls were called by the name of their "boy." I remember my brother was very faithful to a girl two classes ahead of him, Adeline Trask. She was called Addie and she had a steady friend who was called Addie, and my brother was called "Little Addle." I didn't like this very much. I felt it was an intrusion on my privacy, so I refused to divulge the name of my flame, Nina Perry. Therefore my nickname became "Nobody." My sister got around the same compunction by changing her flame so often that people gave up. When anyone dared call her by the name of any of her supposed boyfriends, she said, "Oh, no, that's old. That was yesterday. Today it's different." They said, "Who is he?" "I won't tell." Well, it would be found out, or she'd name somebody; I remember one day she named a boy that we all thought was a perfect dumb-head. [laughter] I think now, come to think of it, that's why we stopped calling her by the boy' s name . At any rate, this sort of thing went on and on and the relationships were very, very distant. One went to dancing school and one had to hold one's girl's hand and tentatively put one's right hand around her waist. It was a rather embarrassing and not very interesting discipline which we really didn't take to. The main thing that I take from my childhood on Staten Island in the way of things which influenced my later life were the evenings with the family when we would play games, sometimes card games, sometimes other games like lotto and dominoes , but increasingly anagrams, which increased our vocabulary and helped us with our spelling. Then, of course, there were the duets on the piano and a little play that my mother put on once in which we acted out French folksongs. Sur le Pont d ' Avig-non was an actual plank laid across two boxes with a blue silk river running underneath with some fresh smelts on it. That tight family life endured until the family was broken up later on by the children going off to boarding school. It led to an increased amount of reading. I should say something about moving away from Staten Island. The family realized that Staten Island was a suburb, that the school was a suburban school while it was a good school it wasn't an especially good one, and Father wanted his children to have the best schooling available. So we moved to an apartment in New York, 58th Street and 7th Avenue, to be near the park for afternoon exercise. My sister went down to the Brearly School on 44th Street, and my brother and I went to the Horace Mann School up near Columbia, which was very highly admired in those days, and later to the Cutler School between 5th and Madison Avenues on 50th Street. In those two years, moving to a new place, meeting city children for the first time, not being able to run loose around a four-acre yard, and being somewhat constrained in Central Park forced the family to consolidate still more. We started a family magazine to which we each contributed, and named it after the large religious painting which my father had brought from Mexico of some saint. I've forgotten what saint it was now, but at any rate, we called it The Prophet . It came out every month and we all took part in it. Father editing it and reading it at a gathering on a Sunday afternoon. Father began to have business troubles. He couldn't collect money that was owed him in Mexico and his creditors began to crowd him in New York. Finally he went to Mexico to try to collect a debt for installation of a large sugar factory in the temperate clime of Mexico. He went, and was driven by stagecoach for two days and received by the debtor with open arms in his magnificent rancho, hacienda as they called it in Mexico; and after a good dinner, and leaving the ladies, they would settle down to talk business. Father approached the matter of the debt, and the debtor said, "You know, Senor Seeger, I like you very much. I think you're a splendid person, but I'm not going to pay." So Father said, "Then, of course, I'll have to go to law." He said, "Don't do it. You'll just waste your money." And Father said, "Why?" "One of my brothers is governor of the state. My cousin is judge of the Supreme Court; all lawyers are in my pay. You couldn't get to first base." They started bankruptcy proceedings on him before he could get back. It was very simple. He stood up before the judge and said, "My debts are such and such. I agree to pay them all back with interest and nobody need worry." His creditors trusted him and he started off again. By this time, his partner in Mexico had more or less gotten the firm into this trouble. So Father took over the Mexican end and gave up the New York end. We moved into a small apartment in Mexico City, but with a private tutor and enough servants. Father kept up his importing business, supplying sugar machinery, the small railroads, tracks and engines and cars, that had to haul the cane to the sugar mills, and began to import automobiles from France, Germany, England, Italy and the United States. Within two years we were back to our accustomed way of living and bought a beautiful house. I remember my mother's first automobile. It was an open Victoria type with a high front seat like the old coachmen's, and she fitted [the chauffeur] out with a top hat, as coachmen were fitted out in those days. We finally laughed her out of it and Father got him a chauffeur's cap. [laughter] The first tutor did an excellent job with us--he made us like to study. By this time our evenings with my father had reached the reading of poetry, and for the first time I began to read books. The poetry was Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the other romantic poets and finally on back to the Cavalier poets and to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser; and then finally to the European poets, at that time always in translation; so that intellectual life really began at that time when I was fourteen to sixteen, in Mexico. The fairy tales led right into Keats and Shelley. The Mexican country and our exploiations into it were identified with Shelley's poetry, and the whole atmosphere was raised to a level of intense excitement-- intellectual, emotional and artistic . Expeditions were made into the country to see the old churches and old buildings which we all sketched and took photographs of. We would go down to the thieves' market and buy antiques of various kinds, always hoping to find a first printing of Don Quixote , for instance, which we never did, although I believe one was found in the thieves' market. We found. however, many old books. Then it turned out that my father had a very warm friend in an old Catholic priest who was called Padre Marin who had a large library of old books . Padre Marin was becoming ill and old and he was willing to sell some of these books. So of a Sunday afternoon we would all go over to Padre Marin's, and we would take our pocket money to buy books. Each one of us children had a collection of Elzevirs, especially the Little Republic series, about three and a half inches high, and that led us into studying the history of printing and learning about the great printers of early days. So our eyes were out for Elzevirs and Alduses and Plantins, and hoping always for an incunabulum. My brother and I went to boarding school in 1904 when I was sixteen. It was a small Unitarian boarding school in Tarrytown, New York. They didn't have much of a football team, but they had had correspondence with my mother who said she had two fine great big boys, and they were looking forward to us as candidates for their small team. When we arrived, you should have seen the faces of the other boys, several of them twice as large as we were at our ages. I remember I weighed a hundred pounds when I was sixteen and my brother something like seventy-five when he was fourteen and a half. At any rate, we had brought with us the things that we'd picked up in Mexico: a matador's sword and some banderillas from the bullfight ring, a little wrought-iron flagellation chain which we'd picked up, I think, in the thieves' market, and odds and ends of things of that sort--Mexican pottery, serapes and some Mexican embroidery--and large shelf-fulls of the Latin and Greek classics published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The school didn't know quite what to make out of these people. Alan, my brother, was a brilliant student and I always managed to squeeze through the examinations with a fairly good mark. We went back to Mexico in summers and made further explorations of the valley. I think I knew almost every footpath in it, either by foot or by bicycle, by automobile or horseback, or burro-back which was the only way you could go to some places.

TUSLER

In what year had you originally gone to Mexico?

SEEGER

1900. We had been back once when I was six years old, and just as we landed at Vera Cruz, a typhus epidemic broke out in Mexico Clty--Father thought it would be all right for him to be there, but we'd better not go up. So we spent several months in Puebla, a beautiful city and, in those days, an almost eighteenth-century colonial town with a very beautiful cathedral. The romance of the Mediterranean civilizations got into our blood at least my brother's and my blood. I think my sister didn't take to it quite so seriously, but all my life Keats "0 for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim. And purple-stained mouth," was just all over the Mexican landscape. There was an identification of the romantic poets, Mexico, and the great learning of Europe, southern Europe especially, that laid hold of us and dominated our lives. My life was amplified by the music of northern Europe which I first came to know --Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and later Brahms, and then gradually pushing the things back to Bach, and so forth. But my brother was definitely a Romance language man. It's impossible for me to detach the important things in my life from these two years in Mexico, 1902 to 1904, when I was fourteen to sixteen, and in the six summers going back, mostly by sea, sometimes taking friends with us from school or college, until I graduated from college in 1908. The world was one enormous universe of gorgeous experiences and gorgeous opportunities which you couldn't define because you couldn't see how on Earth you'd ever come to grips with the situation. It was a hang-over of that nightmare that I spoke of, where you reached out and tried with every ounce of energy and determination you had to reach one of these beautiful planets and move it just a little bit so that it wouldn't do whatever was awful that it was going to do, and you couldn't reach it, and then you woke up with a crash. I remember [this] even up to the time I graduated from school and was slated to go to college. My mother had always wanted me to go to Harvard. I didn't want to go to college; you had to study there and I didn't want to study. I wanted to live. I couldn't see that going into my father's business was living, and college was the only other alternative that seemed possible to me. It was either going [to college or] to work in my father's business, and my mother would have wept unceasingly until I ended up going to college. But college wasn't anything. It was a bore. I didn't particularly care for the people who were going to college or the things they had in their minds. My school friends were nice, they were nice friends, they were nice boys, but they weren't interested in what I was interested in. They had nothing to do with these beautiful peach-colored orbs or with the Milky Way or the thick stars or the planets or the beautiful scenery of Mexico or nice perfumes and flowers and other things that were much nearer and very nice, such as the smell of a newly cut lawn. These boys weren't interested in that. All they were interested in was going out and making money. So going to college didn't mean anything to me. I said, "Well, if it's the only thing I can do, I'll go. I suppose I'll have to put up with it." So I left, finally, for college, feeling pretty much cut loose from anything that I had known up to that time. When I opened the catalog, I discovered there was a Department of Music. I remember going around to old Holden Chapel, which was the place where the Music Department wa,s lodged in those days, a single little room about 30 by 40 feet, and sitting down there poring over the catalog deciding what I'd take. There was a rather nice boy next to me, and we got to talking. I said, "I'm going to take every course there is," and he said, "So am I." So we became good friends, and we went through practically everything except the History of Music, which I didn't take because it was talking about music and I thought that was a ridiculous thing to do. If you wanted to make music, that was all right; if you wanted to talk about it, well, that was sort of fun, it didn't make much difference; but to get together and talk about it seriously, that was just stupid ; only people who weren't musicians did that. Well, that began to mean that life was [worth] living again, and the first thing, of course. I thought of was putting to music some of the beautiful poems that I had been reading.

TUSLER

What had been your musical education after you had stopped taking piano lessons?

SEEGER

Nothing. I just played the piano every day, as much as I had time for, and played the duets with my father, and that was the end of it. And, of course, listened to the popular music of Mexico and played a lot of it by ear.

TUSLER

But no formal training during those years?

SEEGER

No formal training. I had a good voice, and I had always sung with my mother. Mother had a way of putting us to bed, even when we were little children, by singing to us. She had a nice voice and, while she was brought up by a nurse who sang her all "the old bloody ballads," as Mother said, those things by the time Mother became a young lady were not considered quite comme il faut . So she reformed herself and, being very pretty and having plenty of beaus and many of them singing popular songs of the time, she learned the popular songs and they used to sing them together at various sentimental moments. I should perhaps say a word about my mother. I've spoken mostly about my father. Her mother died shortly after she was born, and her father seemed to bear some kind of a grudge against the little girl for having been the cause of his wife's death. I don't know--I can't think of any other reason for his behaving as he did. He put her out immediately with a nurse and an aunt of hers, and practically never saw her. When he did see her, they'd be talking together for a little while when he'd suddenly get up and walk out and not come back until she'd gone to sleep. So she didn't see much of him. She had a wealthy grandfather who brought her up in a big house in Roxbury (her ancestors were mostly shipping merchants and ministers and people like that), and she had an uncle who was quite a wealthy man. They always said, "Now, Elsie, you needn't worry--when you grow up you'll inherit plenty of money from us." Well, the money all vanished. The uncle gave his eight hundred thousand dollars to a seamen's institute, and I think the grandfather's estate was pretty much distributed among impossible inheritors. She was left with a small fortune which gave her about twelve hundred dollars a year. Well, twelve hundred dollars a year in the 1870's, the l880's, was a very handsome income, equivalent I suppose to eight or ten thousand now. So mother was always a favorite child, and when she came to be a teenager in Cincinnati she was put in the best school there. There she met William Taft, who was later president, and the Hollisters, and Nicholas Longworth who married Alice Roosevelt. She met all the famous and wealthy people in Cincinnati. Mother had one very peculiar, I won't say habit, but disposition: she had many warm friends but the ones that she talked about were all wealthy. Her warm friends [who] were not wealthy--well, they were friends, but they weren't so much in evidence and they weren't talked about. I think this was quite unconscious on Mother's part. If anybody had said to her, "Elsie, you seem to only speak of your friends who are wealthy," she would have been shocked. But the fact is that she definitely was brought up with a small independent income, knew people who had small and large independent incomes, and always expected my father to have a large independent income. My father, on the other hand, when he got enough money to support a family with the requisite number of servants, send them to good schools and live in a nice house, then he would lay off. He didn't want to make a lot of money; he wanted just enough to be a gentleman as he saw a gentleman should be: that is, someone who would read books, be able to draw, paint, play music, and do as he wished. He never made the millions, but he always made enough to keep Mother well supplied with domestic service. So that was the situation. Well, when I got loose on my own, that kind of an atmosphere very naturally clung to me. My friends in college were all well-to-do boys, all with independent incomes whose families didn't have to work unless they wanted to. I went around with others who either had inherited or would inherit a great deal of money, and the general atmosphere when I was in boarding school and when I was in college was that the Seeger hierarchy of nobility was extended. The Seegers were still unique, but I discovered that there were a great many people in the world who could be friends of the Seegers: that is, they were well brought up, they were well educated, they were not dissipated, and they all had enough money to live on and to live very well on. When I went to visit in their houses I was astonished to find out that they lived even better than we lived at home instead of having a house of "size A," they would have a "size 2-A," "3-A," and so forth. [laughter] But this all just happened, and it was quite in keeping with my father's political philosophy, which I had im.bibed from early days, that about ten percent of humanity were intelligent, worthy of living. Another twenty percent could serve as lieutenants in keeping the vast unwashed, uneducated, hopeless seventy percent of humanity just from going wild. Of course, the Seegers were members of the ten percent and superior in every way to then, because that ten percent had mostly to spend its time making money and governing countries, being generals in wars and being workers who just worked all the time. They weren't human beings, really; they were educated, they were nice people and you wanted to have full consideration of them; but they worked all the time, and the ambition of a gentleman was not to work all the time but to work when it was necessary and then live a human life, which meant music, painting, drawing, art, poetry and civilized life. You can see how this sort of a bringing up would create a first-rate snob, which was what I was at Harvard, and for several years afterward. I was so much of a snob that I wouldn't even consider what was ordinarily called Harvard snobbery. I pretended to look down on it, the boys that belonged to the fashionable clubs and had their own automobiles and gave dinners at the most expensive restaurants, and that sort of thing. I felt that they were a little bit low. With my friends, we more or less began to consolidate ourselves in the real top-notch snobbery of Harvard and became recognized as the "intellectual snobs." Well, you can imagine that this whole trend from a rather modest small-town beginning, my father going to work at sixteen and my mother marrying a poor young man who was just starting off making his own living, gradually just fit itself right in to this attitude that the world was made for this minute minority of human beings. When it came to music, of course, we very quickly discovered that the small group of us (let me see, three, with a couple of hangers-on) were just the top of the music pile as far as United States went. The great European composers whom we knew at that time, Wagner, Brahms (both had just died, you see), were giving way to Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, and we were going to be the successors of those.

TUSLER

Your intent then was to be a composer?

SEEGER

Oh, yes, and our compositions were highly touted. I should probably go into that in our next session because that really is interesting, so I won't say anything about it now. But what I want to build up now, in this kind of rough sketch, is how one came to be as one was when one was twenty-one. I don't know how good a picture I've made. With me and with my brother, it was a cosmological situation in which the smallest elements fitted. There was no dichotomy between the smallest and the largest. There was a perfect unity between the smallest and largest act of either my brother or myself. He came to college two years later than I and was even more of a picture than I was.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO A
SEPTEMBER 15, 1966

SEEGER

I could pick up this new reel at what was really coming to mean to me, at this moment, a great deal, because I'd never thought it out before: how an early childhood nightmare, the memory of which had accompanied me all through my life and become identified with the whole outlook on life during the period of adolescence, could come to a kind of focus at the end of a college life. My freshman year I'd lived rather solitarily and not too happily because I couldn't connect the family way of living with the new situation. By the second year, it was much better. I began then to knit in a little bit more with m-y musical friends and more with the life of the rest of the class that I found myself associated with. Then my brother came when I was a junior. My brother was the very caricature of the carrying to extremes of my own feelings, which I never carried quite as far as he did. I went around to see him one time shortly after he had gotten established. I opened the door and found the room pitch black except for one candle burning. *Tape I, Side Two contains two separate recording sessions Alan was sitting in a chair meditating. He was meditating on a problem posed by Pico della Mirandola, an Italian philosopher (1463-1494); everything in the room fixed so that the atmosphere would harmonize with his meditations. I didn't carry the thing to that point. I'd become deeply enmeshed in my own composition and was turning out compositions at quite a rate, songs to the poems of Shelley and Keats and others, which meant a very heavily emotional urge with an intellectual capacity that couldn't quite keep up with it. I must put this off till next time when I'm going to treat the musical end of things. The thing that I want to go back to now is to show how this cosmological-intellectual-emotional setup blended right in with the social setup which, if anything, was a contradiction of it, but was nonetheless real. And that's what I could start with next time.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO B
SEPTEMBER 22, 1966

SEEGER

At the beginning of the second session, I must explain that the adjustment of the Seeger-family outlook on life and the Harvard outlook on life was not a very complicated one; there was not much difference. My friends were of two kinds: one, the average college boy, with two of whom I roomed. They were both on the second football team, played guard, and weighed a good two hundred and twenty-five when in training, and my weight was a hundred and forty-two, which it still is. We roomed together but we went entirely different ways, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why we got on. At any rate, my close friends were about five. Reginald Sweet was a very capable musician, an excellent pianist, composed easily, was the son of the president of the Sweet-Orr Overall Company. He was well supplied with funds, but lived a very penurious life. Then there was George Foote, who was the son of a Boston banker long deceased, whose mother was a charming person and had married quite an unusual Episcopal minister. The mother and the stepfather and their daughter, Penelope, lived in Cambridge. The third was John Hall Wheelock, the poet, whose tenth or twelfth volume of poetry I just received yesterday. Fourth, there was Edward Brewster Sheldon, the young playwright, to whose spectacular rise while still in college to being a national figure on the Broadway stage I owe a good deal of the excitement of my sophomore year. Fifth was Van Wyck Brooks, who has distinguished himself with literary criticism, especially of the New England tradition. Both my roommates died not long after leaving college, along with several other athletes that I knew. Of these five men--Sweet, Foote, Sheldon Wheelock and Brooks--only Wheelock is still alive. We were members of a small intellectual club called the Stylus, which was housed in an old wooden cottage between Mount Auburn Street and the river. We used to meet in the afternoon for tea and cinnamon toast, and the sessions would sometimes last well into the night with supper being mostly tea and cinnamon toast, finally winding up, perhaps, at a little cellar coffeeshop run by an old wag named Rammy, where one could get bacon and eggs and things of that sort. My sophomore year was spent more in company with Edward Sheldon than anyone else. We went to the theater as often as a new play came. I took Professor [George Pierce] Baker's famous Course 47 in English drama along with Ned. We heard the first performance of a Russian troupe starring Nazimova when we were two of the four people in the orchestra seats. When Sarah Bernhardt came to town, Ned and I "suped," as they said, several times, and I remember once being one of two detectives who were somehow involved in a murder and Ned and I were standing (he had a few words to say; I didn't have anything to say--it was all in French and I was only the second detective) on the stage when Sarah Bernhardt came on to discover her husband or lover, I've forgotten which, murdered. I shall never In my life forget that shriek. It practically ran down your backbone. Of course at the end she gave us the famous smile and thanks . There were a number of other exciting plays given that year, and I formed the idea of writing an opera, perhaps with Ned as the librettist. The music courses were turning out not to be what I had hoped they would be. Music was dragged down from the lofty level on which I had always placed it and was talked about in terms that were to me almost disgusting. In those days and for years before, even when I was ten years old, I could harmonize practically any tune anyone would sing me for a second time at the piano, in any key, but the way the chords were talked about in the harmony class disgusted me. I was, for Instance, forbidden to write parallel fifths, parallel octaves and parallel fourths. I remember looking at the teacher and saying, "But I like parallel fifths and octaves and fourths." He said, "Well, they are forbidden, you mustn't do it." "Well," I said, "I don't like being forbidden." Going on a little way, parallel sevenths and seconds were sometimes very, very pleasing; but they weren't allowed. In other vrords, I refused to submit to the traditional discipline. I yielded enough in the examinations to just squeeze by, and they were rather disgusted with me . My other courses in the college I paid almost no attention to. I was not interested in them; I merely took them because they were required. To begin the year I enrolled in about twice as many courses as I was allowed to take, and then was allowed to drop those that vfere hardest. My scheme was that I could spend all my time on music and just bone up at the last minute, enough to pass the examinations with a C or even a D. I kept this up all through college, taking the craziest number of courses, in the Koran and the Epic. I've forgotten what courses some of the others were, but I remember the Koran because it was taught by a dear old man whom I really loved. My name, of course, came up on account of my musical work (now I'm anticipating) for the Phi Beta Kappa, and I was ignominious ly thrown down on account of my general college record, which was absolutely terrible and scandalous. [laughter] I took a couple of courses in Spanish because I knew enough Spanish to get by with-out doing any studying at all, and that's the way it went. By the middle of the sophomore year the music professors began to pay a little bit of attention to me, but not much. I was considered a revolutionary and interesting from that viewpoint, but pretty much their despair when it came to teaching me anything. When it came to the history of music, I claimed that no musician need bother about history. History was talking about music, and the only people who talked about music were the people who either wanted to make fun about it, or else just talk about it because it was fun, or who didn't have any music in them. So I never took a course in history of music, but I took all the other courses, I think: harmony, counterpoint, canon, fugue, free composition, and so forth. The denouement came at the beginning of the junior year. A course was offered in song writing. I'd written quite a number of songs by that time and found that the course wasn't to be given that year, it was to be given in alternate years. So I got together with my friends and we made a petition to the Academic Senate to have the course given, and the professor graciously consented to give it. The first meeting we had quite a few songs to hand in. I remember I had one to a poem of Fiona Macleod's. The words were supposed to be sung by a monk who had been walled up in a tree for some kind of ritual deficiency. [laughter] I was known to the professor from then on as the man who wrote the song about the monk in the tree. [laughter] It was the favorite form of execution, apparently, of the ancient Celts. By this time, my friends Foote and Sweet and I were saturated with Debussy, some of his best piano pieces, the Estampes and the Images . We had the scores sometimes for the orchestra pieces before we had a chance to hear them played, because we had a little music store in Boston that would import these scores for us. Our professors were blithely ignorant of these works. We had scores also of D'Indy, the later works of Strauss and Mahler, Reger, Scrlabin, and some of the least known French composers, De Severac, Erik Satie and I've forgotten even the names of some of the others. Saturated in this music and writing music more or less in emulation of it, our professors didn't know what to make of us. The course in song writing was an absolute flop. About the second or third meeting the professor, who was completely beyond his depth (it was old Walter R. Spalding), volunteered that a certain note in one of the compositions should be changed. It was a composition of a rather elderly Radcliffe girl (we had two Radcliffe women both fairly on in years in the course). A howl of disagreement and derision broke out, and the professor promptly covered his tracks and never offered another suggestion the rest of the year. He would simply say, "That's fine, bring me in another next week." So we did. We composed for each other; we gave up the faculty as hopeless. There was one man we rather respected as a teacher, William Heilman, who was patient with us and stood for our rebelliousness, but tried to make us toe the line in a strange kind of counterpoint teaching. It ran more or less this way: in four-four time, whenever you had a long note in the cantus firmus you were to put in eighth notes for the other part. When you had two quarters or eighth notes in the cantus firmus (oh, no, you never had eighth notes in the cantus firmus) you would put in eighths or alternating quarters and eighths, and that was about all there was to it. Preparation and resolution were supposed to be done according to the rules, and I never paid much attention to the rules, so I just wrote the kind of counterpoint exercise that I wanted and got, I'm afraid, a pretty low mark. The parts were very independent, incidentally. Meanwhile, we went in to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the auction of seats and bought seats very close for the Friday rehearsal and up in the gallery for the Saturday concert. we took scores with us for everything that we could lay our hands on. One of the two days we followed the score; the other day we would listen. It would vary according to the piece of music, how well we'd known it, how well we'd studied the score, and so forth and so on. There were two excellent conductors. The first was Wilhelm Gercke, the second Karl Muck, one of the great German conductors of the day, a short man with a Roman nose, a terrific disciplinarian, and a superb musician. I got my first lessons in musicianship from him. We would follow him by eye whenever we knew the score well enough, to see just how he beat a certain measure. We would trust our ears when our eyes were glued to the score. By this time, by the junior year, I had discovered that I could go to the library all by myself and study sitting in the old dusty corridors of Gore Hall, since torn down, fortunately. We found music there that I'm sure had never been opened by anybody--tops would be covered with dust. I can't say that any music had uncut pages, but many books that turned out later to be classics in musicology had uncut pages. Our respect for our teachers went down and down. Moving through the shelves, I discovered a whole lot of music that I had never known existed before, that was the subject of the course on music history which I was not taking. I immediately sat dovm and tried to read scores of the sixteenth-century polyphonists and music from about then on. At that time I didn't discover anything earlier than the sixteenth century; in fact, I'm not sure that there was anything in the library! There might have been, though incidentally, I kept looking at the musicological works which seemed to me hopelessly dry, not talking about music but talking about aspects of music, and I wasn't interested in aspects of music except to talk jokingly about them. It seemed to me that when I got together with my friends and we talked, say, for several hours about music, we threw words around with reckless abandon; we knew we didn't know what they meant, and they didn't mean the same thing when one would use the word and when another did, or when one used the same word at two different minutes succeeding each other. It struck me that these books on music were just hopelessly out of the real main-stream of music. My claim was that when a man sat down to compose or when he sat down to perform or to listen to music, nothing in those books figured at all. You didn't have to know a damn thing of what was in a book in order to compose, to perform or to listen to it. So I considered myself really pretty much apart from that sort of thing. I did have to read librettos of operas, words of songs, and that led me into French and German poetry. My French and German were rudimentary, but I had enough ear for the languages to appreciate the setting of the sound into music. With a dictionary and perhaps with some translations as ponies I managed to get along pretty well. Now let me see what more there is to say about that college period. One went to every concert that one could. When we heard that Pelleas et Melisande was to be given at the Metropolitan in New York for the first time in the United States the three of us went down to hear it. The performance was pretty good with Mary Garden as Melisande, and the coaching, the training was from Paris. It undoubtedly represented Debussy's wishes and we were delighted with it. We knew the opera practically by heart by that time, so that it was a great experience. Occasionally there would be a trip to New York for another premiere, and fortunately Muck was giving us all the great Strauss works, Mahler symphonies, Bruckner symphonies and the chamber m.usic concerts were giving us some of the later works, also we were in the very best place in the United States to get the kind of musical training that you could get by yourself. The musical training we got at the university was practically nil. We had a musical club and one time we got out first-chair men from the woodwind section of the Boston Symphony and they played some of our compositions with piano accompaniment, but they were pretty poor stuff. I must say, as I look back on it now. Not having any instruction that was worthy of the name we had to just bumble around and learn how to write for these instruments ourselves. As the junior year went on, our songs were more and more astonishingly received by the professors. They thought that this was really the most extraordinary stuff they had ever heard. It was full of dissonances and rhythms that they had never heard of before and never thought could possibly be made, and we were delighted with them. We played for each other; we composed for eachother. I, who didn't have much piano technique because I'd never studied, had to get most of my piano music through my friends and I would take home what they were playing. I would have copies and would laboriously try to play Les Jardins sous la Pluie, Pagodes and other works of Debussy to my own delight but, of course, very far from anything like a decent performance. By the middle of the junior year, I think it was, somebody wrote to my father saying this man ought to have piano lessons. So I was put to work with Edward Noyes, a good teacher, Leschetizky-trained, who was teaching some of my friends. He wanted me to study finger exercises again, scales and arpeggios. I told him that scales and arpeggios were not music and that the music that I was writing didn't have scales and arpeggios in it, anyway. What the heck was the use of studying scales and arpeggios? He was very patient and I did do a little rudimentary scaling and arpeggiating, but not much. I did improve, though, and he set me down to play Bach. And I said, "Well, now Bach is very nice and I like to hear Bach every now and then, but why under the sun should I play Bach? It's dead music. I want to play music that's music of our time." Well, he didn't know any and was just recently becoming familiar with it through my friends' indoctrination, and you can see how the thing went. He thought--well, you get around to those more difficult things later on. Meanwhile, I was playing Erik Satie, which was about as simple as anything could be, far simpler than anything of Bach that was given to me. Well, things went along this way with almost hectic excitement. My pocket money was enough to be able to go to town, get a good dinner in a good restaurant and knock around a little bit with the rest of them afterwards. I never went into the heavy drinking that was going on. One night, I think it was in my sophomore year, when I had been out of the room for just a moment, they filled my stein up with everything they could find and dared me to drink it, so of course I drank it and I was horribly sick went to sleep for twenty-four hours after getting rid of it. So drinking didn't appeal [to me] . The knocking around at the houses of prostitution and picking up streetwalkers never appealed to me or my brother. I never even went as far as he did. He used to go down to the famous house. Seventeen Seventy, I've forgotten what street, and sit in the parlor with the girls and the men and boys that came in, and never would go upstairs. So he was quite a character. The general atmosphere was one of great puritan restraint. One wandered sometimes for hours through the streets, hoping that the destined face of the best beloved would emerge from a crowd. Of course it never did. One sometimes saw beautiful and attractive faces where there was a moment of recognition, but one always passed. My intimacy with Ned Sheldon had tapered off as I found myself going to more and more concerts and fewer and fewer theaters, but we kept in touch. In the middle of the junior year, we were all elected to the Signet Society, which was the society of men who had distinguished themselves in the class, with the emphasis on intellectual distinction or social leadership. I don't think there were any athletes in the Signet, although there might have been one or two. I might say that none of us were elected to the fashionable fraternitles--they weren't fraternities, they were clubs. We just didn't go around much with what we called the members of "the Gold Coast" even though we lived on the Gold Coast; my friends could perfectly well support it, although my father probably wouldn't have wanted me to go in for the expenses of one of the clubs. The Signet had a very simple initiation. You read a piece in a darkened room with the light shining down on your page and on you, and then questions came from the darkness of the room. One of the questions that was asked everybody was Nec Adam umbilicum habebat ? Well, anybody who'd had a little Latin could understand it, and you were supposed to make some brilliant kind of an answer. My paper was a take-off on the libretto Salome by Oscar Wilde that had just been set to music by Richard Strauss. It was a rather silly thing but it kept them more or less laughing. I was a great admirer of that kind of verbiage at that time and of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley which illustrated my copy of the play. The Signet was in an old eighteenth-century house which still stands and is still occupied by the club. The membership was most agreeable. We met for lunch and supper pretty regularly and had a steward who fed us fairly well. Feeling that one was making a success of one's college, after having in one's freshman and sophomore years pretty much made a failure, was tonic, I think, for all of us, and the junior year ended in a flourish of enthusiasm. My roommate, one of the football players, visited me for the summer in Mexico and my brother and I, little skinny specimens (I remember my brother couldn't have weighed much more than 105 or 110), took delight in taking this great big husky football player out into the Mexican countryside and walking him groggy, either through deep sand in pretty intense heat or up the volcanic cones and mountains. He was a good soul and he took it all in good grace, but I think would never forget some of the torture we put him through. Returning to the senior year, we were by that time a close-knit body of comrades who knew pretty much what they were going to do and had great confidence in each other's being able to do what he wanted. The attendance at concerts continued. Composition was intense. I had a beautiful room for my junior and senior years in the old Apthorp House. It was one of the old colonial homes that backed on the Harvard Yard in the old days and had a lawn that tapered on down to the Charles River. The whole place was built up by the time I reached it, but the hand-carved bannisters and the frieze along the stairway, the cornice pieces, were all beautifully hand carved. I had a great big room on the second floor, about twenty by twenty, with an open fire and two small bedrooms. The other men in the building were friends and it was a really glorious period. But one mostly worked. By that time, my roommate was out of the building practically all of the time, and I was in my room most of the time when I wasn't either in the library or in Boston at a concert or in the classes which I did have to go to occasionally. It was in the old days of the elective system. Ydu could take anything you wanted and there was nothing you had to do. My French was weak, my German was also weak, my Spanish was weak, but I didn't have to take any courses. My English was good enough so that I could anticipate the required freshman English which was unfortunate. So all those things meant that there was no study except music study and music work. By about the middle of the senior year there was the question of what would happen the next year. Well, of course, my father had determined to take me into his business in Mexico City. I didn't want to go into business, but I didn't see what else I could do because I didn't want to go into anybody else's business--I wanted to compose. "Well," my father said, "now come on, you Just work with me, the work won't be too hard; you'll have your evenings free and your weekends; work for me for ten years and then you'll have enough to live on, and you can devote the rest of your life to composition." He approved of that--that was the way a gentleman should do things; he'd done it himself even though he had a family. Of course my having a family was out. I could be a musician but that was all. [laughter] By about the middle of the year I learned that my friends Foote and Sweet were going abroad to study, and Wheelock was going with them. Sheldon was going down to New York to continue his fame. His play Salvation Nell was already being put on with Mrs. Fiske. It was a tremendous success. It was a contemporary play of New York life. Van Wyck Brooks was a little bit on the edge of things. He was more a friend of Wheelock' s than mine, but he did wind up abroad and I saw him from time to time afterwards. About the middle of the senior year it appeared that I would not have enough money to go abroad. Well, there was a hullabaloo, so Professor Spalding kindly wrote to my father saying that it would be a crime not to send me abroad to study because all young American musicians had to go abroad to study--they could amount to nothing in the United States unless they had gone abroad to study. One didn't pick up American music where American music was; you had to pick up American music where European music was. So my father said he would send me abroad, but this would be the last year and then I would be on my own. The preparation for the graduating ceremonies, the honors in music, began. Sweet and I each wrote orchestral pieces and wrote the required four-part fugue for string quartet, the a cappella piece for mixed voices, and in reserve I had a string quartet and a violin sonata and about three dozen songs, besides some odds and ends of smaller pieces. On the fringe of this small group was a man named [Philip Greeley] Clapp, who was a brilliant instrumentalist and orchestra man and got A pluses in all his courses, and Edward Ballantine, the pianist who later became professor at Harvard. Clapp became head of the music department in Iowa. There was one other, Edward Royce, who was a son of Professor Royce, the famous philosopher, and who had great difficulty composing and rather envied the rest of us our fluency. He was going abroad too, and Ballantine was going abroad. So preparations for the honors degree began, and Sweet and I were the contenders for the highest honors. Our scores were handed in, and it was assured that if the parts were copied they would be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on one of their pop nights. We made a point: we decided ahead of time that we would not write the kind of score that would shock the committee too much. We would write a score that was reasonably within hailing distance of the traditional music of around 190O (this was 1908, of course) but would have in it enough of our own originality to make us feel that it was worthwhile doing. I've forgotten what Sweet's composition was. Mine was an overture to The Shadowy Waters of William Butler Yeats, and it makes me laugh now to think of Yeats being given the kind of a Germanic overture that this overture was. It was somewhat Tchaikovskyish, with a great big sweeping second theme which I thought would appeal to the committee. Well, we finally stood up for the committee, and I've forgotten how Sweet fared, but he got by; he was an excellent pianist and he could play his score right off. So they finally came to mine. They asked me to go up and play the piano. I said, "But I'm not a pianist, and this is an orchestra score." Professor Spalding whispered to me, "Oh, just go up and play a few of the themes, just some of the nice passages. Play that second theme there, they'll all like that," and so forth and so on. I said, "Well, won't they come up and look over, and they'll see the things I'm leaving out?" He said, "Oh, no, no, no, they couldn't read it." [laughter] Well, that's about what I expected, so I reluctantly went up to the piano. Then my friend Clapp, who was listening in on the situation, said, "I'll help you." Clapp had the technical virtuosity of a Mozart, pretty nearly, but no originality; otherwise, he would have been probably one of the great musicians of the twentieth century. His technical skill was simply unbelievable. He could read anything at sight, on half a dozen different instruments, at any speed. So he stood behind me, and when I was fussing around in the middle of the piano trying to play what I could, he would play what was up above or what was down below, and if my hands were rather more spread he'd put an arm over my shoulder and play a horn part in the middle. We put on a complete performance from beginning to end, and they liked it enormously. One of the members of the committee said, "I like that man Seeger's music. He writes tunes that you can whistle." [laughter] I couldn't help thinking in later times of Stalin. It was a tough problem for the committee. Either one of us alone would have gotten highest honors, summa cum laude , but the two of us together were clearly tied. Sweet's music was much more conventional than mine. He stuck to the rules much better. He had a steady record of A's back of him, and mine was a scandalous record; so we tied, and we both got magna cums . Foote got a plain cum laude . A cum laude in those days was a pretty good mark. A magna cum laude put you in about the highest twenty-four of a class of--what was it, five hundred? I've forgotten--with only two or three summas . The diploma was about four times the size of the ordinary and was something quite nice to look at, so I began to feel as if I had really been making my way in the world and went home to Mexico for the summer with my friend George Foote as guest. We had a hilarious summer and were visited by some more friends, and I can remember going over to Cuernavaca from Mexico City in the first automobile that went over the first automobile road. It was nothing but a pile of mud dug from two ditches on each side, and if you didn't keep in the middle you were in danger of sliding into a ditch. At the top of the divide, Tres Marias, we started sliding down the other side, and we were presently met by the governor of the state, who was a client of my father's--I think he bought sugar machinery from him--and transshipped my father and somebody else to his official car to drive into town. We boys went on in the other car driven by the chauffeur. I remember my friend William Kurtz, who has since become a banker in Philadelphia, lifting his boater--that is, his hard brimstraw hat--to the convicts who had built the road, who were lined up on each side holding their shovels more or less at attention. We twitted him no end at that, but he kept right on, as I remember. He thought the convicts built the road, and he ought to lift his hat to them in good democratic style. By this time my brother and my sister and myself were pretty well grown up and were full of hyperidealism. My sister had come up to be my guest at dances at the Signet Club, and my mother and sister were my guests for the class day celebrations. I had several girlfriends whom I had invited to dances, but didn't feel inclined enough to any of them to have them substitute for my dearly beloved sister. Sister was very beautiful, and there was no trouble filling her dance card for her, and I didn't have to do much dancing which always bothered me no end. It was a very nice climax to my mother's life. She had always wanted her oldest son--in fact, both her sons-- to go to Harvard, because some of her flames when she was a young thing had gone to Harvard, and there we were. I was graduating high, which pleased my father, and had some very nice friends whose parents Mother approved of because they were very wealthy— I won't say because they were very wealthy, but because they were awfully nice people, and they happened at the same time to have a lot of money. So everything was going very well, and one could see now from this viewpoint, these many years later, how the Seeger family's attitude toward their being a royal Seeger family with the rest of a kind of nobility or seminobility stretched around, and then hoi polloi somewhere off doing their duty and being kept in order at a distance, was simply amplified and projected in the form of this small knot of intellectuals in my particular class. There were perhaps one or two in the later class, perhaps one or two like Max Perkins in the class ahead, who were worthy to be considered more or less on the level of the Seegers. This first entering, then, into a larger life from the old family life was simply a duplication of it on a slightly larger scale. There were a few more people in it, but they were rigorously selected and had to prove themselves worthy to be considered along with a member of the Seeger family. Needless to say, my mother and father and sister and brother approved of George Foote and my friends Sweet and Wheelock (I don't think they met Sheldon) and occasionally some of my more worldly classmates who were not members of the intellectual snobs, so that the whole life up to twenty-one came to a very pleasant climax. I should have put into my first tape some other aspects of this life which I've been speaking so rosily about. At the time I had the nightmare that I spoke of, and that had haunted me from time to time all through this period, I had also been put out of my little room next to my mother and father. I was the golden-haired boy (and I mean golden-haired because I did have golden hair and beautiful curls) of my mother and father, until my sister began to be the cherubic specimen and very beautiful child that she turned out to be, so along about when she was a year old or perhaps a little over, she became my father's favorite, and being so little. "Oh, Don" (I was always called Don, which was an abbreviation of Don Carlitos, which they used to call me in Mexico), "Don, you wouldn't mind giving up your room to Sister, would you? Because she's so little, we have to have her nearer so we can hear her at night." Well, Don, of course, loved his little sister and gave up his room, but not without terrible feelings of jealousy and injury and anger at the parents for having treated him that way. This jealousy, a feeling of maltreatment and resentment against the parents, followed me all the way through my life up to the point where about in the junior year I began to really find myself. I had a very strong inferiority complex, a feeling that I could never amount to anything, that I was bound to be maltreated by people and that everybody else was alvays going to be able to be given a better show than I was . This was heightened by the delicateness of my brother's health. My sister and I took the childhood diseases in our stride; we'd have a little fever, and after a day or two we'd be just as well as could be. My brother took everything as hard as possible, the way my father did. I think my mother rather took everything lightly, too. At any rate, Alan had to be babied, and Sister because she was so little had to be babied, and so of course I gallantly gave up all kinds of prerogatives in order that their delicacies could be allowed for. Nevertheless, we were very good friends in a very tight-knit group, but I kept this very much under wraps to myself and never let anyone else, even to this day, know that I felt resentment about the way my younger brother and sister were treated, or that I felt my parents had not done the right thing. This is a very important factor in my later life. It showed in one episode which I have only a slight memory of, but in my father's autobiography I ran across it. When I was quite little, I must have been around three years old, I received a spanking for some childish evil doing, and when it was over, I wiped my tears away and kissed my father. He writes about it in the following way: "l never had much faith in the corporal punishment of children, but after this, I never laid a hand upon the child again." This attitude of forgivingness on my part and making allowance for other people's misdeeds has been a very powerful factor in my life, and I should bring it out at this time, because it had been the way in which I'd kept more or less on the level through a childhood which was not always the childhood I wanted at the time. I wanted to be very popular, and I wasn't. I wanted to be very big and strong, and I wasn't. I wanted to be able to run faster and play games better than other people, but I couldn't. I was hopelessly undersize. If any older boy started after me, I could always elude him by dexterity, by running and dodging and climbing over things that he couldn't climb over, so I managed to escape the ordinary beatings-up the small child usually undergoes. In fact, I can't remember ever having been beaten up. My brother was quite different. He faced these things head-on, and if an older boy wanted to bully him, he'd face him up and get horribly beaten. But as I say, I can't remember ever a time when I got beaten up by anybody. This fact, the judicious flight and then the taunting of the enemy from an advantageous cover or position, seemed to be an excellent strategy, and it worked beautifully up to boarding school where I had a similar situation. There were two boys, the Page brothers, who were bullies and everybody was afraid of them. They were very much overgrown and strong, and I remember one time I was walking with a package of books from the study hall back to the building where we all lived. We were talking, and all of a sudden without any warning at all he caught me with a hard left hook in the solar plexus. It took my breath away. I didn't fall down, but after a moment, while he just looked at me with a sardonic smile on his face wondering what I was going to do then, I simply looked at him and said, "That was a cowardly thing to do. You know I can't hit back at you." He and his brother never bothered me again, although they made everybody else's life miserable who was any smaller than them. So by the time I reached college I was pretty much convinced that I had a technique that could protect me in a good many rather tight places. By the time I got to college, of course, I was six-foot-two and pretty broad-shouldered, and then I never was thus threatened again in my life . The fact that I knew that I could be very easily beaten because I was so light always up to that time had made me place a good deal of reliance upon this nonviolent approach to things. The little religious instruction that I had, had been from my mother who spoke of Jesus Christ occasionally, that he was a very fine man. She said, "Of course, some people think that he was God, but your father and I don't believe that he was God. We believe that he was one of the great men in the history of the world, and he did this and he did that, and he said this and he said that." She never mentioned miracles. She never spoke of any of the things that were hard to believe about the Christian ethos, but stressed the love of other people, the kindness to children, and of course stretched it over into the chivalry toward women; and my brother and my sister and I took this as our gospel. It worked, and it wasn't very long before we read it right into our general cosmological way of looking at things: that is, whenever my brother and I (I can't speak for my sister because she was younger, and we didn't talk about such things at the time) thought of meeting la blen almee , it was always in beautiful scenery from a view on a mountain, where you would have the great view that you would have from Tres Marias looking down on Cuernavaca with Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl on one side and the hundreds and hundreds of square miles of sugar cane and forest and billowing hills going all the way down the Pacific Coast on the other. Of course, [we were] thoroughly suffused with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, so that the very little religious instruction, the poetry, the music, and the scenery of Mexico, were all done up in a beautiful package which summoned immediately, when any one of them was mentioned, all the others. There was no regard, either on my brother's part or on mine or, as far as I can remember, on my friends', of any feeling of awe about Christ. He was a good egg. He was there. He did the best he could at the time he was living, and it's the people who came after him that balled everything up about his teachings; and probably he didn't say lots of these things anyway, or else if he did, he said them out of one side of his mouth at one time and out of the other side of his mouth at another. That was OK with us, because this talking business was rather crazy anyway. You could contradict yourself from day to day and say, "What the hell, it doesn't make any difference." You could say with Walt Whitman, "Did I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself."

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
OCTOBER 5, 1966

TUSLER

Dr. Seeger, as a footnote to what we were talking about last week, would you like to put on record what happened to the composition with which you won the honors in your senior year?

SEEGER

The Shadowy Waters was played in Symphony Hall, shortly after the committee had gone over it, by the Boston Pop Symphony Orchestra. I've forgotten who conducted. It was also played in Munich in the fall of that year, and I conducted it up at the Bohemian Club Grove High Jinx, or whatever they call it, a few years later. I'll tell more about that. The work was in no way remarkable from the point of view of the history of European music, but it was perhaps remarkable in the history of American music at that time, although Charles Ives had already, as a man ten years older than I, gone far beyond me. I arrived in Europe with my friends George Foots and Reginald Sweet, Jack Wheelock, to join Edward Ballantine and Edward Royce in the fall of 1908. we all trickled into Munich, which was supposed to be the place for young Americans to study music--that is, Foote, Sweet, and I did. It turned out that Munich was musically provincial to Berlin. Wheelock, the poet, was also with us, and we met at lunchtime and in the evening to talk over various matters of the young American rebels coming to close grips with the old tradition of German music. Our first explorations for teachers yielded very little promise. I remember one strange experience, going to the man who was supposed to be the principal teacher of orchestration in the town. He looked over my overture and kept it with him for a couple of days and finally told me that there was nothing he could teach me, as I was quite competent. I knew I wasn't, but it sort of decreased my enthusiasm to study with him. Foote and Sweet left after six weeks or so for Berlin, where they found more promising teachers. I stayed on for awhile, because I liked Munich, but eventually joined them. I don't know what to say about the two and one-half years of my study in Germany. I didn't enjoy it much, and except for fine routine training in what might be called musicianship, I gained nothing from it. We led a quiet life, living in furnished rooms on the left bank of the Lutzow Ufer. We had good pianos in our rooms. Breakfast was served, coffee and rolls, and we worked more or less during the morning, had lunch together, in the afternoons went back to work, and in the evening usually met at a downtown restaurant prior to going to a concert or roaming around the city. We didn't know how to live in a European city. We had rather formal contact with the life of the city. We didn't enter into it at all, and I must say that as I look back on it as a period of study, it was a rather stupid business. I had letters of introduction. One brought me into contact with the wealthy bankers of Berlin, and I was cordially received and invited to dinners and to dances. At the dances, most of the men were young German officers, and one can imagine my American pride in being one of the few men present in ordinary white tie and tails. I don't remember much about these houses, except that they were very well-to-do, the girls were very pretty and well-dressed, and everything was very formal indeed. The people whom I liked best were the Felix von Mendelssohns, who were descendants of the composer, and lived just the other side of the Brandenburger Tor, facing the Tiergarten and the Reichstag. They were awfully nice people, and I've often wondered what happened to them in the terrible events of the Hitler regime. My general disregard of the other courses besides music at Harvard had left me to enter Berlin society as a complete ignoramus. I remember meeting one rather pretty girl that I'd have liked to have seen more of. and she asked me if I liked paintings, and I said, "Oh, yes." She said, "What do you think of Van Gogh?" Well, I'd never heard of Van Gogh. [laughter] I had taken a course in fine arts at Harvard, but I think it left us sometime around 17OO, high and dry. My friendship with Jack Wheelock led me to read more and more German poetry, and I began to know something about Goethe. But on the whole, I was a very uneducated young man and with my French music sympathies, a little bit out of water in German musical life. One day I took a package of my songs and rang the doorbell to Richard Strauss 's apartment. I think it was out in Charlottenburg. The maid came to the door, and I asked if Herr Strauss was in. Before she could say no, I happened to see him in a mirror slipping from one room into another with an apprehensive glance at the front door. My heart was so touched by his evident desire to escape from having an unknown young musician intrude upon him that I took the "no" and went away. I'm sorry about this, because I think he'd have liked one or two of the pieces. My most fruitful study was with a fat little ex-conductor named Schmidt who promised me that if I'd work hard for six months with him that he could get me introduced to a German opera house where I could become an apprentice. I supplemented this work with a course at the Sternsches Konservatorium in conducting, which was rather silly, under a dear old man, von Fielitz, a composer whose work I scorned. At the end of the six months with Schmidt I had a letter of introduction to Otto Lohse at the Cologne Municipal Opera, and I went down and was accepted. So I left my friends in Berlin and went down to Cologne early in 19IO, I think it was in January. I was introduced on the empty stage of the opera house, and people were very kind but distant, when all of a sudden a big six-footer darted at me from the wings and held out a greeting hand. He was a Middle Western American who was singing in the hero baritone parts, and we became very good friends. I fixed myself up in a furnished room after spending nearly a week trying to find an apartment that had a bathtub in it. I don't mean a room that had its private bath, but a furnished room in an apartment that had a bathtub in the house. But no such things were to be had. A few new apartments and houses had been built in Cologne, and they had modern bathrooms in them but everybody else went to the public baths. I went myself, somewhat hesitantly for the first time, and was asked whether I wanted a firsts, second, or third-class bath, and I said, "First class, of course," when I discovered it only cost about one mark. I was shown into a room about thirty feet square, with a marble tub off in one corner sunk in the floor, almost large enough to be a child's swimming pool. [laughter] I had the use of it for an hour. Cologne was about the quietest of provincial German cities that you could imagine. The streets were practically deserted by eight o'clock at night. In my part of town there were only the small family restaurants, as they were called, good enough for lunch, but rather disappointing for supper, so I would have to walk downtown to get my supper. The work was fascinating, learning how to get around backstage, up in the staircases and runways over the flies and the drop curtains, and seeing how the cues were given for the choruses and orchestra behind the scenes, and having the lightning and thunder come at the right place. Very shortly I was given the job of bringing in the lightning and the thunder in the Freischutz of Weber, and I think I never missed a cue there. I went on to giving cues for Madame Butterfly and the swan in Lohengrin , and eventually helped a little bit with the Rhine maidens, but not having absolute pitch, I couldn't be up in the upper regions to give them the pitch for their cues when they would have to swoop down from a height into the range of the spectators, in the Rheingold. The noise back of the stage in Rheingold was almost deafening. Each Rhine maiden had six men to control her movements, one in a grey-brown hood who held ropes under her cradle that she swam in, one in each wing, and one at the back. There were two more to pull the trollies from one side to the other over the rails on top, so that it meant eighteen men for the three Rhine maidens, excluding the three chorrepetitors who had to give them cues and pitches from various parts of the realm.s of the stage. Working in the dark with this tremendous clanking going on was really quite exciting. I advanced with my responsibility, till finally I was given the conducting of some choruses behind the scene, I think in Offenbach's Contes d' Hoffman , and a few other choruses. Finally, my first disgrace came, bringing in a small group of hunting horns. I've forgotten what opera it was in. I was supposed to be able to follow the piano score, which I didn't know, and bring the minstrels in at the proper place. I didn't. There was a dead silence, and something in German shouted up from the orchestra pit to the effect, "Who's in charge of the hunting horns?" And they said, "Seeger," so Seeger walked out in the middle of the empty stage and got a calling down. They said, "What's the matter?" I said, "I couldn't hear." And he said, "Well, you can see, can't you?" and I said, "Yes," so they gave me the electric signals-- four- three- two- one, three- two- three- one- two- two-three- one, one-two-three-one, los. [laughter] And they came in promptly. But the disgrace was one which put a black mark against me. The next test was a sudden breathless command one night to get into the orchestra pit and play the triangle in a piece that I didn't know, had never heard before. I was dragged down there; something had happened to the percussion player, and I was shown the part, and the conductor kindly gave me the cue. So I started in. Everything went perfectly well until we came to a cut, and I wasn't able to find where we cut to, and a friendly double bass player next to me leaned over and held my hand so I wouldn't play the triangle out of time. That stopped my playing in the orchestra. I obviously did not have the acuity of hearing at that time that a performing musicism should. I didn't know it. I did some training in roles. I worked to a certain extent with my friend the helden baritone and there was a young American singer who was learning some of the minor parts. I also helped her. But the main thing were the rehearsals and the performances many of them with scores. To attend morning and afternoon rehearsals of one of the dramas of the Ring and then sit through three or four hours of it in the evening was in those days my joy. Lohse was an excellent conductor, a fine drillmaster, and had the respect of everybody in the opera house as a superb musician. He belonged to the school of Karl Muck, who had introduced me to fine conducting back in Boston, and I must say that the training I got from him was worth the two and a half years in Germany, which on the whole were pretty unhappy. The last six months of my stay my friend George Foote joined me. His absolute pitch and his acuity of hearing, his brilliant piano playing, advanced him rather more rapidly than I had been advanced. He was a funny chap, and I remember one very amusing story that he told. The orchestra was stopped at a rehearsal one day because the prima donna, who was a very portly almost grenadier-like lady, who was high up on a ladder while a castle was burning, couldn't be heard to scream at the proper time. The orchestra stopped and Lohse asked, "Can't you scream louder?" She said, "No, I can't." He said, "Well, you've got to." She said, "Well, then, send somebody up here to pinch me." [laughter] So Lohse called out, "Herr Foote! " Foote appeared. "Get up on the ladder there and pinch Frau So-and-so." [more laughter] So Foote got up on the ladder and pinched Frau So-and-so. The orchestra stopped again, and Lohse said, "What's the matter, is that the best you can do?" She said, "He didn't pinch hard enough." By this time the whole orchestra was in roars of laughter, so Lohse said, "Herr Foote, be a man." [laughter] Next time, the scream was adequate. I think that was his part in that particular opera from then on. Let me see what more can be said about this German stay. The outstanding experience for me was my first love affair, which has to be mentioned here on account of the reaction after it, which shows some reasons why I turned from music and composition to musicolcgy. The day after the most exciting event of the affair, I put myself immediately to work, as any artist should, so that the full inspiration should be expressed in the music. But the full inspiration didn't come out in the music at all. It came out in the form of a whole lot of diagrams that interpreted my experience in terms of the relationship of what I knew and what I didn't know, and of myself to the universe. This kept me in a state of high excitement for the next night and the next day, and I hardly took time off to eat or to move from my desk. The total waking period was three days and two nights, which is something of a record as far as I'm concerned. On the fourth day, the music began to flow comfortably and I wrote a song a day for a week, and they were good songs. Outside of that experience, I can't really speak of much of anything that has any bearing upon my subsequent personal life or my subsequent musicological life. The first summer, George Foote, Wheelock and I went down to Vienna, Venice, down the Dalmatian Coast, up to the capital of Montenegro, down to Corfu, Costa Brindisi, had a few weeks in Sorrento, and wound up in Paris, where we met Ned Sheldon. We had stayed at the best hotels, we traveled first class, whenever we landed from a train or a ship, we'd take a taxi to the hotel; we had no contact whatever with the people who lived in the countries we were visiting. We took some photographs. We admired everything from a safe distance, and as I look over the trip, it really seems absurd in the light of my children's first visits to Europe. My daughter Peggy, for instance, gets on a motor scooter, slings a banjo and guitar over her back, and motors two thousand miles around England, Scotland, and Wales, or rides practically over the whole of France and the Netherlands, happens to meet a man in a truck who asks her if she'd like to go to Berlin with him to play music for a group of Catholic action dramatists and players, says, "Yes," and so she goes. These people see something of the country that they're visiting. I saw nothing of the country, except what you might see from a National Geographic camera viewpoint. The beggars in Naples were horrible. You almost fled down the street, because they were posted at intervals of about a block apart, exposing the most horrible sores and assailing your ears with groans and shrieks and holding out these trembling hands for alms. The whole trip was a kind of sanitized affair. The stay in Paris with Ned Sheldon was perhaps the most interesting. Ned had made many friends in the theater life of New York by that time. His play, Salvation Nell , had made a great success, and so he invited us to dinner at the apartment of a charming lady in her thirties, who was supposed to be the "queen of the demimonde" in New York. We had a wonderful supper, Sheldon, Foote, Wheelock, and myself, and present also was Marie Doro, who had a high soprano voice and had sung the bird in Siegfried at the Metropolitan, but had made her fame in Victor Herbert operettas on Broadway. I had seen her in a number of them and had taken quite a fancy to her, so that meeting her here was really quite an experience. The wine flowed and everybody was very happy, so they got me to the piano to play some of my songs, of which I whistled the melody. They made a tremendous impression, and Marie promptly suggested she had a comic opera in mind that would be something better than Victor Herbert, more like real music, and thought that perhaps she might make the libretto and I might make the music, and we might meet at some convenient place in Europe, such as Dresden, and go to work on it. That just suited me down to the ground, because I could have been half in love with her the next minute and so everything went very well and I went off to Dresden. Naturally, she never showed up. I forgot to say we went to the theater together a couple of times and to dinner, but that was the end of that. Presently I got a cable from the charming lady who'd given the party, felicitating me on my birthday, and I felt that I was beginning to get into the gay life. The time came around the end of 19IO when I felt that I'd gotten all out of Cologne that I could; George Foote was tired of it, so we went back to Berlin and I got seriously to work on my opera there. I wrote the libretto, using Jack Wheelock' s poems on the city which he eventually published in his first volume of poems for Scribner. I got the first scene done when it occurred to me that it was about time for me to go back to the United States. My first year in Europe was financed by my father, and when the end of the year came, he told me that was all. I could come back if I wanted, but that was the end. So I borrowed enough for the second year from an old family friend, and George Foote helped me out for the last six months or so. So presently I landed back in New York, a young hopeful composer and musician, to make his way in the musical life of the city. I had good letters of introduction all around, and things began to happen in rapid fire. I got some accompanying work for a singer pretty soon, and seven of my songs were accepted by Schirmer for publication. The enthusiasm of the publishers was enough to turn my head, and it did. Kurt Schindler, who was the reader, paid me a call the day after I had handed the things in, at my little hall bedroom down on Madison Avenue and 33rd Street, hailing me as the future composer of America. They arranged for some performances and I had already met some singers who began to learn them. I had a letter to one of the directors of the Metropolitan Opera Otto Kahn, who received me in his apartment at a kind of levee where he was served breakfast by his butler. I had a letter from him to [Giulio] Gatti- Casazza, the director of the Metropolitan, whom I called on the next day. When Gatti found that I didn't kow Italian except in a very distant way and had no French or German to speak of he pointed out to me that entrance to work in the Metropolitan depended more upon knowledge of the language than knowledge of the music. So I didn't gain any advantage there. About six weeks after I landed, an old friend of my mother's, Mildred Sawyer, the wife of Philip Sawyer the architect, who had invited me to her house several times, had me to lunch one day to meet a young violinist. She was a very pretty girl, and it was quite obvious the reason why Mrs. Sawyer had invited us to have lunch with her. Lunch took a little time to get ready and I was asked to play some of my songs, so I sat down at the piano and whistled the voice part it was like music they'd never heard before, and they thought it was astonishingly new and revolutionary and all that. It was really quite respectable in terms of contemporary French music but they didn't know that, and so I basked in the sunshine of the unusual. Lunch proceeded happily, and then it came time for Miss Edson to leave. We took Miss Edson down to the front door and closed the door on her, and then I said to Mrs. Sawyer, "it isn't very cavalier to let her go home alone." Mrs, Sawyer said, "Well why don't you run after her and offer to escort her?" So I did. The result was that Miss Edson was looking for an accompanist, which was what Mrs. Sawyer knew; I had already played some Handel sonatas with Miss Edson, and we got along famously. Constance de Clyver Edson was the daughter of an impoverished New York family, whose maternal grandfather had been the principal of the most fashionable school in the city, with several big buildings on 59th Street where the Plaza Hotel now stands. An uncle had been mayor of the city. Her father, who was an Annapolis man and was also a medical doctor, had gone to pieces as a result of two terrible experiences: one was marrying Constance's mother, and the other was being an officer on a converted yacht of J. P. Morgan's that fought the Spanish fleet as it was trying to escape from Santiago de Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The gunners were missing a Spanish torpedo boat, and Dr. Edson brushed them aside, aimed the gun, and sank the ship. But the sight of the men struggling in the water and being left behind by everybody--nobody tried to save them--unnerved him and he never got over it. Living with Constance's mother xas, to put it mildly, an earthly hell. She was extravagant, she was tempestuous; he was a mild, gentle man; and the result was, when I met Constance, Dr. Edson had retired to Sailors Snug Harbor, where he died some years later. Mrs. Edson was very much in evidence. Constance had been engaged to a wealthy young New York musical amateur the year before, but the engagement had been broken. She had had some psychological difficulties during her very difficult life and at the time I met her was recovering from a pretty low state of depression. We started rehearsing at once, and after six weeks we were engaged. At this time in the spring of 1911 my mother and sister had to flee from the revolution in Mexico. When the bullets began falling in the bathroom window, my father thought it was about time to get them out of the country, so they and seven trunks of our most precious ancestral heirlooms were put onto the last train which went to Vera Cruz, and put on the Merida of the Ward Line for them to go to New York. So, at the proper time (I've forgotten what day it was--some time in April, I think it was April eleventh) , I called up the Ward Line to find out when the ship was going to dock and was greeted with a cheerful voice, "She ain't going to dock. She's sunk." I said, "well, how about the passengers?" "Oh," he said, "it was at night, and they wrapped themselves in blankets, and they were all saved. They're on their way from Norfolk, and they'll all get into the Pennsylvania Station" (this was over in Hoboken) "at such and such a time." So I went down there and met Mother and Sister. They were dressed in what the Ward Line had been able to scrabble together for them, and all the trunks had gone down to the bottom of the sea, where they still are, with the beautiful Spanish lace mantillas that my mother bought for each of her daughters-in-law, much of the ancestral silver, my Harvard diploma and a number of other valuable things. Constance vas introduced to my mother and sister in due time, and they approved, and then I began a tour of New England with Constance, giving concerts at various fashionable seaside and country resorts that she had arranged during the previous winter. It took us from Cape Cod to Lennox to Bar Harbour, and a couple of other places, and we came back with enough money to set up two apartments down in the East Thirties, connected with a clothesline on two pulleys out the windows by which we could send notes to each other from my back windows to her back windows. We began a winter of teaching. She furnished a very pretty apartment, and I didn't pretend to occupy anything but a furnished room. I went out for most of my lessons to the places of the people whom I was teaching, and she taught in her own little apartment. We gave concerts in various places around the city. Several people were singing my songs. The highlight of it was Alma Gluck singing two of them in Carnegie Hall. A few days later, I was in the MacDowell Club, which was the musicians' club there, having tea with some people, when somebody came in and said, "Madame Gluck is outside and wants to meet you. Won't you come out?" My answer was, "If she wants to meet me, she can come in." You can imagine the result. Madame Gluck did not sing my songs any longer. That was about my idea of the way a promising young composer should behave. Well, things went very well. I remember one of Constance's and my series of recitals was in the house of a well-to-do family in the East Eighties just off Fifth Avenue, where we played a fifty-minute program once a week for the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house and a few of her friends. They were not present in the room. They listened downstairs, and we played in the drawing room, which was empty. We were given dinners all over town by Constance's friends and my friends, my family's friends; most of them were pretty well-to-do, I might say. Everything went very well until I announced to my family that we were going to be married on December 22, 1911. I was 25, and my mother thought I was too young, and my father thought I wasn't earning enough money to get married; but they couldn't do anything about it, so they very graciously attended the wedding. We set up housekeeping in Constance's apartment. Everything went well. One day I received a message to receive a gentleman. The card presented President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, of the University of California at Berkeley; the dignified man in a frock coat came up. We gave him tea, and he told us that he had a position of professor of music open, and that my name had been recommended by the department at Harvard. So we talked, and later on, I think the next day, I had dinner with him at the old Waldorf-Astoria, which was torn down to build the Empire State Building. The result was that the deal was closed, subject only to the approval of the Regents, which I was given to understand was automatic. Knowing Benjamin Ide Wheeler later, it was automatic. He ran the faculty and the Regents, as far as I could see, pretty much off his cuff. I hadn't the slightest idea of having any interest in being a professor, but it offered us more money than we were earning in New York at the time. I thought I might last a year or two and by that time we could have our first child and we would have made some connections by which I could advance more rapidly even than I had to higher levels in the music profession. You can see how things vrere going with me. In the course of less than a year, I had advanced as rapidly as I thought my value to music in America deserved! Just before I left for Berkeley, Constance and I were entertained at a large dinner party by an old friend of my mother's and father's, George Plimpton, who was head of Ginn and Company and had, at the time, I might say, supposedly the biggest collection of books on mathematics in the world. There were twenty or thirty people at the dinner, and I was sitting next to Lady Murray, whose husband, Sir Gilbert, the distinguished British scholar, had been made a full professor in either Oxford or Cambridge I've forgotten which, when he was 27. Here I was 26, and I remember Mr. Plimpton taking great pleasure in informing the lady that I was a full professor at 26. [laughter] She was somewhat flabbergasted, and you can imagine that for the rest of the dinner she was rather stiff. Well, we went with our goods and chattels, some lovely antique furniture that Mrs. Edson had somehow acquired, that had interestingly enough formerly been in the old Apthorp House in which I roomed at Harvard, which was one of the great houses of Cambridge in those days. General Burgoyne had supposedly been held captive in it. We shortly rented a very pretty house on La Loma Avenue and set up housekeeping. I don't know that there's anything much to say about this period between graduating from college and landing in the professorship of music in an American university. It was a perfectly absurd situation. The president was acting in extremis; he could not find anybody to take that job. [laughter] The position had been wished on him (I don't think the faculty wanted it) by the California Legislature, which had set up the professorship of music more or less as an appendage of the Department of Agriculture. The stipend was $3,000 a year, which was considered very good for a professor in those days. My first meeting with my colleagues disclosed the fact that there were people over twice my age who were still associate professors. There was no full professor within hailing distance of 26. This stimulated my feeling that Charles Seeger was really something quite unusual, and I showed up for my first class after having been introduced around to the academic circles, mostly humanities, and invited up to the Bohemian Club High Jinx and a few other things. I felt so sure of myself that I went to my first lecture without any preparation whatever. I found out after twenty minutes I had nothing more to say, so I dismissed the class. I'd never opened a book on the history of music. I had no interest in it. I thought anybody who bothered about the history of music was just simply a second-rate musician, and there wasn't any use of my bothering about it. But I realized I was in a jam here, and I would have to talk about the history of music. Fortunately in the library there were a couple of dozen books on music, mostly elementary textoooks, and a small collection of Spanish music that had been given by a well-to-do man of Spanish origin in San Francisco named Cebrian. I got Waldo Selden Pratt's History of Music out of the bookcase which my wife had and a couple of others in German from the library, and in my second lecture I was able to discourse learnedly upon Greek music and Early Christian music. I didn't lack things to talk about for the rest of the year. The courses in harmony and counterpoint were not enormous. They were given in the old hall of the YMCA at one and two o'clock, or two and three o'clock, I've forgotten which, right after the hall had been cleared of the cafeteria dishes and while they were being washed in the kitchen. There was only a broken-down old piano, but I had ordered a blackboard. So the harmony lessons proceeded, I had so many students that I needed a reader, and a young man named Edward Stricklen was recommended. Stricklen turned out to be a red-headed Irishman, who had written the music for a Bohemian Club High Jinx show a year or two before, which was very much admired. It was a kind of Broadway light-opera music, and I looked the score over and ticketed Stricklen. Stricklen was, however, a serious musician, although he was a very peculiar one. He served excellently as my reader, and we got to talking about harmony and how unsatisfied we were with the textbooks I was using, so we decided to make our own textbook, which we did [ Harmonic Structure and Elementary Composition , 1916]. We printed it privately and used it the second and third year. I should say my first boy [Charles Louis] was born in September of that year--that was just about after I had begun teaching, in October--and it had an effect on me which I should register here because it ties in with several of the things that I've spoken of before. I had always been a fairly strapping kind of fellow, and in the built-up clothes of those days with padded shoulders, I could walk around the streets of any European city apparently with a charmed life. I remember telling somebody in Cologne how nice it was to wander around those deserted streets at night; when he told me in real solicitude, "But of course you never go down between the Domstrasse and the river," I said, "Oh, I go down there almost every night." He said, "Man alive, you have a charmed life. That's the roughest part of town, and no sensible man ever goes into it at night." I'd never been bothered, but I was pretty large for a German, and although my weight and size belied my strength, at least I never was bothered. But I'd always had a deadly fear that I would die before I had a child, and that led me to be rather hesitant to venture off into the woods or the mountains at night. City streets didn't bother me, because nobody'd ever bothered me on the street; I thought they only bothered little people. But I remember the night after my first son was born. I set right off from our little house, which was one of the last before the empty Berkeley hills began, and I walked all over the tops of the mountains for about four hours with perfect security, in spite of the fact that it was not considered the thing to do, I discovered afterwards, by respectable Berkeleyans. There were said to be wild dogs, and there were supposed to be other things. I don't know what there could have been up there, but they didn't bother me, and I never had any fear of the dark places after that. I was perhaps a little more cautious about going into the less well-protected parts of town, but that was not so much an emotional thing as just ordinary prudence. Well, toward the end of my first year in Berkeley, or I might say before the end of that year, I had become keenly aware of my own deficiencies in general education. I had met, fortunately, a young man [Herbert E. Cory] a year or two older than I was, from Brown, who was an instructor or an assistant professor, I've forgotten which, in English, and who aspired to be a poet, just as I aspired to be a composer. We found ourselves both of us teaching in a university. He was a swarthy, dark-complected fellow, who rarely appeared on the campus without nine or ten books under his arm. He had an ability to read a fat volume of any kind in an evening and give me a digest of it the next morning. Talking over our mutual situation together we decided that we both of us were comparatively uneducated, although he was a much better educated man than I was, and it behooved us to go around and learn something about anthropology and psychology and biology and logic and some of the Oriental literatures. So we pitched right in, and I can even now remember with some pleasure the dismay on my colleagues' faces when I would show up and ask them if I could attend their seminar in symbolic logic, the Veda, or industrial relations or something of that sort. Cory and I went together to most of these, and he would dig right into the reading, and I would do what I could, reading much more slowly; but he was my guide, and if he gave me a glowing account of some book, then I would read it. One day we were sitting in the meeting of the academic senate and out of a dead silence came a motion to the effect that no student in the University of California would be awarded the bachelor's degree until he had supported himself with the labor of his hands for one year. The silence afterwards was deader than before. No second. The president asked, "Is there a second?" and nobody piped up. "Well," I thought to myself, "this is a wonderful idea; I think we should certainly go into this." So I seconded it. The man who proposed it was an inconspicuous little fellow, whom I'd never noticed before in my high-handed way, and so he and I were put on a committee of five, the other three being safe, respectable men who'd be sure to put the quietus on this crazy idea. Well, we met and did our best, but that was the end of it. The proposer was none other than [A. L. ] Kroeber, who later distinguished himself as an anthropologist, and we got to know each other fairly well, and through him, Robert [H. ] Lowie, who was also there at the same time. I attended seminars with both of them. In fact, what grounding I have in anthropology I owe to them. At the end of my first year, along in April or so, I went to the president one day (I never bothered with deans, just went straight to the president) and inadvertently let slip, "Well, next year we must do such and such a thing." The president looked up and said, "I don't know whether there's going to be a next year." "Well," I said, "don't you think we'd better decide?" and so I got up and left the room. I never said a word of this to my wife or anybody else or said a word to the president, until one day he called me in and very graciously said that there would be a second year. By that time I had planned a summer session, and the summer session was about to begin. My real work in the Department of Music in Berkeley rather began from that time.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 13, 1966

TUSLER

In connection with the remarks you began to make last time about teaching music at Berkeley, do I understand you correctly that there was no Music Department there when you began?

SEEGER

There was no Music Department there when I arrived. My predecessor, who was the first professor of music in Berkeley, was John Frederick Wolle, who had made a name for himself conducting the Bach Choir Festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I think all during the time he was at Berkeley he continued holding the festival. He was a quiet, rather unaggressive man, a charming little fellow (I met him later) and he had given some courses and put a few elementary textbooks in the library. My information was that he left only two students, and then while he took his sabbatical (he had been there six years), nothing happened, so that when I took over, I had to begin entirely afresh.

TUSLER

When we stopped last time you were just beginning to describe to me the circumstances of your staying for the second year.

SEEGER

Oh, yes. My first summer session at the University of California in Berkeley (that was 1913) I realized would either establish my position there or I would probably not be reappointed at the end of the second year, so I decided I must make an effort to be a good professor. I planned the two courses very carefully, and they were given in the old administration auditorium. The audience was pretty good. The History of Music was the main course and had the largest audience--I think the room was filled. I was able to arrange for good illustrations all down the line and, amusingly enough, thought that in connection with the history of music, I should have a session on folk music. This was quite unusual in courses of this sort at the time, but had been initiated by Henderson, a critic for a New York paper at the Institute of Musical Art in that city. Fortunately, one of Henderson's former illustrators, Lucia Dunham, had moved to Berkeley with her husband who was a businessman and was a friend of my wife's. She was engaged to illustrate the singing aspects of the course and volunteered to sing me a folk-song program. We worked up a program of folk songs in seventeen different languages from all over the world; not very well knowing what a folk song was, we sometimes slopped over into the popular domain, and I think there may have been one or two primitive items on the program. She received coaching from the specialists in the various languages, some of them reaching back to dead languages. On the folk-song program we had songs of the troubadours and trouveres and Meistersingers and minisingers, who were anything but folk singers. They were skilled professional or semiprofesslcnal singers and composers, but I didn't know that at the time. At any rate, it was customary to regard them as folk singers at that time. When it came to songs from present-day Greece, there was nobody in the faculty viho could tell Mrs. Dunham how to sing modern Greek. But the professor of Greek said, "There is a peanut vendor on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft, and I feel sure that he can tell you how to pronounce this song." So we went down to the peanut vendor, and as soon as we sang him the song (he couldn't read notes) he said, "Oh, yes, I know that song," and gave us the pronunciation in contemporary Greek. He was a Greek emigrant. The summer program was a tremendous success, and I remember very warmly being congratulated by Professor Rieber, who was one of the members of the committee on musical instruction, that he liked a man who put up a good fight. So I felt at the end of the summer that I was pretty well established, and I think I was. There were several rather amusing angles to that summer session. Most of the music courses that had been given in summer sessions were given entirely independently, not only of my predecessor Wolle, but entirely independently of the new Music Department that was set up under my direction. I was informed that this was a highly successful summer music program; it had nothing to do with the academic program whatever, but was considered a kind of missionary job of the jacking up of the quality of the music instruction in the California public scools and was widely attended by the public school teachers who wanted to know a little something about what they were doing, or were supposed to be doing. The direction was under a lady whose name was Mrs. [Lauretta V.] Sweesy, so I didn't bother about that end of things; I considered music in schools to be beneath the notice of my high professorial dignity, and remembered that it was even below my high third-grade dignity when I refused to sing out of the song book we had at that time in the Staten Island Academy. So I didn't bother about many of the arrangements which all went through as usual, but I made a point of appearing at eight o'clock the first morning of the session in the foyer of the Hearst Mining Building where the music courses were given in the summer. I saw on the tables there a broad display of popular music magazines, such as the Etude , Musical America , Musical Courier , and so forth and so on. As I was being shown around by Mrs. Sweesy, who was all politeness and consideration, [I asked] "Where do these sheets come from?" She said, "Oh, the publishers give them to us for free distribution to our pupils every year. It's one of the most valuable assets of our work." And I said, "Please see that by tomorrow morning there's not a sign of any of them in this room," and walked out the door. [laughter] You can imagine the consternation, but there were no more of them. I had a hundred-and-twenty -voice chorus to conduct, and I used it to illustrate the history of music course by having them sing the early choral music of Europe from the ninth century organum on up to, I think, a Bach chorale or maybe something of Brahms. I had a plan to give in the Greek Theatre Gluck's Orfeo . I still think it's a natural for the Greek Theater there. Fortunately, the famous singer Schumann-Heink had bought a place on top of a hill outside of San Diego, and one of her great roles was singing the part of Orfeo. I had invited my friend George Foote out to give a course in piano technique for the summer session, and he and I went down to see Schumann-Heink. We arrived after supper on a cold night, driving up the winding road to her hilltop house. She was there with some of her grandchildren and children and was most affable, and said she would be delighted to do this. It was too late, however, in the year to manage all the engagements for the other parts, and Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who was William Randolph Hearst's mother and lived back of Berkeley in the hills, whom we had hoped would put up the money because she was a great fan of Schumann-Heink' s, didn't feel like risking the money. I think they thought that I was a pretty young man to be undertaking such an ambitious job as training a summer-session chorus to do the choruses by heart, get them trained and stage-managed with all the problems of lighting and orchestra and so forth in the short month or so. So the thing fell through. Now let me see if there's anything more about that summer session that is worth mentioning. I think not. There was, however, probably performed for the first time in California, organum, conductus, motets of Machaut, short excerpts from the masses of Dufay, Josquin, Lassus, Victoria, Palestrina, and at the other end of the summer's instruction, that was the last day or two, a performance of early Schoenberg, Debussy, Scriabin, and I think some Stravinsky, though I may be wrong about the Stravinsky-- that might have come a year or two later. My second year at Berkeley had a well-rounded announcement of courses, and these attracted eight or ten, perhaps a dozen, fairly serious students, who began with diatonic harmony, which we mixed alternate days with counterpoint and used Stricklen' s and my textbook.

TUSLER

What was the status of the department at this time? Could a student get a degree in music then?

SEEGER

There were no arrangements at the time for anything beyond the course instructions which I outlined. I'd have to have an announcement of courses for the year to refresh my memory on what I actually announced in the fall of 1913; I think I announced courses that were not expected to be given, because there were no students that were qualified to take them, but I think I announced them in order to show students that there was to be a course of study of four years and it would take them about half of their time, their study time, to go through it in order to get the degree. I think this was before the days of majoring and minoring. The prospect of having a capable assistant in the form of Edward Stricklen and a teacher of singing, George Bowden, an English university man who was a good teacher and could handle a fairly large class, made me feel that I was well launched in a serious undertaking. By this time I had become very much interested in staying at the University and making a lifework of academic teaching. Everything was rosy, the prospects and the work also. I had already launched with my wife a series of University Recitals of chamber music patterned after Arthur Whiting's university recitals that were given in the Ivy League universities in the East and in which my wife had been a participant from time to time. The concerts were moderately well attended. I think they were given in a hall that has now been torn down. A small and loyal audience came year after year throughout the remaining five years that I was at the University. We engaged local talent. The University had bought us two Steinway Model B grand pianos; we had a small amount of money for fees, and there were enough serious musicians to take the trouble to work out the compositions that I wanted to have played, such as cantatas of Bach and Couperin, Rameau, and some of the then very little known early violin, early chamber music and choral work of the seventeenth century. The most memorable event of the fall of 1913 was a call one day from a man who told me his name was Harry Cowell, who had a son, aged 15, that he wanted to have take serious lesslons in composition from the best teacher he could find in the Bay area. Harry Cowell brought along his son Henry, who was a very pretty and engaging young man of 15 , scarcely more than a boy, who sat down at the piano and put on the rack Opus 108. I was duly impressed. Then he started to work with fists , forearms, and elbows on a little upright piano that I had in the second house that I moved to, up La Loma Avenue a block from the first house. I was delighted with the man, asked him if he knew anything about contemporary music, and he didn't; so I showed him some of the early Schoenberg. Opus 11, Opus 19; the Opus 7 of Scriabin; and some early work of Stravinsky. We immediately hit it off, and Harry decided that the person for Henry to study with in the Bay region was me. We talked over the situation, and I gave him three alternatives: one was to give up all composition for a while and simply study the orthodox routine of harmony and counterpoint; another was to keep perfectly clear of academic instruction, pay no attention to it whatever, and simply study contemporary composers and write original music as fast as it could be written; and the third al ternative was to mix the two. The mixture choice seemed best to me, and I think best to both Henry and his father. It was arranged that since we had no expert teacher of strict counterpoint (both Stricklen and I had the contemporary bowdlerized version of counterpoint of the late nineteenth century) he would study with a local English musician who had gone through the Fux school, would take his harmony and other music courses as a special student in the University of California for which we got the permission from the University, and then once a week he would come to me on Thursday afternoons and we would explore the potentialities of what was then considered "modern music." The scheme worked beautifully. Stricklen was an excellent harmony teacher and the British, whose name I may remember presently was an excellent teacher. Henry's and my sessions with modern music began at about twelve or one o'clock and lasted sometimes to one o'clock at night. I remember one night, it lasted all night long and we wound up at a hotdog stand in Oakland. There were no phonograph records at that time, you have to remember what scores were available were in my library. Henry was an excellent musician, a born musician. He had had some lessons on the violin, some lessons on the piano, and that's about all. His father had left his mother when he was quite young. I think they were living on a Kansas farm at the time. Harry Cowell, the father, came of illustrious lineage in England and Ireland, connected with nobility on one side. I remember a governor general of Canada was closely related to Henry at one time, and Henry went up to visit him. Henry's grandfather had inherited a big estate in Ireland with one of the old stone towers on it, but his immediate family had lost most of the money that they had had, and Henry's father had become a wanderer. He was a dilettante, something of a poet, something of a writer, and had wandered from job to job. He was a tennis expert--in fact, he was the teacher of Helen Wills [Moody] who was eventually women's tennis champion, but he never could keep anything going very long, so that Henry was brought up in pretty terrible poverty. At the time that he came to me, he was living with his invalid mother in Menlo Park, I think, in some kind of a little cottage. Professor [Samuel S.] Seward of Stanford and some other people had become interested in Henry and got together enough money to pay his railroad fare and living for him and his mother while he studied at Berkeley. Henry had had six weeks of schooling. At the end of six weeks in the first grade, he decided he didn't like school and he never went back. His mother taught him. He read a great deal, and he was pretty busy taking care of his invalid mother, tending pigs and collecting orchids. I think there's an orchid named after him. He stayed three and a half years with me taking all the music courses, coaching some of the students, and was finally drafted in the Army in the First World War. I'll just finish up this aspect of Henry Cowell's study with me, because he was my first brilliant student. He was an unwashed little specimen. I don't think his clothes ever went to the cleaner. In fact, one time the girls in the Music Department came to me and said they didn't like to speak about it, but couldn't I do something about Henry's taking a bath? I said I'd try, but it didn't seem to have any results. "Well," they said, "Will you leave it to us?" I said, "Yes, OK, if you can do anything." The Music Department, which was then giving quite a number of courses, was housed in its second old house. Just east of where the Women's Faculty Club now stands on the edge of the creek--there was a bridge over the creek there; it's all been filled in now. There was a bathroom upstairs, and since the furnace was sometimes put on, there was hot water. So they got some towels and a cake of soap, and they took him upstairs and they pointed to the bathtub and they said, "Henry, take a bath, [laughter] we've got the key and we're going to lock you in. " Well, he came out all washed. In the Army, he was put into the kitchen, and it was pretty rough. I was able to get Henry transferred to a band, where he had not only practice in conducting but in learning instruments. After he'd been studying with me for a couple of years he brought me a symphony. It had a rather nice scherzo, which had one note in it I thought really should be changed. I'd never asked Henry to change a note. That was not my function. My function was to develop his ease, speed, versatility, and daring in composition. So I suggested, "You ought to change that note. Instead of an A-flat it should be a B-flat," or something of that sort . He wouldn't do it, which was what I expected. He was a good autodidact. In fact, I've found that my best pupils have to be autodidacts. If they're not, they don't interest me. About thirty years afterwards, Henry came to me one day and he said, "You know, Charlie, that note you wanted me to change in that scherzo of mine-- you were right." I never felt so much that I was wrong, [laughter] The other members of the eight or ten good students that came to me in 1913 were two-thirds girls and one-third boys. They simmered down in the course of three years to four girls and two boys, as well as I remember. They none of them had any talent in composition. The girls went in for music teaching. One of the boys was Glen Haydon, who became eventually a professor in Berkeley and some time in the '30's, I think, went to the University of North Carolina as head of the Music Department there. He died about a year ago, but I had the satisfaction of writing the foreword to a festschrift that his colleagues had gotten together for him that will be published any day now. The other young man, Russick, became one of the prominent members in the Music Educators' National Conference and supervisor of music, I think, in the schools in Cincinnati. He has also died. The students were good students. They worked hard and took some rather unusual courses. History of Music, I decided, was not a freshman, sophomore, even junior year subject. It was a graduate subject. But owing to the requirements for teachers' certificates and that sort of thing, I managed to salve my conscience and give a course in the history of music in the junior year. The course for the senior year that they all took was Introduction to Musicology, as Glen Haydon has put on record in Studies In Musicology (Chapel Hill, 1969) his book, The Introduction to Musicology . This was apparently the first course in musicology given in the United States. Apart from those two courses which I gave myself, I had a course in counterpoint in the junior year and in free composition in the senior year. One of the disciplines in counterpoint was a scheme that I had worked up for teaching Henry Cowell. It was a course in dissonant counterpoint, a complete topsy-turvy approach to counterpoint in which one prepared consonance and resolved consonance with dissonance instead of the reverse. Species One was entirely dissonant-- that is, in two parts the only intervals permitted were seconds, sevenths, ninths and tritones, octaves, thirds, sixths, fifths, and fourths were forbidden. The counter-point was prepared by a discipline in dissonant melody writing: that was writing melodies in which the skips were either dissonant skips or else, as I said in those days, dissonated very promptly--that is, if it was a skip of the major third, there would be after it a dissonance with one of the components of the major third. If it went C-E, the following tone could be C-sharp or D-flat, D-sharp or E-flat, B or B-flat, either at a seconds or a sevenths or ninths interval. The concept of dissonance was extended to rhythm, and no successions of two equal beats could be followed by a succession of two equal beats. The Idea was to make a rhythmic flow which went from a doublet into a triplet and from a triplet perhaps back to a doublet, but more dissonantly into a quintuplet or a quadruplet. I had a syllabus for this course, but unfortunately, all copies were burned up in the big fire in Berkeley, which burned up all my records of the Berkeley period, for I had left them in a small house down on Euclid Avenue and the flames burned everything within blocks of it. Later on, in his studies abroad, Henry Cowell swears that he saw a copy on the desks of both Schoenberg and Hindemith. I know I sent copies to them, but that they were on the piano or desk of Schoenberg or Hindemith we have to leave to Henry Cowell.

TUSLER

What was the reaction of this kind of counter-point?

SEEGER

Whose reaction?

TUSLER

The students'?

SEEGER

The students took it like lambs. They did their best. They had to in those days, because there was no opposing Professor Seeger. When he said you should do something, you did it. It wasn't even an "or else." It takes a very young man sometimes to act that way, but I was positive I was right. The thing that impressed me at this time in Berkeley, in the year 1913-1914, 'was my own ignorance and the almost appalling knowledge, ability, and skill of my colleagues in other departments. When I was working up my history of music course, which I had two years to work on before I gave it, I realized that something was wrong with the textbooks that had to be used, and even the sources that had to be used. By this time I had begun to be aware that there were sources. At first, I'd thought there were only textbooks. So I acquired some of them through the library, and by diligent and somewhat militant practices persuaded the library to begin to build a music section. What I insisted upon was a beginning of the collection of the complete works of the great composers, and I started in with three, with a possible fourth--Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Brahms we had to pick up in the form of sheet music. They thought I was pretty crazy, but I said, "How many complete works of Shakespeare do you have?" Well, I've forgotten what the answer was, but it was up in the dozens or hundreds, and they didn't have a single complete set of Beethoven or any other great composer. So I had my way. I also was able to get a complete set of the published papers of the Royal Music Association, some of the works of the great German historians, and the Oxford History of Music, which was about the best thing in English at the time, and so forth. But as I looked at these books on the history of music, I realized that they all stopped about the time I thought that music began to be showing some signs of life, and there must be something wrong with these historians that couldn't bring the history of music up to later than 180O. Fortunately, I ran into Frederick Teggart, who was a professor of history, and we liked each other, so I began to go around to his seminar. My friend Cory accompanied me. There I began to get the ideas of modern history writing. Teggart was right in the middle of drafting his first book on the theory of history as process, and I took it to heart very seriously and began to try to find out what was the history of the music process. At the same time, I began to be skeptical about the meanings of the words we were using. Different authors whose books I read seemed to use words in different senses, especially words such as rhythm and meter and harmony and melody and so forth--all the common words used and supposed to be music technical terms. I had been brought up at Harvard on the old nineteenth-century "elements of music" philosophy and I decided that what they called elements of music weren't elements of music at all, that they were simply misnomers in language that misrepresented music. So I began to go around to the philosophers to find out what words meant-- [George P.] Adams and [Clarence I.] Lewis and [Jacob] Loewenberg (he was in my class at Harvard and was an instructor there in the Philosophy Department). I went to the seminars and discovered that words could be used with precise meanings, which I'd never bothered about before. As long as a word had a lot of vague meanings, that was sufficient for me. The more vague they were, the better. Now I was looking for precise meanings. This led me over also into the question of this thing they call "science." Well, science was doing a lot about music. It was designing concert halls and instruments, analyzing the sounds that we call musical sounds, and there were beginning to be psychologies of music. So I had to look into all of these, and discovering presently that their methods differed a good deal, I was finally face to face with a method of science. I fortunately had to hand Pearson's Grammar of Science , which became my Bible for the next few years. I went all out for science. At the same time, I was very keenly critical of the people who wrote about music and especially people who wrote about the new compositions and the concerts; they were writing about value, and they knew nothing about value; they'd never studied anything about value and they didn't know anything about the history of criticism. They were a bunch of rascals who were drinking the life-blood of music and distorting the image of music in the public's eye. My success in finding out something about value was much slower. There was no grammar of criticism, such as a grammar of science, and I had to bone it out mostly for myself. Arthur [U. ] Pope, who was then the assistant professor of philosophy, was an aesthetician and I went around to his classes and lectures, but I couldn't take aesthetics, he called "the philosophy of the beautiful" was all right in itself, but as I said, music is not all beautiful. Some of it isn't beautiful, and I was left pretty much high and dry there. One day (I've forgotten how it happened, or the exact year; it might have been later than I think) in a summer session, a professor from Harvard named Ralph Barton Perry vas advertised to give a lecture in Wheeler Hall on the general theory of value. I said, "Aha, this is my meat." He was a youngish man, a little older than I, so I went to his first lecture. The old administration building auditorium held something like two hundred and fifty people, I think, and there was a mass of people outside, three times what the hall would hold. So I rushed up to the president's office (oh, yes, this m.ust have been later than 1913-1914, it must have been quite a good deal later) and said, "We've got to put this man in a bigger hall; this is scandalous. The place is chaos ." They said, "Well, there's Wheeler Hall over there-- take the whole lot of them up there." So I took them up there, and Ralph Barton Perry was my devoted friend from then on. His first lecture was an eye and ear-opener to me. There was such a thing as the study of value! It had been conducted mostly by psychologists and economists in Austria, and I hadn't learned of their existence. I had gone into the critique of reason of Kant; I'd taken a seminar on Kant, but I hadn't been able to make any headway with his Reinen Vernunf t . The sentences were too long and too verbose, and my German wasn't up to it, and I didn't have a translation. (Yes, I think I've anticipated myself a bit here.) At any rate, the value aspect of the history of music was just as much up in my mind as was the scientific, but I couldn't do much about it. I had to give what lectures I gave on value off the cuff, pretty much subjectively. That I could transfer from literary criticism to music criticism was clear, and under guidance of my friend Cory, my critical apparatus became much improved. But the apparatus of literary criticism, fell far short of what I wanted the apparatus of musical criticism to be. Throughout my work in Berkeley, the critical aspect of my work was far less well handled than the scientific. Now let me see what else I should say about that year 1913-1914.

TUSLER

What were your connections with the higher administration?

SEEGER

We were very smooth and very good. The president backed me as well as he thought I should be, and while I was housed for 1913-1915 I think, in an old house since torn down on Bancroft that smelled rather badly, we moved into a much better house, as I say, up behind what's now the Women's Faculty Club. I had at least some money for buying books, instruments, library materials. The University Recitals went on, and everything was going very nicely. Now whether it was in 1913-1914 or whether it was early in the next year I don't remember, but I think it was along in the spring of '14 before the war. Cory and I were holding forth one night on immortality, I think it was, to a group of our young faculty members and graduate students, and we thought we did a beautiful job. I noticed there was a man over in the corner who didn't say much, and after a while he opened up. He was a redheaded fellow, an economist named Parker, Carleton [H.] Parker. I wish I could reproduce his denunciation of the two of us. It was tempered and professorial, as it should be, but he pulled no punches. We just didn't live in a real world. we were sitting up in an ivory tower talking nonsense, and we could talk our heads off and it wouldn't make any difference to anything at all, and we were just children and damn fools. Well, we rather liked that; we liked people to come out and say what they thought. So we took him up, and we had a marvelous session, as a result of which he said, "You come off with me and I'll show you something," When we were able to make an arrangement we went off with Carleton Parker to the valley. I've forgotten what the first place we went to was; I think it was in the hopfields. The migratory workers, the agricultural workers, were making a lot of trouble in California at the time, and efforts were being made by the IWW's, the old International Workers of the World, to organize them. They were having terrible trouble. On this ranch we saw the handcarts and the wagons (I don't remember any automobiles) that the workers had come to this ranch in. As we went over the dusty entrance to the ranch, we found some tents were set up--I've forgotten whether there were any shacks or not, but I remember the tents. There were a lot of children around, some animals, and there was a latrine, nothing but a hoard over a ditch not too very far away. The workers were in the fields, and the workers were everybody over about six years old who could do anything in that connection. The trouble was, the children looked just like my children. (My second boy had been born by that time. They were yellow-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked specimens, healthy and happy.) These miserable, dirty little pockmarked skinny specimens, some of them with bloated stomachs, had rather put me down. We talked to some of the workers, and they told about the miserable wages and hard working order, the long working day, and the insecurity of the employment; they'd sometimes travel several days laboriously through the hot valley to find that there was no job. We visited a Hindu temple that had been built by one of the ranchers so that his Hindu workers could worship properly. The conditions on that ranch, I don't remember, but the fact I don't remember them [may mean] they may have been a little bit better than the first one. We went to one or two other ranches, and it was a pretty dreadful situation. Meanwhile, Parker was telling us that the large proportion of the people in the world lived this way, and the way we thought the reality of life was laid out was really something quite different. Well, this had been on my mind for a number of years. I'd been brought up, as I think I said, with my father's philosophy, that about seventy percent of the people in the world were just stupid and couldn't do anything for themselves, and about all you could do was just keep them from rioting and making trouble. But I had begun to doubt this. When I was in Berlin there was a riot outside the Reichstag one time, of the Socialists for some reason or other, and a full account of it was in the German newspapers. I never read newspapers; I thought that was a foolish occupation for a composer. But my friend Sweet one day when I went up to his room had the paper on his desk, and I said, "What do you read this stuff for? You have nothing to do with that.'' He said, "Well, Seeger, these people may have something." "Oh," I said, "nonsense. They're nothing but gutter-snipes, and politicians are using the guttersnipes to advance themselves." Then we had a lively argument. But at the same time, my friend the poet, Wheelock, had been glorifying what he called "sane and sensual humanity" in some poems that I was very much impressed with and I had used these in the libretto of my opera for the choral part, which was to take something like the choral part of the Greek drama. The chorus was to be arranged on two sides of the stage in ranks behind a screen so that you couldn't see them. They could see the conductor and they could sing through the screen to the audience, but you couldn't see them, and the actors on the stage would act entirely independent of them choruses on the stage were out. So this idealistic concern with the brotherhood of man was accompanied by me with the leftovers of my childish scorn of the "lower classes ." I had seen misery in Mexico City, where the children rolled around in the dirt and the sewage of the dogs and other animals, and in the Mexican villages, where the children were at least healthier because they were outdoors and they would have plenty of greenery that they could eat. And I'd seen the miserable children in the Lower East Side in New York and in the slums of the great European cities. But they were hopeless. You couldn't do anything with them. Some nice people and even some relatives of mine had gone into settlement work, and I respected them for it, but I would say, "What can you do with those people? What could you do with these dirty, unfed hopelessly unintelligent beings?" And still there was a wall between the idealistic sympathy with Wheelock's poetry and the growing feeling that perhaps something ought to be done about it. Well this had been more or less gnawing at my thinking and feeling processes for some time. My old state of mind had been undermined by Teggart's seminars in the process of history where huge multitudes of people went at each other hammer and tongs, and they killed each other, tortured each other, and shut each other up in stockades and ghettos and so forth. Human life began to represent something to me that was not Just like the life of "our dear queen." I think Carleton Parker's criticism disposed of the last shreds of these childish survivals. I don't mean to say that my father was a brute. He wasn't, but he was a quiet, gentle person who simply had that view, and that view was shared by the people whom he most admired in life; anyone who went out and tried to do anything for this multitude, that was all to the good, but not everybody could do that, and somebody else had to do something else, anyway. Somebody else had to earn the money to pay for the settlement workers, and so the whole thing was in a neat picture of nineteenth-century laissez-faire economy. That, I think, more or less winds up my second year at Berkeley, which was for me a graduation into the life that the bachelor is supposed to graduate into. I was twenty-seven or eight by that time, instead of being twenty-one--a few years late, but still it did happen, thank heavens, at that time. I think also at that time through Carleton Parker I had met Emil Kern, an old Kautskian Socialist who lived more or less by his wits in San Francisco and had a shack over on the Pacific, who took a shine to Cory and me, and we took a shine to him. He made fun of us, as Parker did, and so that was a healthy thing. Emil Kern was a disenchanted, misanthropic, old German who'd come over here and had no faith in the American way of life. He'd look at my fireplace and he'd say, "You know, you fool Americans, you burn up enough wood in that fire to heat a building ten times the size of this. Most of the heat goes up the chimney. You ought to go over to Germany and learn how to have a good, little briquette stove off in the corner and keep your whole room much warmer and more healthy."

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
OCTOBER 20, 1966

SEEGER

The academic year of 1914-1915 no sooner began than World War I broke out. California seemed very far away, and most of us felt very much in the position of observers. My own feeling was, having studied in Germany and disliking German militarism, that it was a tossup between the two undesirable opponents, the German militaristic machine and the vast and apparently unshakable British Empire, whose misdeeds were of course ringing in our ears year after year in the newspapers. For the United States, imperialistic ideas were beginning to evolve, and they were not entirely harmonious with the British. There is not much to say about the actual conduct of the music work after that year; it became solidified. The courses were increasingly well attended. Courses in voice culture were introduced. The students were advancing through my planned four-year course for the BA, and the University Recitals continued. They were of pretty good quality. Things were going very well. The development of contacts with San Francisco was increasing on two sides, on two different paths. On the one hand, I had some introductions to well-to-do families in San Francisco and would go for luncheons, receptions and dinners to the big houses on the tops of the hills, where I knew the Bournes and the Kings, and I've forgotten the names of the others now. On the other hand, my friend Cory and I began to be invited to give lectures to the Radical Club, which met in small restaurants on the border of what they used to call the Barbary Coast. I can't be too sure of just what the chronological order of events along here is, and perhaps it doesn't make too much difference, but the most exciting events were the marches of the old IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) through the valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento, trying to organize the migratory workers. Our sympathies were, of course, at once involved. The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra was improving in stature, and musical life was beginning to build up. One of the difficulties was getting hold of music. I discovered a small music importing house in Los Angeles and began to import music from Germany and Russia direct to them. They gave me faster service than New York, there was no place in San Francisco from which I could order. The last opuses of Scriabin and the early [work] of Schoenberg and Stravinsky began to come in. One of my students, Dorothy Pillsbury, rather liked to play two-piano music with me, and we worked up a number of programs to the point where we could give them in public. I had not been placed on the Committee for Music and Drama. It was chaired by Professor [William Dalton] Armes of the English Department. I don't know whether Professor Armes remembered or not, but when I was in Harvard and taking Professor [George Pierce] Baker's course in the drama (I think it was English 21, I'm not positive of the name). Professor Armes, then an elderly man with a gray beard, was on leave from California and taking courses with Professor Baker because he wanted to work up his own courses in California. The desks and benches in Professor Baker's old room were rather shaky, and Ned Sheldon and I took great pleasure in shaking the desk that we were sitting at, at the other end of which was Professor Armes, so that his avid notetaking was thrown completely out of kilter. [laughter] I don't know whether he remembered this or not, but my first session with Prof essor Armes, I think it was in the fall of 1912, was inauspicious. He showed me with great pride the Sunday afternoon programs of music, "Half- Hours of Music," I think they called them, in the Greek Theatre. The programs were appalling. There was a woman whistler on one, and a solo cornetist on another [laughter] , and with my characteristic frankness of expression in those days, I denounced these in no uncertain terras. Armes' feelings were hurt beyond repair, and he would not have me on the committee for all the time that I was in Berkeley. Our relations went from bad to worse, until finally it was open warfare. I can't remember just exactly how the thing progressed from bad to worse, but I disapproved of most of his programs and he was not interested in mine. He had thousands at his afternoons in the Greek Theatre, and I had mere hundreds at the University Recitals, so he felt an advantage. Later on, I think it was in 1915 or 1916, he was approached by the manager in San Francisco of Leo Ornstein, a hell-to-leather young New York pianist who played the piano with his fists, who interested me very much, and of course was an idol of Henry Cowell. Herr Armes turned thumbs down on the concert by Leo Ornstein, and so when the manager came to me, I said, "Why, of course, I'd just love to give him a concert." So we started to make arrangements. I had no money, and I explained to the manager that he'd have to do the thing on a shoestring, and he could have all the profits above the expenses. Evidently Armes got wind of this, and the first thing I knew the manager told me he was dropping the matter because Professor Armes was going to take it up. That was just about what I should have expected, but I hadn' t expected it. The evening of the concert came (this must have been a good deal later; it must have been 1916 or maybe even 1917--yes, I guess it was 1917), and owing to the shocking publicity, Wheeler Hall was practically full. I had accepted an assignment from the student newspaper, I think it was called the Daily Californian , to review the concert, and when I presented myself at the entrance. Professor Armes was standing behind the ticket box. I had no ticket and he wouldn't let me in. Henry Cowell went on in--we were together. I returned to the music building and wrote up a review, and Henry came around Just about as I was finishing it and told me how wonderful the concert was; so I put at the end of my review: "This revievr was written in the music building while the concert was in progress, because I was refused entrance." And it was published. [laughter] Poor Armes never got over it. He was ill at the time; I didn't know it. I finally had an appealing letter from him in his freehand writing, which wound up: "With this explanation, may our hopeless feud be ended," or something of that sort. Of course, it didn't end it. He died not long afterwards, not on that account, I'm sure, but of others. I had been on the Committee for Music Education, and that's how I got off on this side issue of Armes. It was a very stuffy committee that was at war with the humanities. The educators were supposed, after taking a certain number of courses in education, to be able to teach anything] the humanists were interested in the people who were going to teach some subject knowing something about the subject. I got along perfectly well with the educators by keeping my mouth shut, and was presently visiting high schools in the foothills of California as a neophyte member of the committee on education. I spent a couple of weeks each spring going through the foothills. It was extremely interesting, and at each high school I would give a talk as a visiting man from Berkeley; since I was a musician I talked about music, and then I would play for them. Iwould play some conservative music, perhaps something from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, or Bach, and then perhaps something from Chopin or Schumann or Brahms, and then wind up with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or Scriabin. The students in these high schools I was visiting slumbered through the early parts of the program, but really perked up for the modern music which they loved. It never failed to get a hand. At some of the nearer high schools that I went to, Dorothy Pillsbury came with me, and we gave performances on two pianos when we could get two pianos tuned together. One of our chefs d ' oeuvre was the first half of the Consecration of Spring by Stravinsky, which was greeted with enormous applause by the students and dismay by the older people. As the year 1914-1915 went on, my second boy [John] was born. Henry [Cowell] brought in more and more good stuff. I felt more and more sure of myself and when an old friend offered to loan us money to build a house, we accepted with pleasure. We had made some very warm friends from the faculty. I remember Mr. and Mrs. John Galen Howard. Howard was the architect of the early white buildings--the main library building, the campanile and the two little cheese boxes down below, Boalt Hall and the Administration Building. They were warm friends of the Gregorys, who had a house up on Greenwood Terrace; Noyes and Wells of the English Department were friends of theirs. With one or two others they had formed a poetry club, and they used to meet at the members' houses where, after dinner, each member would read in turn from the English poets. When my turn came, I read Shelley's Peter Bell the Third , which was a merciless satire of Wordsworth, and the shipwreck from Byron's Don Juan , both designed to shock my friends. The shock was almost complete, I'm sure, but they took it with good grace. So naturally when it came to buying a house, I wanted to buy a house up at the head of La Loma, near the Howards and the Gregorys and the Noyes. We found a beautiful lot just back of the Gregorys owned by Bernard Maybeck, the architect. It had a beautiful willow tree in the middle of it, and with Arthur Pope of the Philosophy Department, we divided the lot and met the conditions of Maybeck that he would design the exterior at least, if not the interior, too. So we had the advantage for the small amount of money that we paid for the land of having the genial architect provide the plans for us. During the summer of 1915 , the house was built. I was a rather unruly client for dear old Mr. Maybeck. I insisted upon my own floor plan. He saw no harm in it, but when I started working things out into inches, I could see a certain amount of disapproval; but the floor plan was accepted and the house was staked out so as to preserve the beautiful tree. La Loma Avenue, which now is almost an expressway behind the house, was at that time a footpath, and the neighbors all assured me that it would never be anything but a footpath, that the petitions were in the works for its being closed to ever being a road, so that I would be perfectly safe in placing the house where I did. Maybeck put the outside on, and the house is still standing. I had a good landscape architect plant it, allowing a place for a couple of Christmas trees which were redwood trees about three or four feet high whichj after the decorations were taken off were planted. One of them is now about fifty feet high. I had bought an autcmobile a Model-T Ford--oh no, I think I bought the Model-T the next year--at any rate, we spent the summer down at Carmel in Mrs. Howard's cottage (which we rented), and came up to supervise the building of the house from time to time. The little round studio that I built for myself at the foot of the lot was almost finished, and I made the mistake of sleeping through the night on the floor, contracting a horrible case of grippe. My first masque had been performed by the girl students of the University in 1914--it was Derdra ; their second was the Queen' s Masque [in 1915] and a repeat performance was arranged. I had a rehearsal for it but was too sick to conduct, so Miss Pillsbury, who'd been in on the rehearsal and the conducting and copying of the parts, made shift to conduct it somehow or other with the help of the concertmaster and some members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. By that time, entry of the United States into the World War was very much under discussion. War feeling was mounting in California, and it must have been during those years that the University became very strongly pro-Ally. I still remained pretty much aloof. I couldn't see that the German side was any worse than the English side. This made some bad feeling, and I can trace the relationship of the Music Department to the rest of the University partly in terms of this feeling. The young members of the faculty and the graduate students seemed to be pretty much against the United States entering the war. Woodrow Wilson was campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out of war," and we were pretty sure of ourselves. There was a small group of us who were rather good friends, older graduate students and the younger members of the staff, who used to go off on hikes on weekends to Bolinas and up to Mount St. Helena and other places where we would either swim or hike and in the evenings sit around and discuss the world in general, sometimes putting on impromptu plays in which I would sit at the piano, improvising accompanying music, and the actors would pretend sometimes to sing and act more or less in the emerging style of the movies. I remember one especially successful evening at the old roadhouse at the top of the pass (it was a dirt road then) of Mount St. Helena where Cory made furious love to a very pretty girl whose name I've forgotten now. I think she was an instructor in the English Department; it was a huge success. It was up near Silver Mine, made famous in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters . When It came to signing up for the drafts I signed as a conscientious objector. The dear old judge who took my deposition begged me not to do it, but I was adamant, and thought the issues of the war were about fifty-fifty, and that fighting wouldn't do any good whatever, that the two might just as well fight each other to a deadlock and make some kind of peace without involving the United States. As the war fever Increased, my lectures at the Radical Club and the IWW meetings were more frequent. I needn't go into many more details here except to say that I was Invited to give a lecture to the IWW's at their meeting place out on Market Street on the second or third floor of a loft. I went up full of spirits to find that the doorway was surrounded by a cordon of police and a huge crowd of people. We made our way through and struggled up the stairs, simply packed with people and with plainclothesmen obviously stationed on the way. The room was filled to standing room, to the last square inch. My topic was Bertrand Russell's article on pacifism that had been published not long before in the Atlantic Monthly , pacifism being, of course, in this respect an issue of the IWW's and of a very large part of California. (Carl Seashore, the psychologist, who had been visiting the previous summer session, I remember voiced his opinion one night that California certainly must be four-to-one against entering the war.) I gave my lecture to a most appreciative audience. My sallies were greeted with enormous applause, and I remember only the final denouement. Bertrand Russell here was talking sense, but the only thing was about the program that he outlined that it was absolutely impractical, that unfortunately people would fight. After the cheers died down, the officers of the IWW present came forward and gave me an invitation to join, which I humbly declined, because I said I wasn't worthy of mixing my bourgeois background in with their proletarian ancestries. As a matter of fact, there was a young Oxford or Cambridge man there whose name I forget, whom I'd known for a couple of years and was a confirmed IWW, and who was involved somewhere in their internal organization. But my belief at that time was that if the working people were going to do anything for themselves, they'd better not have any upper-class people too closely connected with them, that they were rather dangerous even though they might voice sympathies. As I remember, the men took it very nicely and appreciated it, and we shook hands warmly all around. Whether any word of this reached the University authorities or not I never knew but undoubtedly they were informed that this young professor was really carrying on a little bit beyond the bounds of decency. Cory and I and some of our colleagues began to meet with rather cold glances from our academic friends. I remember one day, just in front of the Administration Building, passing a man whom I admired very much, some of whose seminar meetings I had attended, a biologist by the name of [Samuel Jackson] Holmes, who cut me dead. I turned sharply and caught him by the arm and said, "What's the matter?" He said, "I do not recognize people who approve of soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies to barn doors." The only thing I could think of saying was, "Where do you get the data for your field of study, from the newspapers?" and turned on my heel and walked off. That didn't help matters. Things got worse and worse. President Wheeler, who had been a publicly known Germanophile, was in trouble, not that people didn't stand by him, because he was much admired and very capable, but he was in internal trouble, I think, and began to be rather undependable in his speech. He would make slips, such as introducing the president of Mills College as the president of Wells College at a class day speech and he obviously felt terribly badly about the situation. I wouldn't be surprised that it led to his premature death. Everybody knew that for years he had had a large portrait of Emperor William over his piano in the president's house. The administration of the university otherwise was increasingly strongly pro-Ally, and Professor [Charles Mills] Gayley, who was dean and eventually became acting president, was an Englishman. Anybody can see that in spite of the fact that I had now increased the enrollment of the Music Department to several hundred, my term was limited. My students had gotten along very well. They studied hard, did well, and we finally put on kind of a party, a graduating party for my first class that I'd seen through from the first year to the fourth. I don't remember much about it, except that I devised a two-piano composition improvised by Henry Cowell and myself, in which there was a cadenza for conductor solo, the conductor being Glen Haydon. He was a tall (he must have been six foot three inches at least) redheaded clarinetist who was anything but an actor, but he put on a perfectly beautiful half-minute cadenza, the conductor solo, finally collapsing on the podium to the small audience's delight. [laughter] I had meanwhile bought my first automobile, a Model-T, and had spent several weeks tramping up and down California with my wife and two small children. We arranged it this way: the back of the front seat was cut and hinged to fill in the foot room of the back seat, and I extended the front seat with some kind of a device so that a double mattress could he put inside. My wife and I slept inside. The younger boy slept in the back foot room with his head poking out through the open door. (It was what they called a tonneau in those days; there were two side doors and of course a collapsible top.) The older boy was slung in a kind of hammock on the right footboard, the hammock being a cord between the edge of the front mudguard and the back mudguard. In that way, we could all be off the ground when we wanted to be. We sometimes would all sleep out on the ground. We went up north and we went down south, and we went through several of the Indian reservations, Yosemite, over the Tioga Pass, which you could imagine in those days was something of an adventure--the road was just a dirt road; and it was a wonderful experience. There had been at the time some twelve hundred wax cylinders of California Indian music collected by various anthropological expeditions in the Department of Anthropology, and of course these were put at my disposal. I remember going around and listening to these, the first field recordings that I ever heard, and finally having it occur to me that some of them didn't sound very well. So I went to the anthropologist in charge, I forget his name now, and said, "Some of these recordings seem to not sound as well as others." "Oh," he said, "yes, they deteriorate very rapidly under playing." I remember even then having enough sense to say, "Well, you're a damn fool if you let any body play them." "Oh," he said, "we let anyone play them, graduate students or anyone else. It's good for them." And I said, "Well, it's not good for the records, and you're criminals to let these things be heard because they are some day going to be very valuable." I had no idea of there being such a thing as a study of this material. It was in process in Berlin, but I had no idea that it was. Well, to wind up the stay in Berkeley as fast as I can, I arranged to take a sabbatical year off in the East in 1918 and 1919, realizing that probably I would not be reappointed at the end of my seven years. The anxiety of the war and also hard work had made steady inroads on my health. I'd always been able to do anything I wanted, although I was very underweight and slight. Let me see. I was six foot two Inches and weighed l42 pounds. When I went up for my physical examination for the draft, the doctors were really quite scornful, and I remember one of them pointing over to a magnificent specimen, who really could have posed for a statue of a Greek athlete, and he said, "There's a soldier." I often wondered whether that boy lived through the war. My status as conscientious objector was never challenged. I remember when I was called upon by two men to buy war bonds--everybody was supposed to buy war bonds--I refused. I said, "I don't approve of this war and I won't willingly pay a cent to support it. I am a law-abiding citizen, if the government has to tax people for the war and they pass a law that everybody shall pay a certain tax, I'll pay it, but I won't contribute voluntarily." Being in a prominent position, and California being very largely still against the war even up to the summer of 1917, I was never bothered; but some other young conscientious objectors were. I remember there was a young professor whom I rather admired; I've forgotten what university he was in--he was an economist. He was made to stand up with twenty-five others at the camp to which he'd been taken, and the fire hose was turned on them; they were knocked down. When they were resuscitated. they were made to stand up again and knocked down again. I don't know how long it kept up, but several of them died. The continuing excitement of being antiwar in a war economy and a war psychology had worked on me very seriously. The loss of certain friendships had also worked. I had composed the music for the two partheneias, keeping a heavy academic program going at the same time. By "a heavy academic program" I don't mean teaching two seminars, which is the case with many of our professors nowadays, but a teaching schedule of fifteen, sixteen, or eighteen hours, not counting the appointments with single students outside, with half a dozen different courses. So my wife and I decided that we would go East. The war was still in progress, and it must have been September, 1918 when we rented the house and got permission to travel by Pullman with the two children to New York. It was a slow and somewhat interrupted trip, but we got there. We were met at Poughkeepsie by my mother and sister in a rented car, and taken cross-country to my father's country place five miles south of Pawling, Dutchess County, New York, where they had bought the old Patterson house; a Patterson had received his deed to the land from the Revolutionary authorities back in the eighteenth century. It was a lovely house, designed by an architect who had done only four or five in the area. They had enough coal to keep the house warm; they had two country girls for servants and we spent a wonderful winter together. My father was in Paris as vice-president for Europe of the American Rubber Export Company, [which had] headquarters in Paris. I hadn't been in Patterson very long before we heard over the telephone that peace had been declared, November 11, 1918. I was in pretty bad shape. I remember we were much worried about it so that I went into the Institute of Life Extension in New York either that year or a year or so later for my first serious physical examination. I was given a very low grade. There wasn't much I could do. I was shot to pieces, wouldn't last long. The events that I have been speaking of so far had mostly to do with my relations to society in general, but within that conflict, that largely social-psychological conflict, there was an intellectual conflict. I found that although theoretically I could compose at any time, while I was teaching, I couldn't; and it finally came to be shown to be fact that in Patterson, where I didn't have to do anything except appear for three square meals a day and spend all the rest of my time at composition. I couldn't compose. The virus of musicology had gotten into me, and talking about music became something which I couldn't separate and it didn't occur to me to separate, from making music. In 1916, I had been invited to give two lectures at Harvard. At that time I had announced my course on the introduction to musicology that I've already spoken about, and when they asked me for the title, I gave them the title "Introduction to Musicology: Scientific Method," Lecture I; "Critical Method," Lecture II. The answer from Professor Spalding was, "We've talked over the word musicology in our faculty meeting, and we don't think much of it, please find another word." And so I dutifully changed the title to "The Organization of Musical Knowledge: Scientific Method and Critical Method." The first lecture went very nicely, and the second lecture I had about twice as many people. The lecture on criticism naturally started in with the question of what was value in connection with music. I cited one thing that worried me very much. Music must have some relation to society. It's inconceivable that it shouldn't. Young composers wrote operas because wealthy people wanted to have operas written. They wrote symphonies because wealthy people wanted to have symphonies written. They wrote a cappella choral masses because the Catholic Church would support them for life while they wrote these masses. They wrote the music that was demanded of them. It was only in the Romantic period that they began to write music that they wanted to write for themselves and society didn't ask them to write, and they sometimes had a hard time making two ends meet. I said, "Well, here am Ij you all know that I graduated here with honors in music and want to be a composer-- but who wants my music? In other words, what's the value to society of my music? To me, it's everything, but what is it to society? We live in a business economy here, and everything is talked about sooner or later in terms of money; money is a means of exchange for economic value. How is economic value decided? It's by supply and demand, and techniques of distribution." I had read enough Marx to be able to pretty much get over their depths, because I'm sure that none of them had read Marx, but actually my Marxism was extremely weak. I said, "Let's put it this way. The so-and-so committee of Congress has just published a report. It shows that a very large proportion of the population of the United States lives at an income level below what is considered subsistence [level] by ordinary social work standards. I know perfectly well that no matter what kind of music I write, this rather large percentage of the population (I've forgotten what it was) won't give a damn about my music. Even if you took it to them they wouldn't like it. They won't go out and ask for it; much less will they pay for it because they can't even pay enough money to get bread and milk. Now, it doesn't bother me too much that grown people can't get this bread and milk, but I must say that it rather bothers me that the children can't get the bread and milk. I have two little children, and it touches me rather closely when I think of those two children starving to death. "What is the relation of my music to this United States of ours, a large part of which, which really vorries me greatly, is living at a starvation level, a still very substantial part is barely squeezing by, a rather small part is really living in what you might call comfort, and a pretty respectable percentage is living in utmost luxury? I can't make head or tail out of it. What shall I do? I ask you that question. "As I work it out from the figures of this committee, the five thousand dollars a year that I require to sustain my family and myself in the condition to which we are accustomed, where I can have a good piano and enough household service so that I'm free to compose as much as I want, represents the difference between a sub-subsistence level and a bare subsistence level of one hundred twenty-eight people." And I gave them the figures by which I calculated this. "Now," I said, "of this one hundred twenty-eight people, there are undoubtedly some loafers who wouldn't work even if you gave them a chance to work, but there are some people who are probably asking for work and trying to get it and can't, and there are children probably without enough to eat, no medical care, no clothes, no decent living conditions. How can I go on saying, 'I like the music I compose and a few of my friends do and then wait for music historians two or three generations later to decide whether it's good or bad?" I said, "I can't function under ethical situations like this. The situation's gotten so bad that it's beginning to influence my composition, and I'm wondering if I'm writing the kind of music the American people want, even though I like it better than the popular music that they seem to pay very readily for. "Well, there's the question, gentlemen, take it or leave it, I can't live with it. What shall I do?" Until a few years ago, I think, some fifty years later. Harvard hadn't quite entirely gotten over that lecture. I remember meeting Randall Thompson, who was chairman of the department in the fifties — I was in Cambridge at the time and wanted permission to use the library there, to enter the stacks, which he very graciously signed for me. We happened to be talking about old times and I said, "Do you remember those lectures that I gave at Harvard? Do you remember them?" He said, "I certainly do, I still have my notes," looking at me in a rather disapproving manner. [laughter] My friend George Footo, whom I'd gone through college with, and had been almost on a blood-brother friendship basis with in Germany, wrote me a few weeks afterwards, "Dear Charles: Since our political views differ so extremely, I think that perhaps we might cease our correspondence." I never wrote to him again for thirty-odd years, nor he to me. Well, this inner conflict, which was an intellectual-musical conflict with me, and the outer social conflict between me and society, reduced me to a pretty low level. I had horrible indigestion and didn't know how to live, and decided that what I'd better do would be to just live an ordinary physical life for a couple of years and then try to work out some way of supporting my family. I had enough income from the first year, for my sabbatical year and then from the renting of my house to struggle by for a little while. My wife took the whole matter with the best grace possible. She could see that I was pretty near the end of my rope physically and did everything to help. We worked out a scheme by which, when my mother and sister left for Europe, we would live on at the house, taking complete care of ourselves. Father didn't need the house and was glad to have it occupied, and we dispensed with the servants and we shared the care of the children. Our third child Peter was born that spring of 1919 and I took as much care of him as his mother did. I learned to change diapers, give baths, make milk formulas, feed, quiet, entertain, and in general do half the work of taking care of the three boys, the cooking, and the house cleaning and everything else. We worked out a scheme between the two of us that is about the most crazy thing I ever heard of. We had decided that the American people didn't have enough good music, and my wife, not having enough strength to go through the regular concert mill, and my not having enough strength to do much of anything, we decided we'd go off and play our violin and piano recitals in two ways: we would play in the houses of well-to-do friends and small concert organizations, and make enough money to play in small schools and churches and fraternal meetings or any others that would be willing to hear us for nothing. We would put up our own signs and we would travel on our own, by my building a trailer in which we could live, which would be pulled on behind the Model-T Ford. So I started in building the trailer. I went to the Trailmobile factory, a small fly-by-night organization then down on Long Island, and gave them the dimensions of the chassis I wanted. We had to cut one in two and weld in a few feet of iron. The wheels had one and one-half inch solid rubber tires on them, and the draw bar weighed about sixty pounds--it was five feet long. I put a four-speed transmission in the Ford, and it took me a year to build the trailer. I remember putting in oak beams that would be quite suff icient--no, twice as sufficient--for the second story of a California house. The outside of it was wood, the top was canvas like a prairie wagon, and it could collapse for getting under low bridges We had a little zinc well in which a gasoline stove was put; we carried water in a few large canteens; and the toilet arrangements were a large pail with a cover. I had arranged a platform about five-by-five that could pull out from the chassis and make a little porch, which could be surrounded by a tarpaulin and made fairly tight for a winter porch, and we set out a few months later than we'd hoped, in November, I think, 1920. By this time, I had gotten stronger. I had gotten hold of the digestive situation by reading a book by a man named Christian, who said that the trouble with Americans was that they ate too much soft food, so I piled myself full of bran and lo and behold, the digestive troubles all disappeared and my muscles became hard as iron] I became pretty tough, for I had to drill holes in the steel frame of the chassis by hand. Nowadays, you do it with an electric tool. Well, we started off in November, all of us with colds, stacked up with a couple of gallons of maple syrup we'd made out of the maple trees on the place, some pumpkins, and enough potatoes to last us for a little while. Our first adventure was being overhauled by a traffic policeman near Briarcliff Manor on the way down to New York. This was of course before the days of freeways and park-ways. He was almost trembling with excitement [laughter] and he said, "Do you know what you're doing?" I said, "Yes." And he said, "But did you see the way that thing shakes that you have on behind?" I saidj "Yes, the road's shaky." It was a little one-track tar road in not very good shape; and he said, "Well, be careful." So we went on, and you should have seen us driving down Fifth Avenue. It was the first trailer to be lived in, I think, that most people had seen. Whether anybody had made another one I don't know. But the noise of the Ford pulling this heavy weight on behind (it weighed well over a ton) and the Ford full of children looking out from under the collapsible top, and the rather pretty woman sitting in front, and the man with the beard driving (I decided that shaving was one of the things I could dispense with on my first trip through California in 1916) created really quite an excitement. [laughter] Everywhere we went we became the cynosure of neighboring eyes. Well, we worked on down south, and I remember going out of Washington. There were already some campers on the road, automobile campers. They camped mostly in tents, but there were some campers like ours; I don't remember them, though. Ours was quite a big one; it was fourteen feet long. We all got into it with all our clothes, a small collapsible harmonium, the violin, and we took the children's toys. I remember going out of Alexandria up a hill and passing a Ford which didn't have a trailer on behind. We stopped at a gas station not far beyond,, and this man came up to me and said, "How do you do it? What kind of an engine have you got in there?" [laughter] Well, we were going up in the third speed; he couldn't make it in high speed, so he had to go into low speed. There were two speeds on the old Model-T, and I had four very powerful gears. With the engine running full speed I could move in first about one and one-half miles per hour, which guaranteed me that if the tires would hold you could climb almost anything.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 27, 1966

TUSLER

Today to start out I'd like to go back to your years at the University of California and ask you a few questions about the wartime situation there. You said you took a stand as a conscientious objector, but this was not, shall I say, put to the test because you were found physically unfit for service. Was your stand as a CO well known on the campus, and did you suffer any as a result of this?

SEEGER

I didn't advertise it, I didn't conceal it, either, but there was no particular interest taken in it.

TUSLER

So this had nothing to do with you leaving eventually.

SEEGER

I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

TUSLER

But for other reasons.

SEEGER

Yes. I think Professor Gayley would not have been particularly pleased, and there might even have been pressure upon him from outside, but I know nothing of it.

TUSLER

Did you have a particular disagreement with Professor Gayley?

SEEGER

Oh, no, we were always on excellent terms.

TUSLER

And with President Wheeler also?

SEEGER

Oh, yes.

TUSLER

He was a well-known pro-German, was he not?

SEEGER

I wouldn't say that he was pro-German, but he was a Germanophile, and of course when it came to the war, he never was pro-German in the ordinary sense of the word, as far as I know. He had lived as a Germanophlle all his life, and he found it a difficult choice to make, I'm sure, although I'm imputing this to him; I don't know, I never discussed it with him.

TUSLER

Did you know him well personally?

SEEGER

No, and I rather doubt that anyone knew Wheeler very well. He was an autocrat, but he was a very likable man.

TUSLER

Will you give me the exact circumstances of your leaving there? Did you know when you went on leave that you were not coming back?

SEEGER

No, I hadn't the slightest intention [of not coming back] . I was going to stay there, serve my sabbatical and put up a fight to go back, and I was pretty sure I'd win; but one day I was working in my little round studio--we'd already sublet the house and were living down the street farther, I think where Professor Kerman lives now; I think Tolraan, the physicist, built the house in the place that the old house burned down. Felix Warburg walked in on me one morning with a member of the Board of Regents, I've forgotten his name, a well-known San Francisco man whom I had previously met, and we discussed various matters v ery amicably. Felix Warburg was an old friend of my wife's. He and his wife had given us a very big wedding reception dinner at the time of our marriage in New York some years before. We walked down the street and as soon as we began talking my wife looked at me and said, "Well, it's all right. We'll go East." I had been pressing her to go East and spend the winter at Patterson with my mother and sister, and she'd finally decided that was the best thing to do. So it was rather a sudden decision and we left almost immediately, leaving our house fully furnished in the hands of some very nice people.

TUSLER

But there were no what you would call critical situations with anybody else on the campus which caused you to make the decision not to go back?

SEEGER

No, that was after I got away, the decision. I was still thinking I'd go back, but during the year at Patterson it was quite obvious upon reflection that I wasn't in any physical condition to do it, and that it would be a very hard fight; and so I wrote to Professor Gayley and asked him how it was with the University, whether they wanted me back, and he said, "No," and so I decided I wouldn't try to fight it out and let it go at that.

TUSLER

This physical disability of yours that year was brought on by these conflicts you said you had.

SEEGER

No, it was partly conflict, partly not knowing how to live.

TUSLER

Would you like to amplify those remarks at this point?

SEEGER

Well, I don't know that it's worthwhile. I didn't know how to stand, how to sit, how to exercise or be active, how to eat, or how to do anything. I'd grown like Topsy the way most other people had in those days, and that combined with the worry about the general situation made a combination. I realized I wasn't fit to go back.

TUSLER

Do you feel that your interest in musicology came from those years, or did that develop later?

SEEGER

My interest in musicology began in my first year at Berkeley, but it grew rather gradually and didn't define itself any too well until I got East in 1918 or 1919 and set myself to try to put on paper the ideas that had been stimulated by the contacts with Cory and Teggart, Lewis and Adams, Kroeber and Lowie. I found that I couldn't write, that I simply had no technique of writing that kind of prose, and I worked for about two years solidly, getting standard works from the Library of Congress. They were very generous and would lend me things that they now would not ordinarily allow to go out of the building to hold sometimes for two and three months. I borrowed a great many of the standard classics, some in first editions, seventeenth and eighteenth century works as well as nineteenth, and managed to cover quite a good many sources that hadn't been available to me in California. I wrote three papers during the two winters. One of them was "Music in the American University," which was published in the Educational Review and two papers that were published later in the Musical Quarterly .

TUSLER

Do you feel that the Music Department at Berkeley was at all musicologically oriented in those years that you were there?

SEEGER

It was beginning to be musicologically oriented in my last couple of years there.

TUSLER

Of course, at that time there really were no departments of musicology anywhere in the United States, were there?

SEEGER

Not even any courses given; my course was the first.

TUSLER

All right, then, shall we go on from where you stopped last time? You were describing your trip in your home-built trailer, and you had just started southward.

SEEGER

As I think I said, we all had colds when we started, and we got over them and never had another cold. The idea was to go to California. We decided to go by a southern route. As we got down into North Carolina, the roads got worse and worse and finally there were nothing but dirt tracks. Subsequent inquiry about the roads showed that they were worse. We decided to winter in Pinehurst. Looking around for a place to spend the winter, we found a nice pine grove and went to the nearest house and asked if we could camp out in it. They looked at us rather suspiciously, and the man was a pretty tough-looking specimen, I will say; but we managed to make friends with them, and they let us stay for a few days. One morning at about five o'clock, before dawn, there was a knocking on the door of the trailer and we were asked whether we would drive our neighbors to Carthage, a neighboring town, in order for them to get a new tire for their truck so that they could do a job during the day. We said sure, invited them in for a cup of coffee, set out, got the tire, and our friendship was cemented. We asked them if there wasn't a better place for us to camp than that which was near the road, we were a little worried about the children. It was a dirt road over to the nearest town. They let us look all over their land and their brother's land. It turned out that we were In the middle of a set of family holdings of the Macdonald family. They traced their name and descent to Flora Macdonald, who had befriended Bonnie Prince Charlie in the unfortunate struggles for the throne of England some time back in the eighteenth century. We were finally introduced to the brother of this neighbor of ours, Jess Macdonald, who had a little mill pond, ran a mill, and ground the corn for that part of the area. He was a fine-looking fellow, with quite a large family-- a dear old mother, whom we called Ma Macdonald; a wife and I think a sister or sister-in-law. There was a huge pile of logs out behind, mounds full of yams, and various small buildings that were corncribs and such things. The road into Jess Macdonald 's place was tricky. It must have been three or four hundred yards of winding dirt road, going over tree stumps and roots and over a little brook. We managed to get the trailer in and down onto a bottom land on the edge of the corn field, of course at this time of year nothing but stubble. It was dry and shaded by some nice trees and had plenty of sunlight. There was a pile of old junk out behind, but I didn't bother much about it. Next morning, it was all thought by our neighbors, at first, and I seem to remember they told us so afterwards, though I'm not sure, that we were disguised revenuers. [laughter] But they sized us up as worth taking a chance on and perhaps giving them a clean bill of health, and after a while they were disabused of the idea. I don't know how large the family was, but they told me it was something like one hundred and fifty members spread throughout the county. Presently the father of the whole clan appeared, a very handsome little man with a great, white handlebar mustache, and we were introduced formally. He came in a mule cart. He was Macdonald, about five feet high, and with the most aristocratic countenance you could imagine. We all got along well; the Macdonalds loved us, and we would take our little portable organ and music stand and play Bach and Handel and Purcell to them, and when they thought we'd given them enough, they'd pull out their banjos and violins and play the local music, which I'd never heard before. They played mostly square-dance tunes. I remember to this day one of the parts of a pretty square-dance tune they played, "Sweet Sixteen," which I've never found since in anybody's memory. They fell in with our plans, and we played at the local schools and churches; we went up to the neighboring town, I've forgotten its name now, and played in the town hall, at the same time cultivating our friends in Pinehurst, which was about three miles away. The advantage of this place was that I could get certified milk for Peter and such little commodities that the local peoples' store wouldn't normally have been able to get. We played a concert at the local country club and it was well liked, and presently we were asked to dinner at one of our friends' houses, named Hall. He was a novelist, a rather successful novelist at the time, and we were all preparing for the day. That morning, there was a knock at the door again, and Jess Macdonald said they had a job unloading a freight-car down in Pinehurst, and So-and-so was sick and they needed four pair of hands, and would I come down. He said, "You'll get paid." So I said of course I'd go, and I unloaded roof tiles for a day, passing them from hand to hand: two in the car, as I remember, one outside on the ground and another one in the truck that was to take them to the place where they were to be put on someone 's garage . At the end of the day I got my pay, I've forgotten what it was now. My impulse was to say, "No, I'm doing this as a favor to you," but I knew better by that time that that would be an insult, so I pocketed it manfully and asked to whose house the tiles were destined to go. It turned out that they were destined to go to the house that I was going to have supper in that night. [laughter] So after getting home and washing down (it was hard work-- I used gloves, but the others didn't; they had rough hands), I put on my black tie and my wife put on her pretty evening dress, and we went in and had a nice supper in the house. I turned the conversation onto the garage, but didn't mention that I had earned I think it was three dollars passing tiles that day. Well, there's not much to say about the winter, except we got healthier and healthier. I built a corrugated iron roof over the trailer so as to keep off the snow and one time we had about nine inches. Jess Macdonald helped me cut down enough pine trees to build the sides of a log cabin sixteen feet square, and we put an army tent up over it so that my wife could practice her violin comfortably out of the immediate neighborhood of the children. The children, of course, loved this experience. We needed water, and so they said, "Well, you must dig a well." I said, "I can't dig a well; I never digged one before." "Oh, nobody digs a well. They get a well digger. We'll see to that." So one morning quite early, an old Negro drew up in a mule cart and said he'd come to dig my well. So he went to it, and he dug the well and got very nice water (I've forgotten, there weren't many feet), and when he came to go, I asked him how much I owed him. I didn't owe him anything. We gave him some coffee, and we'd given him some lunch, and he went off shaking hands, all very good spirits. I asked Jess Macdonald about it the next day or that evening, because I was worried about him. He said, "Oh, no, don't worry, he digs all our wells." And that was the end of it. [laughter] There was no pay. I don't know whether they paid him, probably not. Macdonald might have paid him in corn, or offered to grind him some corn or something of that sort. We used to get the corn and wind it (pour it from one receptacle into another in a strong wind so it would blow the bran off), and it was a wonderful experience. Well, I won't dwell on this much longer, except to say that when we left we decided we'd give a party. Some friends we'd met in Pinehurst were expert puppeteers, so we arranged the little doorway of the log cabin in such a way that it made a little puppet stage, and we arranged some logs, and invited the neighborhood. We were a little bit dismayed when the sun set, not a soul had shown up. But as the twilight deepened, people came on foot and carts and on muleback, and first thing you know, we had quite a large audience. I don't remember how many there were, but there must have been seventy-five or one hundred men, women, and children. The performance was an enormous success. We played some music that we thought they'd like, and they were spellbound by the puppets. We had made full arrangements to leave early the next morning, because of course the neighborhood would have been uninhabitable afterwards. We went out and started northward (this was in April, I think), hoping that on the way we could get enough engagements to make a profitable summer. We had no skill in business management, so we got my wife's brother, who'd been a press representative for Sarah Bernhardt and a number of other great performers of the day, to be our advance agent. He was unsuccessful. He got hearings for us, but no money. We finally wound up in our own territory around New York and picked up some engagements. One of them, I remember, was for Colonel Thompson, at East Hampton. He had a beautiful lawn. We drew the trailer up on it, opened it and used the platform as a stage, and gave a concert to about sixty of his guests. I have a photograph of it. We went on down and visited my friend Jack Wheelock in East Hampton and went up to other parts of New England, living in the trailer and visiting our friends.

TUSLER

Were you making enough money from your engagements to live?

SEEGER

No. By August, we realized that we were spending practically our last reserves. There had been waiting in our suspense file, if you want to call it that, an invitation to teach under Frank Damrosch at the Institute of Musical Art where my wife had studied, with enough money to live comfortably in New York. So we accepted. In other words, we gave in. The grand plan to bring good music to the musicless people of America collapsed for lack of business ability. [laughter] By this time, the children were growing up. We had a faithful friend, an ex-school teacher, who was giving them their primary and kindergarten education, and we rented a nice little apartment from an old friend up on Madison Avenue. I had long wanted a harpsichord, and about this time we had managed to sell our house in California to a former pupil of my wife's who'd married one of the Radins, and we had enough money to buy the harpsichord. So I looked around for a harpsichord. Finally I got wind of one that was in Boston and I asked for a full description of it and lo and behold, it was the same harpsichord that I'd had at the University in Berkeley and had had sent to me from Los Angeles. It had traveled back across the continent and been bought by Frank Bibb, the accompanist, and so I started to work on the harpsichord.

TUSLER

What sort of a harpsichord was it?

SEEGER

It was a Dolmetsch, two-manual, with six pedals. No. 53 a beautiful instrument. I had by that time learned to replace the quills and the felts, and keep it in pretty good condition and tune, and when we moved out of the little apartment on Madison Avenue I took it up to the Institute on 122nd Street and Claremont Avenue, where I used it in my courses. My courses had to be taken by every student expected to graduate. They were: a course in the history of music once a week; a course in mythology, epic and romantic poetry; and general musicianship. I've forgotten what the others were. My wife was an excellent teacher [and we] started right in. I told Frank Damrosch I didn't know anything about epic and romantic poetry or mythology, and he said, "But you can learn, can't you?" I said, "Oh, yes, I can," so in the course of the first year I managed to work up quite an interesting course, at least interesting to me. It began with Greek mythology and worked through The Golden Bough into other mythologies, took up the Greek epics, and toward the end of the year reached Dante and finally Goethe's Faust and Wagner's Ring . In a one-hour lecture a week one couldn't cover too much. This absolutely fascinated me, and it wasn't long before I found myself spending nearly all day in the library, working up this side of the anthropological field which I had neglected in Berkeley, where I chiefly concentrated on method. We'd had so much trouble taking care of the children this first year that we sent two of them to boarding school (Peter was four and a half), and moved to a smaller apartment with my oldest son Charles. From then on, the marriage began to disintegrate. My wife couldn't handle the children physically and nervously, and I hadn't the wit to realize that I could have done both, but it just never occurred to me. I can't say it was the thing to do or that it was a possible thing; it was perfectly possible. I could have done it and kept my teaching going perfectly well, but I was an idiot and didn't do it. At any rate, the first year things didn't go any too well. About the middle of the year, one of our colleagues, who was an old teacher, I think, of my wife's, told us that what we needed was to get set up, philosophically, emotionally, intellectually, physically, socially, every way, and she had just the thing for us, which was a yogi colony up at Nyack. So we went up and visited it. People seemed to talk sense, and there were some very interesting people there: Cyril Scott, the English composer, had been in and out, but was back in England when I went up there; Marshall Bartholomew, the conductor of the Yale Glee Club, was a regular weekend visitor; there were painters and artists and writers and musicians and, most importantly, millionaires. The place was run by a man who called himself Dr. Pierre Bernard; he had conducted some kind of an ashram in New York. As soon as Dr. Damrosch heard about it, he called me in and said, "Charlie, you must realize this man is a charlatan. He's an imposter. He's a terrible reprobate." And I said, "Well, how do you know this?" He said, "Everybody in New York knows it. He's been kicked out of New York." I said, "Well, do put me in touch with somebody who can give me the straight dope." So he gave me a letter to a charming lady in excellent society named Miss, or Mrs. Townsend, I don't remember which, who received me at tea and told me in as guarded a way as a lady in those days could deal with such things what a terrible man he was. I thanked her very much, but it didn't deter me. We kept on going up there and being entertained occasionally, and when the summer came, we went up with the trailer and spent a few weeks. We parked out on the lawn of the Clarkstown Country Club, which was the public name of the center, and met everybody and decided to join. We tried living in New York in several ways, in various combinations, with the children and without the children, their going to school, and boarding school, and then living with us; and finally my wife gave up teaching and rented part of a house in Nyack, and that didn't work. The next year, we rented a nice big house and had the children with us, and things went from bad to worse. I would spend a Monday and a Tuesday in New York, and then a Thursday and a Friday. We made every possible combination we could, the children going back to boarding school and finally giving up the house and my wife taking an apartment in New York. Meanwhile, we'd been living more or less separated during the summers, and I'd been taking care of the children, and I'd been living a more or less hermetical life in New York. I had no friends to speak of in town. I'd see my friend Wheelock once in a while; I spent most of my time going down to the Harvard Club and finally wound up living at the Harvard Club. I had no interest in politics, economics, social affairs, or anything. I lived practically a sequestered life, having come to the conclusion that my life had come to an end, and the only thing to do was to live as quietly and unobtrusively as possible for the rest of the time. Along in 1929 something happened. It might have been the electricity in the air as the result of the collapse of Wall Street; I think it was February. At any rate, my friend Carl Ruggles, whom I had seen something of during the summers of the '20' s, and Henry Cowell, who had brought us together, were both in New York, and they introduced me to a dear little old lady, Mrs. Blanche W. Walton. I'd say she was fifty-five then, with a small independent income who had the upper floor of a house in Scarsdale. I used to go up weekends, and Henry and Carl Ruggles would forgather there also, together with some of the others who were interested in contemporary music, "modern music," as it was called in those days, and we had a wonderful time. Mrs. Walton had a very pretty daughter Marion, who was a very talented sculptress, whom was engaged to a young man in the publishing office at Macmillan' s. I remember the first performance, Carl Ruggles' Portals. Henry had been in to the rehearsal and had been entrusted with the parts and the score for the performance next day. Unfortunately, he went to a concert and left the score and parts behind in the top circle at Carnegie Hall. The horrible truth was imparted to us on a Friday night at about twelve o'clock, and after a short council of war, we decided we could put the composition together and copy the parts so that it could be performed the next day. I think perhaps there was a dress rehearsal the next morning, but I've forgotten now. At any rate, we all set to it. Carl had a pencil score, which was not very easy to read, but we each started in copying. I remember coming to one place and asking him whether a note was a B-flat or an A-flat, and he couldn't decide, so he said, "What do you think, Charlie?" I said, "Well, I think it's a B-flat." And he said, "Well, then let it be a B-flat." [laughter] So it was a B-flat, and as far as I know, it may be still today! The concert went off with great success, and so we all felt well rewarded. The group was so close-knit and was so appreciated by Mrs. Walton that it's worth dwelling for a moment upon it. I'll fill in the names later--they escape my mind. By the time June came and the end of my teaching in New York, it was clear that Mrs. Walton would give up that apartment and take one in New York at which we could forgather a little more conveniently. There was a handsome leonine-headed pianist, Richard Buhlig, who gloried in purple silk pajamas and was quite an esthete; there was a French musician who had gone in for theosophy and had changed his name to a Hindu-style name, Dane Rudhyar; Henry Cowell and Carl Ruggles; Edgar Varese was in and out; Carlos Salzedo; a pretty young pianist and three or four others. Mrs. Walton was a great friend of the Edmond J. De Coppets. Mr. De Coppet had founded the Flonzaley Quartet, which was the most admired string quartet of the day, as a younger group in contrast to the older group in New York led by Franz Kneisel that had been dominant for a long time. Henry, who was a great catalyzer, had persuaded Mrs. Walton that she, since she had a guest room and would like to have somebody using it, should invite a young Chicago composer named Ruth Crawford to spend the winter with her, and suggested also that it would be a very fine thing if Ruth Crawford would study with Charles Seeger. Charles Seeger had always turned his nose up at woman composers, so when the arrangements were talked about they were phrased this way: Miss Crawford must take six lessons at such and such a fee, which was fairly high. After the six lessons, she can make a new arrangement, or she can study elsewhere. Meanwhile, Ruth Crawford had spent the summer at the MacDowell Colony. Her compositions had been played in Chicago and had received quite a bit of notice there. When she was installed in Mrs. Walton's apartment, Mrs. Walton took a great fancy to her and so prepared the first lesson with great care. There was to be a very nice supper, and the lesson was to begin at five o'clock. Miss Crawford and Mr. Seeger were introduced. She was a buxom, red-cheeked woman of about twenty-nine with bright, sparkling eyes and black hair, and dressed in the atrocious flapper costumes of that day. The door was closed on the studio, and the lesson began. At seven, Mrs. Walton knocked on the door to no avail. At intervals after seven, the knocks were repeated, a little louder each time. Finally, a genteel Philadelphian voice called through a crack in the door, "The dinner is spoiling," so we came out. The lesson was a great success, and at the end of the six lessons it was decided that Mr. Seeger would not charge anything for successive lessons, and they kept on during the winter. By this time I had established myself at the Institute in a position of teaching ten classes of eight-hand piano sightreading. The sections were made up of five or six advanced students, who read at sight the Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms symphonies, taking turns conducting from score. In my second year at the Institute I had gone to Frank Dararosch and told him that excellent as was the instruction in his school, there were a number of things that were being missed between classes. When I gave him a list of them, he was dumfounded and he said, "But this can't be." So I said to him, "Let me examine your senior class next year on these subjects; you can look in any time you want, and I'll give you a kind of survey of things they don't know." He was pretty well convinced after a few weeks that something had to be done, but I kept up the survey for the year, seeing each student for an hour and putting him through certain tests, mostly of sightreading and, to a certain extent, of written work. At the end of it, he had no trouble convincing his faculty that things were not as they should be, so I was engaged to give also a course in general musicianship. I think it's the first course in general musicianship that was given in the country. As far as I know, the word was an invention of my own and wasn't used anywhere else before. My trick test was a piece of music which had a tempo mark and a double bar with a repeat in the middle of the page; a surprising number of the students would pay no attention to the double bar in the middle of the page, and when they got to the double bar at the bottom of the page, they'd stop. When I said nothing, they'd look at me questioningly. The answer was: suppose this were a test on your ability to perform a certain job that you wanted to get. "You're out in the professional life in New York, aren't you?" "Oh, yes, I play the piano in such and such places." "Well, suppose you go out and want to accompany somebody, and they give you this piece and you play it the way you played it--this is what's the matter with it." Then I began to show them the things they had done wrong. They hadn't asked whether to make the repeats or not. The piece goes on after the page is turned over, but it never occurs to them the piece does go on. This and a number of other tricks that the musician has to learn as he grows up were not being taught at the Institute. They would find themselves getting along swimmingly, and then suddenly come to the bottom of a page and not be able to turn it. The idea that they should prepare the pages for turning at the beginning was something completely unknown. As far as general instruction went some of the teachers, of course, taught their students this; but others didn't, and I was able to catch them. Another one of the tests was to perform a simple two against three. None of them knew how to do it. Even a graduate student who'd graduated with the highest honors didn't know how it was done. He did it by "knack." This sort of thing put me in a very good situation at the Institute, and everything was going very well. The teachers rather resented it at first, but were very grateful for it afterwards. I was teaching the students how to do ornaments, what accelerando meant, what rallentando meant, the different kinds of accelerando and rallentando, and catching them up on a whole lot of little details, such as giving a pianist the Brahms horn trio and then singing the horn part as written. Of course it sounded awful, and the student looked at me as if to say, "What are you doing?" and I said, "Well, you see, I'm reading the horn part Just as it's written," and the pupil would say, "Well, yes, that's just what is written. It doesn't sound right." It turned out they never knew what a transposing instrument was . Well, this and other things had made me feel that everything was going very nicely, and together with my falling in with this tight little group of people interested in modern music, life began to look up.

TUSLER

What was the rest of the faculty like at the Institute?

SEEGER

The faculty was one of the most distinguished faculties that could have been brought together in New York at the time. Excellent teachers--Percy Goetschius, the author of a number of textbooks on harmony; Franz Kneisel, the leader of the quartet that I spoke of, and other members of his quartet; excellent pianists; they had first-chair men from the Philharmonic Orchestra for the wind instruments; and it was a good old-fashioned school. On the German pattern, it was about as good as one would expect to find. I also took over Frank Damrosch's course in the teaching of music, but doing it in his way: that was, taking his little handbook and reading a certain number of paragraphs and then commenting on them, spreading the book out throughout the year. I could get away with murder in this way as well as any other, and he was entirely satisfied. The '20's had been for me, however, a matter of abysmal disappointment. The exhilaration of going off in the trailer was lost, and my wife and I went two totally different paths, so that by the end of the '20's we were living entirely apart. She didn't even take part in taking care of the children in the summer. They were with me, and she never showed up.

TUSLER

Were you composing at all at this time?

SEEGER

No. I'd given up composition by this time, but I was working on a treatise on composition. After one of the most exciting winters in my life, which was that winter of 1929 and 193O, I asked Miss Crawford if she would come up to Patterson, live at a neighbor's house, and take my treatise on composition at dictation, the treatise being a resume of the lessons I'd given her during the year. Meanwhile, she had been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to, in those days, study abroad, and she had prepared to go abroad in August. So for June, July, and the larger part of August, we worked on "the book." It was to be called Tradition and Experiment in Musical Composition in the Western World . I had evolved a discipline of composition on the basis of my old dissonant counterpoint, and by the time Miss Crawford was ready to leave, the two volumes were completed. They were brief, some two hundred pages each, with examples. Miss Crawford decided to leave by way of Quebec and go to London first and then over to the continent to Berlin, unfortunately. People in those days had begun to go to Paris, but she had some reservations about going to Paris that I shared, and so we thought Berlin would be the best place. Vienna would have been much better. During this year I had asked my wife for a divorce, which she had refused, and presently I had fallen in love with a very charming English girl who was very much like her, a fact which appalled me after a while; I realized that a second marriage to her would turn out unsuccessful even sooner than the first had. The first had lasted eighteen years, and the first ten years had been very happy. So I broke that off. Mrs. Walton and I decided to take Ruth Crawford up to Quebec and see her off on the ship. By this time, it was quite obvious to Mrs. Walton that she would be a "three' s-a-crowd" person on the trip to Quebec, so Ruth and I started off together in the pouring rain in a little Model-A Ford with a demountable top. It rained all the way to Arlington, Vermont, where we'd planned to spend the first night with Carl Ruggles. The night was uproarious. Carl had established himself in the old schoolhouse of Arlington, a room about thirty feet square and about twenty feet high, with two little rooms which I suppose were originally the girls' and boys' cloakrooms. He had a wretched old piano in it, and had set up his easel and his painting apparatus down at the other end of the room. There was a big potbellied iron stove to keep him warm. The trip to Quebec turned out to be for me rather dramatic. Ruth and I had always decided that we were going to be good friends and comradely musicians, and in Arlington I suddenly realized that I was going to feel very badly if she left --in fact, that I was in love with her in fact, we were both in love, and it was a rather hard thing to separate. I think one of the most horrible experiences I can look back on in my life was seeing her go off on the Empress-of-Something down the St. Lawrence River, while I was left alone in the pouring rain to go back to a Ruthless New York. However, everything went according to schedule, and we kept up a lively correspondence. She produced quite a lot of good composition in Europe; the best known is the String Quartet, 1931, which she wrote in Berlin. I took her place in Mrs. Walton's guest room for the year. It was a wonderful winter. The group stayed together. The International Composers' Guild was in full flower. The composers were giving concerts. Varese was turning out his early revolutionary works. Ruggles' compositions were beginning to be played. Frank Damrosch was highly displeased with my intention to divorce Constance; and my work at the Institute was cut down to about a thirds but I made it up with private teaching on the outside. A number of other lively events of a more personal nature I can skip over during these last years of 1928, '29, and '30, mostly '29, '30, and '31. The most amusing parts of the winter at Mrs. Walton's were the periodic appearances of Carl Ruggles and his inimitable stories. He was the best raconteur I've ever known in my life. He could tell stories to a mixed audience that most men couldn't get away with even with an unmixed audience. He had an almost unlimited repertory. At this time he was being patronized by I think Mrs. Whitney, and he was called up at about four o'clock one morning by her secretary [who said], "Carl, I've got a party that's dying on my hands. You've got to come right down." "Oh-h-h," he said, "I'm asleep. I can't do it." She said, "You know where your bread and butter come from; you be here in half an hour." Carl went down as soon as he could and found an almost impossible party ranged around the walls , half alive. He set himself in the middle and started telling stories, and at seven a.m. the party was going strong. He was forthright in his expression of his opinion. At one time he'd been to a concert of a first performance of a work of Ernest Bloch, and afterwards to Mr. Pulitzer's house where everybody was to meet Mr. Bloch. Ruggles avoided Mr. Bloch as well as he could, until finally, Mr. Bloch came up to him and said, "Mr. Ruggles, I am Ernest Bloch. What do you think of my composition?" And Ruggles, with a curl of the lip which was inimitable, took a firm stance and leaned backwards, looking him in the eye, and said, "Nothing at all," waiting to see what Mr. Bloch was going to do. [laughter] I don't know. I wasn't there, but this is the story. He had picturesque ways of describing people.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 3, 1966

TUSLER

Can we go back first today while you make some more remarks about what it was like teaching at the Institute of Musical Art?

SEEGER

I find myself in the habit of discounting the '20's and my withdrawal from contemporary life. Thinking over the last tape, I think I have probably exaggerated my increasing loneliness in New York from 1922 to 1929. There were only seven years there, and perhaps the loneliness is accented by the fact that I had decided to give up composition and that I couldn't wrestle with the problems of musicology that were pressing upon me. I practically came to the conclusion with regard to the musicology that speech could not express what I had in mind, admitting, however, that my speech technique was very feeble. The activity at the Institute of Musical Art was very limited, also. It would be hard to give anybody in touch with contemporary music education in the '60's an idea of what music education was in the '20' s in what was at that time the best conservatory of music in the country. It was fairly well endowed by wealthy New Yorkers and had back of it the prestige of the Damrosches, old Leopold, the father of Walter and Frank Damrosch; the pretty new little building on 122nd Street and Claremont Avenue; and the very strict adherence to what were considered the highest values of the German tradition. There were first-class teachers in every department. The lectures were sops to Cerberus. The students had to take them. The marks could not be based on any pretense of scholarship. A history of music in a lecture course once a week for students who didn't see any reason why they should study it couldn't amount to very much. The course in mythology, epic and romantic poetry might be considered to have interested them even less. The reason that the course was given was that most of the operas up to that time had been built on mythological and romantic subjects. I think my predecessors in giving those courses stuck pretty closely to the repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera and the symphonic poems that were given by the symphony orchestras and perhaps the words to which some of the great romantic songs were set. My interpretation of the subject followed my own interest, and I learned a very great deal in the course of preparing those lectures, which were never the same in any successive year. I was led off into arithmetical mysticism, magic squares, crosses, and so forth, tying them in with the arithmetical mysticism of Dante's Divine Comedy , and some of the music theory of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and I even excited some of the students who had not only musical talent but a certain amount of talent in the gymnastics of words. I wound up, of course, with the Wagner operas, and so was able to get away with some of the other and wilder excursions into the Veda, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Mohammedanism. The students were made to work very hard at their instrument and on their music note paper. The late '20's and the early '30's precipitated a student awakening, very much of the same sort that has happened in Berkeley at the University of California in the '60' s. Those that were disturbed by the stock market crash of 1929 and the early miseries of the Depression, which of course were felt in New York almost immediately, gradually had black marks set up against their names in the office of employment in the Institute, through which many of the best undergraduate and graduate students were able to supplement their meager income by professional engagements. The situation got so bad in 1932, I think it was, that some of them were able to glimpse through my lectures on mythology, epic and romantic poetry that my viewpoint was not quite as conservative as that of most of the teachers and of course, the trustees and director of the Institute. I had made a point of never having any outside contact with the students at the Institute. I scarcely knew their names; they were just numbers. I had burned my fingers in Berkeley by coming too close to the radical-minded, and I had decided it was no use, that I couldn't do anything about it, so the students were numbers. But in spite of this policy, we drew closer to each other, as some of them not only took all my lecture courses (which they had to I'm afraid) but spent a couple of years in my piano ensemble classes, where the bars between personalities were lowered under the excitement of keeping places in reading at sight, up to time, with dynamics and nuance. We'd all get tremendously excited, and we got to know each other pretty well. So in about 1931 or 1932 , they came to me with a hard-luck story that those with black marks against them were not being recommended any more to as many jobs as they were worthy of, and that some students who were less able were getting the recommendations. They wanted a place to meet, frankly, where they could organize, and the Institute would not allow them to meet in the building. Nowadays, they would have met in someone's room, but they came from all over greater New York and sometimes from out in the country, and there was not the freedom that would allow the boys and the girls to go to each other's rooms . I had started to teach at the New School for Social Research. I put the matter up to Alvin [Saunders] Johnson, the director, and he said, "Why, sure, let 'em come down here and meet." So they met at the New School. Word getting around later, this was not helpful to my standing with the administration, which had already been blackened by my desire to divorce my wife Constance who was almost, as I think I've said somewhere, an adopted child of Frank Damrosch, the Warburgs, and other trustees. During the '20' s, a wealthy silk merchant and manufacturer named Juilllard set up the Juilliard School of Music in an office building down off Park or Lexington Avenue, in the fifties, I think, or upper forties. The director or president was John Erskine, one of the brighter literary lights of the day, a man of the world, a wit, a stylist of a sort, and a very charming person. I had been doing what I could during the '20's to organize a society for musicology. I felt that I needed musicological contacts, and I was not able to make them easily; in the early '20' s I was not able to make them at all by myself 0.G. Sonneck, who had left the Library of Congress and had taken up the position of what you might call music director of G. Schirmer and Company, and edited the Musical Quarterly, was ill, misanthropic, and pessimistic; and while we were good friends, I couldn't get him to do much of anything. Waldo Selden Pratt, whose position I took in lecturing at the Institute, was also elderly, mostly interested in hymnology, and not interested in anything much after 185O. Leo Lewis at Tufts I had met but did not think very much of. The most helpful man was Otto Kinkeldey, who was chief of the music section of the New York Public Library, and who had aided me in some of my preparation for my lectures at the Institute. He was a historian, German-American, but German-trained. We never became very close. I granted that the historical orientation in musicology was as important as the systematic, but my interest was the systematic. Perhaps I had better define them here, although I've defined them in various written papers. I defined the historical orientation as the study of music, or the looking at music, in general space and time. It was the main orientation in European musicology; in fact, to all intents and purposes it was the only orientation. The systematic orientation I define as the looking at music in its own space and time. Such a radical notion, of course, found no echo in any living person in the '20's in the United States. They thought I was simply a freak. I was not able to express myself very well, which made the understanding of my viewpoint still more difficult. As soon as Juilliard set up his foundation and Erskine got it going under way, I went down and presented my plan. I had a nice letter from Erskine afterwards, which said I had presented my subject very ably, but he thought that while eventually the foundation might be interested in musicology, in the near future it was interested in singers and players of music and, to a certain extent, composers. Period.

TUSLER

You were giving no classes in musicology at the Institute.

SEEGER

No. There was no interest in musicology at the Institute. I don't know that Frank Damrosch even read any of my three papers that were published while I was there, one in the Educational Review , and the other two in the Musical Quarterly . If he had read them he might have said, "Well, Charlie's got a great head, but this is all pretty much off in fairyland." I tried by correspondence and by conversation with Sonneck to draw Carl Engel from the Library of Congress-- Engel had taken Sonneck' s place--and I'd had correspondence with Pratt, Leo Lewis, and a couple of others whose names I forget now. I didn't think much of Kinkeldey in that connection because I had not realized that he was interested; we'd talked a little bit; but while they all thought that something should be done, no one would take the lead, and I being so much younger than the others felt that I should not take the lead. Also, I didn't know how.

TUSLER

What was your aim? Did you wish to form an organization?

SEEGER

I wanted to form a musicological society, that would pick up the fragile little strand of interest that had been broken by the demise of the Union Musicologique and its forerunner, the International Music Society, whose section I spoke of in an earlier tape (at which Kinkeldey had been present, but I never knew it until years and years afterwards, in fact, I think until sometime in the '50' s). Even he never reminded me of it. Well, nothing happened. With the gradual drawing together of different strands in the environment in my own thinking and in my own feeling in late 1929, due perhaps to little Mrs. Walton's having set up something like a little salon of modern music enthusiasts (we'd call them avante-garde now), these various strands began to come together. My teaching of Ruth drew my own musical ideas together, and my point always with her was that what I was interested in in composition was trying to connect the head and the heart in the tradition of my old teacher, whom I think I spoke about in the previous tape, who said, "Herr Seeger, there are two things in music. There is a head (and he tapped his head), and the heart (and he tapped his chest). The head alone is nothing. The heart alone is nothing. Music begins when you connect the two." This struck me as a very nice way of putting the whole matter. Ruth was enthusiastic about it, too. She was more able to connect her head with the heart than I was. My head and my heart were light-years apart. I couldn't approve of what I liked, and I couldn't like what I approved. I had been drawing them a little bit closer together, and during the year's teaching of Ruth, they came quite close together. I could almost say that I could like what I approved and approve what I liked, but not during 1929 and 1930, although 1 felt the things were coming closer and closer. Of course, they came closer the more I fell in love with Ruth. About the end of December, I think in 1929 or 1930, it occurred to me that perhaps I was competent to begin to do something now about musicological organization I was 44 years old and the old fellows had mostly died off. So I went down to Kinkeldey and we talked over the possibility of getting together a little group in New York that would just talk about music seriously. He was not in favor of the word "musicology," but he vrould tolerate my using it. As a result of a couple of conversations, we finally decided that we would get together with three other people, and we would discuss the possibility of meeting once a month and talking seriously about music. We could only find three others in New York whom we thought could talk about music on the level that we wanted to talk about it: Joseph Yasser, a Russian emigre, who had written a remarkable book on tonality, then in manuscript, but he had written a couple of articles that had called our attention to him--he'd come to the United States by way of China; Joseph Schillinger, another Russian emigre, who had formerly been quite an important official in the Bolshevik music setup, but not being sympathetic to Bolshevism, he escaped and came to the United States by way of China, too--he had produced what was then a rather novel theory of writing music by algebraic formulas, A Theory of Evolving Tonality (New York, 1932). following [Sergey Ivanovich] Taneyev, whose work on counterpoint Kinkeldey and I were familiar with. The fifth member was Henry Cowell, my old pupil, whom I had sent to study with [Erich Moritz von] Hornbostel in Berlin and who had brought me back the astonishing news which I had no idea of before of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and of the small group of comparative musicologists that had been working in Berlin from about 1900. I knew that they were working, and knew that Hornbostel was the outstanding man, and that's one of the reasons that I sent Henry to him, but I had no conception of the emergence of a new discipline. I thought I was dreaming of it myself , but not knowing how to go about founding a musicology that was a worldwide musicology. I thought perhaps the best way I could do it would be through the little group in New York. Well, by that time Henry had brought me back this news, by the time we got together and started to form the New York Musicological Society. The first meeting was held at Mrs. Walton's house; she gave us refreshments afterwards. I wanted it to be a strictly scholarly, expert discussion. I had a fait ful student in May DeForest, the daughter of a wealthy New York family, one branch of which were friends of my family's, and Ruth was also interested in the approach but to their rage, I would not allow them in the room in which the five musicologists, who didn't call themselves musicologists yet, were to meet. There were two folding doors between the dining room and the living room of Mrs. Walton's apartment on Central Park West, and they sat on one side of the folding doors, which were closed, and listened through a crack in the door. [laughter] Miss DeForest's roommate. Miss Dunlop, a Scottish-English girl who was an expert stenographer, sat on the other side of the door and was supposed to take minutes. The discussion went well, and we decided we'd meet in a month and that Kinkeldey would read a paper. The reason I wanted to exclude the women was because music up to that time in the United States was supposed to be a woman's job, and I and other musicians felt the scorn of the average American when he heard that you were a musician. I can remember when I first started in New York, back in 1912: I was at a fashionable dinner and when they asked me what I was going to do, I said I was a composer. "A composer? What's a composer?" I said, "I compose music." "Oh, listen to him! He composes music! Did you ever hear anything so funny? Women do that! " Men were not supposed to compose music. In fact, my own family felt very much the same way. My father, though he was an amateur in all the arts and wrote some very pretty little songs, when I told him I wanted to be a musician, said, "But, Don" (I was called Don because I was born in Mexico), "gentlemen are not musicians." And that was the attitude of the average gentleman in the Americas, and the average man from the gentleman class on down. The country was very socially classified at the time. It is very hard for us to realize in the '60's, how close to a European class system we had come in 1900, and 1912 even, in the United States. Class and status are still talked about, but they're a little bit laughed about. In those days they were sacred cows. So we kept the women out of this talk of the musicologists because only women's clubs talked about music in the United States at that time, and we wanted to make it perfectly clear that we were men, and that we had a right to talk about music, and women weren't in on it. [laughter] Well, of course, in the next meetings, the women were in on it, but there were usually only one or two women to anywhere from three to (eventually) twenty or more men. I must say a word about what I had learned at the yogi colony up the river. I've forgotten now just exactly how much in detail I went into that matter. The brand of yoga, or "yog'," as it's properly pronounced, that I was taught up there was the so-called Gatastha (later known as "Hatha") yoga. The six yogas were considered to be equally important, in what struck me from my reading under Ryder in Berkeley as the most authoritative Hindu tradition. The emphasis in Nyack was placed on the physical yoga. Dr. Bernard was unquestionably an expert in this, although when I went there, to the Clarkstown Country Club, I had no way of judging to what extent he was proficient in the discipline. One night I happened to go into the meeting room early. It was dark before the Saturday night meeting, and there were some lights down at the further end, so I vient on to where there was a small group of the members under an electric light hanging from the ceiling; the doctor was there with a white cloth in his hand, and several large skewers about seven inches long--I should say they were triangular at the broadest [point] and about one-fourth inch or five-six-teenths of an inch thick, and he was putting these skewers through Dr. Bernard's tongue. The frenum was cut so that the tongue could stick 'way out. There were two skewers in the tongue when I came there, and a third was being put in. I watched the process very carefully, because I'd read ahout it. There was a very small drop of blood at the bottom of the skewer, but that was all. In the very high-powered bright light that was shining right above Dr. Bernard's face, which was slightly upturned, I could see his forehead and his eyebrows and his eyelashes and nostrils, the tongue and the lips, very clearly. I could also see with a somewhat less brilliant light his hands deliberately hanging down by his sides. There was not a tremor in any part of the face as the skewer was put in and removed. The small drop of blood was taken up in the handkerchief. After the skewers were all removed, he put his tongue back in his mouth and talked perfectly naturally. It was quite obvious that he could do some of the miraculous things that were talked about in the books. One day we were talking out on the lawn. There was nobody behind him, but as he was talking he looked carefully and suddenly did a back flip, threw himself right over, a head somersault in the air and landed on his feet, [while he] kept on talking as if nothing had happened. I had seen Mei Lan-fang by that time, and remembered a famous duel in one of the operas in which, when the sword was (supposedly) rammed through the villain, the villain did that same thing. He did a complete back flip, landed on his teet, and walked off. (Death in a duel, portrayed that way, I can assure any reader of this oral transmission, is to me a thousand times more moving than the protagonist sinking down on the ground and imitating a physical death. ) Furthermore, some of the students at the Clarkstown Country Club could do some rather amazing things. One member. Sir Paul Dukes (he may be still alive, but perhaps he wouldn't mind if he's still alive my quoting him), stood up in a leotard with a full glass of water about a yard behind his heels. He bent himself backwards very slowly, picked up the edge of the glass in his teeth, drank the water by bending back toward a standing position, when it was empty put it back down on the floor, and then resumed the standing position. There was one more thing that Dr. Bernard was able to do with the yoga discipline. He had very strong control of the members. There was no questioning it. The membership must have been up to one hundred or two hundred, drawn from all over the world, poor people, wealthy people, all thrown in together and on the surface treated alike but under the surface, the wealthy had much more close attention than the poor did. Another remarkable thing about the ashram was that there were favorites. Some of the members got more than others, and others like myself got very little, for I was in a head-on collision with the doctor on fundamental philosophical matters; although it never appeared in words, it was quite clear in what we call the affections. I was tolerated, and I was handed over for instruction to one of the assistants. Dr. Bernard felt that the swamis who would come over from India to spread the gospel of the Vedanta were in error in that they emphasized the Jnana Yoga, that is, the intellectual yoga, and the devotional yoga (Bhakti), as being the basis upon which the discipline of yoga could become established in the United States. Those were factors, he admitted, but his idea of the American culture was that it was a money culture, and that yoga had to be adapted to a money culture; in other words, it had to be sold. To sell it meant making money; and his way of making money was to give wealthy women (and maybe wealthy men; I don't know about the wealthy men, but to give the wealthy women--I know there were quite a few there) training that they were not able to get from psychiatrists at the time. We had any number of Freudian cases that had either petered out or gone askew, and several of the students who had gone through this regime were getting along much better under Dr. Bernard's treatment. As time went on, I became more and more convinced that I was not getting what I ought to be able to get from Dr. Bernard, and finally it came to a point where I began to realize that I was getting something that I shouldn't get. I've always been very flexible, and I could do many bending tricks that no one else there could. They got me up to exhibit before a class one day, and one of the girls said, "My God, that ain't a man, it's a woman! " [laughter] Finally, I began to have some pains and I went to a doctor about it, and he said, "Well, what exercises have you been doing?" I told him what I was doing and he said, "My God, man. You'll split a gut. Don't ever do such a thing." A couple of other things happened, so I gave up my membership and my instruction. I had, however, accustomed myself to exercise two hours a day and I realized that dropping it off suddenly might be a bad thing, so I tapered if off, and in the course of about six years, by about 1935 I had given up the exercise completely. But it had done me an enormous amount of good physically. One of the most alarming pieces of mal-education in this experience was in the matter of breath holding. I'd read about the yogi who was buried for three weeks under six feet of earth under the twenty-four-hour surveillance of British Army officers, and then was resuscitated when he was dug up, and I was a little bit inclined to say that perhaps these things might be possible; and there were matters of hypnotism. So I put myself assiduously to work out the breath-holding techniques. My teacher was of little assistance to me after I reached the three-minute period. He didn't seem to be interested. I concluded he couldn't hold it any longer himself. As I pushed it up to four, five, and six minutes--I thought there was no harm in trying to do it--I began to have some very interesting experiences. I won't go into details, but sometime around in 1927, i think, or 1928, when I must have left the place, I pushed it up to fifteen and had begun to find myself uninterested in breathing. You want to breathe up to a certain point, and then your chest begins to go up and down very fast, not with breathing, but just nervously; and that calms down, and after a while, you begin to just not be interested in breathing; you don't have to breathe. One day, the day that I happened to look at the clock and see it was fifteen minutes, I said to myself, "My God. Nobody knows I'm up here. I won't be noticed perhaps for a week. Suppose I hold my breath for a week? Would they know how to resuscitate me?" So I decided I'd better not play with that sort of thing any more. Years afterwards, I discovered from one of the foremost teachers at Nyack that none of them ever tried to hold their breath more than six minutes. The experiences that you have in this very elementary stretch of the discipline is enough to make you realize that there must be something in it that we in the Occident ought to know more about. I had found that this breath holding was extremely useful to me in many practical occasions in life. I won't go into the details about them, but I can almost say that the remembrance to take a full breath or two and hold it has been extremely useful to me ever since.

TUSLER

I would like you to go back before we get too far away from the Institute of Musical Art and talk a little bit more about Frank Damrosch. I gather that his attitude was very conservative about everything.

SEEGER

Oh, yes, there are a couple things there that I promised to put on this tape. One of the outstanding points that Dr. Bernard emphasized in yoga was that you just didn't pay any attention to society. Society was made up by a low class of human being, and it was legitimate prey for any intelligent person to make use of. You learned to control your thoughts, you learned to control your emotions, and you learned to direct your thoughts and direct your emotions into channels that would benefit you. You didn't give a damn about benefitting anybody else. This, you see, was exactly the opposite of the state of mind that I had been in in Berkeley, when I had worked myself into a physical nervous breakdown because of too much concern for my brother man. It was an excellent antidote to the situation, and in drawing these various strands together in 1929 and 193O, I was quite aware that I had the two in hand, so that I could distinguish between the two and then try to unite the two--in other words, to try to define my concern to society and my concern for myself in common terms, and make decisions on the basis of a fifty-fifty balance between them. The work at the Institute had been to a large extent de-emotionallzed for me by Frank Damrosch's not wanting me to deal with any music after 1900. At the end of my first year there, I had brought the students up to 190O and then spoken of Erik Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, whose early works I had in hand. I was called into Damrosch's office shortly afterwards. where he was in great perturbation, saying, "Charlie, I hear you've been lecturing on this man Schoenberg. Don't you realize that he is of the gutter? It's nasty. It's disgusting. It's evil." Well, we talked about it for a while, because we were very good friends. I said, "If it's your policy to have me stop at 19OO, I'll be very glad to," so he patted me on the back and said, "That's all right. That's fine," and we came to a modus vivendi . During the '20' s, my whole emotional musical life was being, you see, torn to pieces between my love for the pre-1900 music and my admiration for the post-1900 music, which simply didn't agree emotionally. They were two entirely different things and I couldn't put them together, so that a great deal of the work at the Institute was denatured, so to speak, for me, especially that which had to do with the teaching of music, my fourth lecture which I haven' t spoken much about, where I was in charge of the preparatory centers, small children's classes, conducting by teachers in the Institute and graduate and competent students in the Institute. I had " to soft pedal; my philosophy was: "I can't do anything about society so there's no use trying, and here in the Institute where they don't want me to do anything about society, except pre-1900 society which doesn't exist any more, I'll just disconnect when it comes to anything that has to do with contemporary life; as long as it has to do with life before 19OO, I can have a balanced attitude and a fairly 'balanced teaching capability,'" as they say nowadays this is interesting. I spend a certain amount of time on this here, because six years later it begins to be resolved. I was unable to relate the two things, the twentieth-century music and the pre-twentieth-century music, society and the individual--the individual being me. But by six years later, they began to get related. Now let's see, we'll have to pick up the tape where we left off last time. I had said good-bye to Ruth; she had gone off to Europe; we kept up a lively correspondence, and she composed steadily. Her early works were done by the Novembre Gruppe in Berlin. She came to know all the contemporary musicians, called on Webern and Berg, and had very interesting conversations with them.

TUSLER

Was she writing in that style herself?

SEEGER

No, she was writing in her own style. I was rather anxious for her not to get too mixed up with the European teachers, because by that time I had become fairly confident that the United States was giving birth to its own compositional style (it was really aborning at the time, and since the early '30' s, it's been shown to be the case), so that I was not anxious for her to become a twelve-tone rower or a Webernite, although she had leanings in that direction, as I did too, or get mixed up with quarter-tones or any of the other special disciplines that were in vogue in Europe at that time, especially some of the French ones which I considered to be very hostile to the development of an American compositional style. I got my divorce; Ruth and I were married. We set up housekeeping in New York. The Depression became worse and worse. The combined situation at the Institute, the disapproval of Damrosch who didn't want to have anything to do with me on account of my divorce, the new administration of the Juilliard School which had taken over the old Institute, the disapproval of my helping the dissident students, and I think a certain disapproval of Erskine of my lectures, caused me to be separated from the Institute. Excepting for the income, I was very glad to be rid of it. I had become interested in other things. The New School for Social Research had set up its new building in 1931, and Henry Cowell, who had been giving some lectures there on the music cultures of the world, asked me to go In with him and teach half a year while he taught the other half-year. He was spending his time alternately in California and in New York at the time. I started off the Music Cultures of the World course in the new building in January, 1931.

TUSLER

You were no longer, then, teaching at the Institute.

SEEGER

I was still teaching at the Institute, and I had a number of private classes. One most interesting one was made up of five people: an elderly steel manufacturer, a young lawyer, a middle-aged lawyer, a literary agent, and the best girl of the young lawyer. We met at the apartment of the elderly lawyer, had a good dinner, sat around an open fire, and I talked about their amateurish approach to music. we usually would take a symphony and I would analyze it for them. I still treasure the letter that they wrote me at the end of it. My paid pupils were gradually saying they couldn't keep up the full fee or couldn't pay any fee, and Ruth and I had less and less to live on as the Institute tapered off rather gradually, and the New School for Social Research didn't develop financially as we'd hoped it would. I'll never forget my interview with Alvin Johnson at the end of the first term of teaching at the New School. He was a most lovable and admirable man, and his business office had made me out a check for one-half the amount of the contract. I needed the other half. If I hadn't really needed it pretty badly, I would have done nothing about it, but I really needed that other half. So I went to him and put my hand on his and said, "I know how it is. Dr. Johnson; you have this beautiful new building and hardly enough money to run the school but I've received a check for only half of the contract and much against my inclination I'm having to ask you to give me the rest." He said, "Well, there's one thing about it--the one course you've given and the other course you've advised me on are the two most profitable ones we've given," so that assuaged my feelings a little bit.

TUSLER

Were they having particular troubles because of the Depression?

SEEGER

They had a terrible time. The wealthy men and women who'd backed the New School did dig into their reserves to keep it alive. The most exciting contact at the New School was [Thomas Hart] Benton, the painter. I'd known him for some time. He was a boon companion of Carl Ruggles', and he had been an abstract painter, doing very much in painting what I had been trying to do in music. One day, the story goes, when the budget was very low, he looked up at his wife Rita and said, "Rita, there must be something the matter with my painting. Who am I painting for? I'm painting for the American people. If the people in America don't like my [work] well enough to pay for it, at least to give us a decent living, there must be something the matter with the painting. It's not for me to say there's something the matter with the people. That romantic belief is no more valid. I'm going to begin to paint the American people." And he did; and one of the first things he did was to paint a mural for the New School for Social Research. I think it was on the second floor in a room about thirty or forty feet square not a high ceiling but with only two windows and a door. He covered the rest of the walls with a fresco of American life. I still think it's a great accomplishment. We had a dedication of it and Tom came to me and asked me if I could play a guitar or banjo. "Oh," I said, "when I was a boy I used to play a guitar just for the fun of it; I can't play a banjo." He said, "Well, I'd like to inaugurate this room, to baptize it with some American folk music. I can play a harmonica, and such and such of my students can play the banjo, guitar and mandolin. Will you come and rehearse with us?" I said, "Why, sure, of course I will," so we rehearsed and we worked up a small program--I ' ve forgotten how long it took, eighteen or twenty minutes, something like that. We sat ourselves down on four or five chairs comfortably in the middle of this room. There were a couple of people looking at the murals. As the music spread out into the other halls, more and more people came in. We finally had to crouch over our instruments, jammed in like sardines, while a couple of hundred people packed themselves in that little room and applauded again and again. We had to play our program over I don't know how many times. The evening probably did give a fillip to donations; I hope it did. By that time Tom had begun to get some well-paying commissions, so he threw a magnificent New Year's Eve party, with dozens and dozens of eggs and crates of whiskey that still somewhat enlivened the early Depression. The little musicological society grew. The first meeting was by Kinkeldey, who presented a set of five equal-tempered gongs which he and the professor of physics at Cornell had had manufactured.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 10, 1966

TUSLER

I believe you have one more story to add to the record about the composer Henry Cowell, when he was a student at the Institute.

SEEGER

Yes. As I recorded in one of the early tapes, Henry and I had decided that universality was one of the things that we were interested in in music, and that therefore it would be a good idea for him to have in his musical education a pretty thorough going-over of the old traditions and as much association with the new as he could, and everything else in between. When he finally left California and got out of the Army, he presented himself according to plan at the Institute of Musical Art as a student and was properly enrolled with my recommendation. Not long after he began his studies--some six weeks or so, I believe it was--he handed in one of the little-known chorales harmonized by Johann Sebastian Bach as his harmony exercise, and it came back covered with blue pencil marks. The denouement in the class when it turned out to be a Bach chorale could be imagined. [laughter] The whole matter was promptly referred to Frank Damrosch Henry was called up to the office and promptly fired. [laughter] I think this deviltry was quite original with Henry, but might have been an emulation of Carl Ruggles' experience at Harvard where he handed in a little-known Schubert song in a class in song writing. Well, that sort of thing's probably gone on throughout history. It's a complete misunderstanding of the nature of discipline by the student and the teacher. They should have laughed it off and gotten down to business, but they didn't see it.

TUSLER

Who was his teacher?

SEEGER

A man named [Alfred M.] Richardson, a dry little pedagogue who followed George Wedge and Percy Goetschius. I was thinking at this point, at about the midpoint of this series of dictations, that in between these Thursdays I frequently jibe at myself for taking them as apparently seriously as I do. As merely one of an uncounted billion of little units of a minor encrustation on a minor planet of a minor solar system, and perhaps a minor galaxy, and perhaps maybe even a minor galactic system, it sometimes seems as if the spending of fifteen hours talking about oneself should be a rather humorous affair; but after all, the galactic systems and the encrustations and everything else to do with the phenomenological universe are the things that are given to us, and about all that we can give to the universe is our own values. And so the values are here, the main things that we're talking about; hopefully they are arranged so that the lesser values are omitted, but they do sometimes intrude. The period of the Depression during which I was in New York, roughly speaking, 1929 to the end of 1935, is the span of time that we were talking about in the last tape. Of the three or four strands most important to me during these six years, the compositional strand was petering out very rapidly. I had long given up composition; during the '20's I was interested in other peoples' composition. And I was interested in the teaching of it, which developed into a theory in the book that I referred to, which has never been published and I hope never will be unless as a historical curiosity. But by about 1932 or 1933:, an event of importance happened in which this compositional interest, the teaching interest, the musicological interest, the social situation and the concern with the misery of the people, the increasing disillusionment with teaching, the very sharp decrease in my personal income, and of course a number of lesser strands, all became focused in one point. Ruth and I were living in Greenwich Village, and one day Henry Cowell told me of a group of young composers who were trying to do something about the Depression. We got to talking about the Depression, and Henry brought up the point in that connection. He said, "Looking back to the days in Berkeley when we thought that we were to blame because we couldn't connect our music with the social situation, you might be interested in this little group. Don't you want to come around sometime?" So Ruth and I went around. Of course, the occasion for the going around was a lecture by me. Being forewarned that they were Communist oriented, I designed a lecture on the "dictatorship of the linguistic;" for the uninitiated reader, of course, it was to be understood that it was a parody of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." I conceived of language as underlying any social, economic, or philosophical theory or system, and I wanted to see how the Communists would take my underpinning the foundations of their Communism with a rather fluid, tricky, or perhaps treacherous art called "language." They were quite impressed by having "a well-known musicologist" speak to them, and had neither the wit nor the Marxism to argue against it. So we had a love feast, and I found them a very interesting group. One of the men, Lan Adomian, now I think a Mexican citizen and living in Mexico (he was a displaced Russian in the first place, either born of Russian parents in New York or immigrated), had a small band of volunteers who would go off on picket lines and form accompaniments to the picketing songs; they were composing picketing songs. The upshot of the situation was that both Ruth and I felt that here was the missing link in the book that I had written. The book that I had written was predicated on the validity of a theory of composition which was entirely intrinsic to music--that is, oblivious to any extrinsic influences. I had indicated in the preface of the book that of course outside events did influence music, but we hadn't the slightest idea how. (I'm reminded of a recent volume, published I think this year or last year by a member of the staff of the Music Department of Berkeley, which tries to do just the same thing. The little pamphlet that goes out with the notice quotes a number of pages from the book that deal with Mozart. If you sift the paragraphs and the sentences in these three or four pages about Mozart, you'll find that Mozart composed the kind of music that the social situation he lived in required him to write. There's almost no tracing of the technique of Mozart in purely musical terms. It's traced almost entirely in non-musical terms, completely contradicting, apparently, the thesis of the book. ) Ruth and I took this little Composers' Collective, as it was called, very seriously. The headquarters was somewhere just south of l4th Street--11th, 12th, or 13th Street, somewhere in there. I think the collective paid for the dirty little loft room, with a possible piano, for our weekly meetings, and we all pitched in to writing songs for the unemployed, for the picketers, for the strikers, for union meetings, and such things. Gradually the small group of five or six attracted more and more members, until along in 1933 and 1934 and 1935 we had a membership of something like twenty-four technically proficient composers, ranging in age from [my age]--I think I was the oldest--on down. Someday I'll make public a list of the membership by the names that they went by. Many of the people used assumed names. I think that perhaps now with the possibility of a rebirth of McCarthyism in the United States it might be fairer to leave out the names of these people, but it should be known for future history. I don't know where I'll leave those names. I should attend to this sometime while the tending is good. I can mention one name because the man is dead, and that is Marc Blitzstein, one of the most brilliant members.

TUSLER

Were they mostly well-known people?

SEEGER

Oh, practically all of them either were well known or have since become well known. When I say practically all I mean half of them. Four or five of them are among the best-known composers in the United States .

TUSLER

Were they under any pressure at that time for this activity?

SEEGER

People didn't bother in those days about having their name associated with a Communist -affiliated group--I wouldn't say "dominated" group, but I really think it was more dominated than people realized at the time. It was very sympathetic to Communism. You see. Communism in the United States in the early '30's was still idealistic. It still had around it the aura of the early Bolshevism, which was experimental in all the arts; and this group of young musicians and medium and even older musicians represented the leaders of the avant-garde, as they call it now, but of "modern" music, in the '30's. They not only wrote many of the principal articles in Modern Music , but in other journals. Their compositions were anathematized by the leading critics. They were played at the concerts at the International Composers' Guild and the League of Composers, and they were beginning to be published. They were in those days what are now the classics of the avant-garde. Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock came out or was written along during the period of the collective. Hanns Eisler, the outstanding European composer of this persuasion, came to the United States at this time, fleeing from Hitler. His appearance at the collective was memorable. He was welcomed at a concert in an auditorium hack of Carnegie Hall (I've forgotten what it's called, the Shriners or something like that, the Masonic Temple--I don't know what it was). A concert was put on to welcome him, and he was introduced. It was the worst-managed concert I think I've ever attended. For myself, as an admirer of Eisler's work, it was unmitigated tragedy. Since the whole thing was more or less sponsored by the Communist Party, I sent the Daily Worker in a review the next day of the mishmashing of this reception for what was probably the most outstanding Communist musician of the day. Whether Eisler was a Communist I don't know, but he was certainly very sympathetic to Communism. Communism, as I say, in those days represented the only political-economic-social philosophy that offered anything in the way of a tangible escape from the philosophy that had put us into the Depression--namely, the Coolidge-Hoover laissez-faire. My review was a denunciation of the efficiency of the party in managing this reception, and I urged a public apology to Eisler. I didn't have a telephoney I was as they say in the United States, "contacted" (I never use the verb "to contact"), and asked if I would go down and discuss the review with the editors of the Daily Worker , because they would like to publish it but wondered if I could soft-pedal it a little bit. So I went down and agreed to a certain amount of soft-pedaling, and the review was published. The next day I met Eisler, and we hit up a very close friendship. He was a pupil of Schoenberg, a little round man of early middle age, who looked as if he might have run a lunch counter or a small haberdashery shop somewhere down on the Lower East Side. He had an extraordinary mind and was quite a brilliant conversationalist. His collaboration with Brecht is well known, and one of the works that I had especially admired was his Massnahme, for which Brecht wrote the words and Eisler the music, a teaching of the Communist discipline. Needless to say, with all this contact with Communism, and having welcomed the Russian Revolution in the first place, even when I was back in Berkeley, Ruth and I were in the way of becoming very loyal fringe members of the Communist front. It's very hard for Americans in the present day to realize how many intellectuals in the early '30's defended Russia and the Communist movement and the Communist philosophy. People like myself who'd tried in vain to make head or tail out of Marx and saw perfectly clearly its datedness in evolutionary philosophies, had no trouble in disposing of the fallacies; but, of course, it made us quite unable to talk with the people who regarded Marx and Engels as the, not authors necessarily, but inscribers of the "divine word." We had no conception of the change that had taken, and was taking place in early Stalinism. The famous purge trials, which came up in 1933 were not translated into English. They were reported only by English translations of Russian foreign news, which was of course composed by the Soviet government and English anti-Communist reports of the trials. So we wrote off these trials, as far as we knew them (we knew them only from the New York Times and such sources); we wrote off the unfavorable aspect of the trials and tried to give them the very best appearance we could, although they were a little bit unsettling. Now to come back to the collective: the weekly meetings were really quite exciting. The Communist Party had just published our first Workers' Song Book , copies of which are pretty rare now. Eisler was asked for his criticism of the anthology and sat down at the piano and went through it, making really a brilliant critique of the whole thing. I won't go into any more detail on that here. He was in New York for a while and attended irregularly. He had meanwhile gotten a job making a film for the Standard Oil Company. The prospect of a student of Schoenberg writing the music for a propaganda film for the Standard Oil Company sent us into gales of laughter, [laughter] I think he used an electric guitar I'm not sure; just with six instruments, as I remember. He got the better of us. Everyone liked the music; it was considered a tremendous success and led to his obtaining more and more commissions for writing music for Hollywood films. I'll speak of this later on; I mustn't forget to speak of my visit to his villa in Bel-Air in the wartime '40''s, where he was living while he was composing the music for films for Hollywood. Now let me see, how did this collective go on? A couple of us got the idea that the old form of the round might be used, so we started writing rounds with somewhat satiric verses on the Du Pont brothers. Father Coughlin, President Roosevelt, who'd just been elected and was burying hogs and burning wheat; some of them really were very good. I remember one written by Elie Siegmeister (I think Elie Siegmeister won't mind my putting in his name here). [Sings]: "Three brothers named Du Pont; patriots are they; they make their money from munitions in an honest way. They love their country, right or wrong, but when yen or lira come along, they always very cheerfully to anyone will sell shells that will all armor pierce and armor that will stop each shell; there were three brothers named Du Pont. . ." [laughter] One of my rounds was reported to us as having been heard sung by a truck driver in Louisiana a year later. It was on the subject of John D. Let me see if I can remember that. I must put it in here. "Oh joy upon this earth to live and see the day, when Rockefeller senior shall up to me and say, 'Comrade, can you spare a dime?'" One of the most memorable events in this Composers' Collective was the appearance of Aunt Molly Jackson, the Kentucky coal miner's wife, traditional ballad singer and union organizer. Aunt Molly had been taken to the border of Harlan County, Kentucky, along about 1933 or 1934 and told to get out and stay out if she wanted to stay alive. She and the other members of her family wrote union organizational words to traditional ballads. Her ballad of Harry Sims has been put on records; many people sing it nowadays. She was in a way quite a great person. For the old English ballad, for instance, which has the refrain [Sings]: "Oh lay the lily low, oh lay the lily low," she said, "Join the CIO, oh join the CIO." She came in one day, introduced I won't say by whom, and we all were respectful to her, because she had by that time quite a reputation. Her reputation lay in having carried two guns and having more notches on them than she would readily acknowledge. However, we couldn't make anything out of her, and she couldn't make anything out of us. The last I remember of Aunt Molly was that she was sitting way of f in the corner of this large loft room, while we excitedly went over our lucubrations at the piano. I was sorry for her and for ourselves at not being able to get together, and I went up to her afterwards, I remember, telling her, "Aunt Molly, I know you can't make anything out of this, and we can't make anything out of you, but it's our fault. You're on the right track. You go out and keep on doing what you're doing. Maybe we'll learn someday how to do things." The next most memorable event of this collective (I mustn't draw this out too long, but you see, it's more or less the beginning of this protest song writing that's going around nowadays) was a competition for a May Day song announced in the old New Masses ; the words were chosen first and published, and we all went to writing the music with a will. Needless to say, Aaron Copland's music won. We had a large meeting; I don't know how many people were there, "but there must have been fifteen or twenty who had competed in the competition. I happened to be chairman and closed the discussion in this way: "Of course, Aaron, we all know your song is the best piece of music that was written. It really is a beautiful song, but I have this one question: will it ever be sung on a picket line, at a union organization meeting, or at a strikers' meeting?" Well, there was a unanimous judgment that it never would be. It had modulations and skips in it that the average person couldn't manage. You had to be a pretty good musician to sing it. It was a swell song. When it came to my song, which I purposely put last, I introduced it with a little preface, "Now, of course, this is the worst song of the lot. But I will put this up to you: let any ordinary American hear it twice and he'll be able to sing along with it. Isn't that so?" And they agreed it was. I had by that time gotten the Aunt Molly idea, the hybrid and imitation hillbilly type of song. (I could write a better one now, knowing much more about hillbilly.) Shortly after this, I left for Washington. Now I must go back and pick up some of the other strands. We had had a number of concerts, and Ruth wrote several compositions. She wrote two songs with piano accompaniment which were performed at an Olympiad, as they called it, both of them, I think, written in English by a Chinese-American, one on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, and the other called "Chinaman Laundryman," detailing the miserable experience of the Chinese-American discrimination at the time. I'm going to try to see if I can't get those things played now; I think perhaps the audiences are about ready for them. She published some more less controversial compositions, but I had less and less to do with the compositional end of things. My interests were more and more with the small New York Musicological Society, which had thriven. We continued meeting at Mrs. Walton's house and the meetings attracted more and more people, and were more and more worthwhile. None of the papers were historical. Of the thirty papers of the period from 193O to 1935, most of them were by the more or less regular members; occasionally we'd have a paper by a visitor. The rules of the meetings were that everybody present must comment on the paper whether they knew anything about the subject being dealt with or not. If they didn't know anything about the subject dealt with, they were to comment on the method of study disclosed or the presentation. Once or twice every year we had round robins. I remember one on the correlation of the parameters of color and tone that attracted twenty-four participants. There were several painters present Tom Benton among others, commercial artists, advertising technicians, psychologists, acousticians, composers; and it was quite an exciting meeting. [Leo] Theremin was there, who had invented the instrument whose pitch you varied by nearlng your hand to a magnetic rod. Theremin's instruments were beginning to be used in nightclubs and occasionally by synnphony orchestras, as by Leopold Stokowski. Carl Ruggles' compositions were being increasingly played. Varese's works were getting around; Henry Cowell's works were also. The sessions of the muslcologlcal society held in Mrs. Walton's apartment were becoming known around the city. A number of people who were more interested in the history of music than in the systematic study became members, but they never showed up for meetings. We in our Intransigence more or less gloried in the theory that they were afraid to come, that we'd have made mincemeat out of them if they had. We would have attempted to show that they didn't know anything about history, much less anything about music. So we really had not only a chip on one shoulder, but on both. Kinkeldey showed up every now and then and was very sympathetic with our aims, and read one of his usually good papers.

TUSLER

When did all this start? Was it in 193O?

SEEGER

It started in 193O and went on until 1934 or 1935--

TUSLER

Was it a formal organization at this point?

SEEGER

It was a formal organization, oh, yes.

TUSLER

And its name was?

SEEGER

The New York Musicological Society. We published a bulletin, and it now is a collector's item. Each meeting was described in four or five lines. We had a constitution about a page long. I served as chairman most of the time because nobody else seemed to have the time to spend on it. Secretaries varied. Finally, we were without a secretary, and a young man showed up, who was just back from his PhD studies at the University of Berlin, named Harold Spivacke, and I asked if he could serve as secretary. He said he would be delighted. So I came to know Spivacke, and both of us were very sympathetic to one of the principal objectives of the New York Musicological Society, which was to form a national society. One day Spivacke asked me, "Would you be willing for me to go out and see if I could get this thing under way?" I said, "For God's sake, go out and do everything you can, and I'll help you if my help is of any use." So he went out. He was a born negotiator, administrator, and sized up the situation very quickly: that there was much more musicological interest in New York than just the systematic interest --in fact that the dominant interest probably was historical; and so he went around among the historians. Within a very short time--I couldn't tell you just how long a time it was but it was amazingly short--he came to me and said, "I think I've got the whole thing sewed up. There's only one condition of it, and that is that you'll take a back seat." I said, "Man alive, I'll take a back seat--I won't even belong to the new society if you'll only get it started. The important thing is to get that new society started." So, on June 3, 1935 we met in Mrs. Walton's apartment, by this time down on Washington Square, eleven of us. Kinkeldey wasn't there, but he was one of the members who was in the consortium, or whatever you call it. I called the New York Musicological Society to order and heard a motion that it be dissolved; the motion was seconded and the society dissolved, and then the assembled group decided to found a national society whose name would be selected later. I really can't tell you just what the next steps were and just how they followed each other. Somehow or other I was involved in the matter, even though I had offered to take a back seat. The group suggested a number of names; there was a great hesitancy to accept the name musicology. The English resistance to rausicology was strongly felt, and it looked as if it might be an American Association for Musical Research, a term which I abominated. Somehow or other, I don't know how it was, we managed to turn it into the American Musicological Association and finally into the American Musicological Society.

TUSLER

that was the English resistance to musicology?

SEEGER

The English resisted musicology as the English so often resist anything new, especially in academic life, and although the French had musicologie , the Spanish had musicologia , the Italians musicologia , and so forth, they just couldn't take it; they wanted "musical research." Well, when it came to the organizational meeting at the old Beethoven Association, Kinkeldey of course was elected president, as he should have been. When it came to nominations for a first vice-president, there was a dead silence. Obviously, there was a problem there. Finally, Carl Engel got up and nominated Charles Seeger; I bowed very appreciatively to him, and I was elected vice-president. But everybody understood that I would stay in the background. The rest of the officers were elected. and a meeting was announced for, I think, Philadelphia. At the meeting in Philadelphia (now I'm getting beyond the New York period; I was already by this time down in Washington, I think), I read a paper "Systematic and Historical Orientations in Musicology," in which I claimed that they were equally important peers of one another, that as much attention should be given to system as to history, that as much as possible we should try to balance the two. As I got up to read my paper, my coat got a crinkle in it and two pennies dropped out on the hard floor, so I was fortunately able to pick them up and say I hoped that my paper would be worth two pennies, and not merely one. You can imagine that the audience, which was quite small, was rather grim. Well, they took it, and there was no questioning, no discussion; and that was about the end of it.

TUSLER

Are these proceedings published?

SEEGER

There was no publication for the Musicological Society in those early days. They published abstracts, and they published proceedings and that sort of thing up to I've forgotten what year. So I sent the manuscript to Edward Dent, in London, and he got it published in the Acta Musicologica , 1939. I think it was. Mrs. Walton had become increasingly interested in musicology. She came to me one day in 1932 and said she would like to sponsor a small publication series in musicology, and talking the matter over we decided to set up the American Library of Musicology. I was president, perhaps president-editor, and she was secretary, and she decided that she could afford about $2,000 for the first volume. I laid out the program for the American Library of Musicology in my favorite pattern of fifty-fifty systematic and historical, which I 've just said I emphasized in a meeting of the Musicological Society five years later. The systematic works were to concentrate on those having to do with the cross-cultural theory and non-European musics on the assumption that enough publication was sponsored already on the European or Western field. So I picked out Joseph Yasser's work for the first volume, Helen Roberts' study of the music of Southern California Indians for the second, and Joseph Schillinger' s mathematical theory of the arts for the third. I felt pretty sure that we wouldn't lack future volumes once we got these three published. Yasser's book was a little more expensive than we had expected. I think it came up to something like $2,500. It was beautifully done and has since become one of the classics. Helen Roberts' book hasn't attracted notice outside of technical circles, but it was a first-rate work and up to the level of her other outstanding publications. I wanted to have something of [George] Herzog, but he never wrote a book; I would have published collected papers of his, if we had run on farther. Before a contemplation of Schillinger' s book was finished, Mrs. Walton had suffered too much financially in the Depression, and the library went out of business. Yasser, on his own, got enough money together to publish his Medieval Quartal Harmony . So the Library of Musicology folded up. I didn't mention the historical branch. The historical branch was to consist at first of publications of the classics of musicology, of musicological theory, principally--on the left page, the most reliable original text, and on the right, an English translation. I've forgotten what I'd picked up for the first, but we never got that under way.

TUSLER

Was this a function of the Musicological Society?

SEEGER

No. It was entirely separate from the Musicological Society. A young group of Russian emigres led by Yasser formed in connection with the New York Musicological Society and had a number of meetings in Russian. Connected with this end of things were the courses in the musical cultures of the world at the New School for Social Research. Neither Henry nor I knew much about non-European music, but we set ourselves to learning and then telling a class the little that we knew. But we did it as honestly as we could, by saying that we didn't know much about it, and getting live performance for every lecture. I remember when it came to Chinese music we went to the Chinese Music Society in Chinatown. They had a room about fifteen feet square, quite high, with the instruments that they played hung up on pegs around the walls. We would ask them to come up and give them a small fee to come up and give a performance; and then we would say what little we'd been able to learn from the rather small literature on the subject that we could put our hands on. They would ask us what instruments we would like to hear, so we would point to one instrument after another, and if they had the performers ready and were willing to get together with them, they would come up and play them separately, and then put them together in traditional groups. We had an old "stableboy" f rom Hoboken who couldn't speak English who could sit dovm with a gusla and sing Serbo-Croatian epics until you simply had to stop him. There was a group of Japanese musicians at Columbia; there was an excellent Syrian who played the lute and could talk a bit about theory; and there were two Hindu musicians in town. I remember the young man, Sahat Laheri, who died a long time ago, but the older man was a superb tabla player. I can't remember what some of the others were. We obtained them sometimes from as far away as Boston or Philadelphia. There wasn't much money to pay them fees, but we managed somehow or other.

TUSLER

What was this course called?

SEEGER

Musical Cultures of the World, which they call the course here at UCLA. I had one small group that was more interested in theoretical study, and one man who had fluent German began translating some of the by now classics of ethnomusicology--Hornbostel, Lachmann. The only one that he got through was Lachmann' s Musik des Orients . About the middle of this time, in the summer of 1933 we heard that Erich von Hornbostel had fled from Germany and was in Switzerland. I went straight to Alvin Johnson and asked if he couldn't cable an invitation to a chair in the university in exile [which was] set up at the New School, which he did that night, and received an acceptance reply I think the next day. Hornbostel and his wife and a huge shipment of library and instruments arrived in October. I remember the boxes. They measured, most of them, four by four by six. A room in the New School was completely full of them, except for a small space in the middle allowing for the door to be opened and two or three people to stand there and perhaps begin to open one box. Hornbostel turned out to be the wonderful person we'd heard he was, and it was my pleasure to introduce him to his first seminar of two people--a rather faded lady, an amateur; and a middle-aged gentleman, who as far as I know was also an amateur. Hornbostel spent the two hours entirely on the old Edison cylinder phonograph. It was one of the most touching, one of the most moving experiences I ever had in my life, of an academic sort. The three of us sat facing a little table on which the little machine (it looked like a miniature sewing machine) was placed, and Hornbostel sat in his chair behind it; there was an electric light shining straight down over the instrument. After I finished my brief introduction, there was a silence, while Hornbostel looked at us with shining eyes, stooping over the instrument, and finally putting his hand on it. He said, "This, gentlemen and lady, is an Edison phonograph." His face became wreathed in an ecstasy of smiles. "It records music, singing, speech. It operates by a spring mechanism, which you wind up this way." (I am speaking fast; he dwelt on every word.) It took him two hours to explain the machine. My emotion in the opening of the lecture became transformed into a real worry that the two people wouldn't show up for the next meeting. [laughter] But they did, and things began to move. Henry had foresightedly bought two sets of the Demonstration Sammlung of the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin of 120 cylinders each: one of them was on deposit at the New School; the other Henry kept for himself. We had a pretty good phonograph play-off, and things were in the way to develop marvelously. Hornbostel was a cousin of the Warburgs, New York bankers, and it was not long after he arrived that we began talking about the archives in Berlin and the possibility of buying them from Hitler for American money, which Hitler was very anxious to get. Hornbostel felt sure that the Warburgs would give him the money, and felt also sure that Hitler would feel good riddance of the records, and while he would charge a high price, the operation could go through. So we drew up a project to found an Institute of Comparative Musicology to be independently set up in New York and headed by Hornbostel. By this time, he began to be ill. I think he never gave more than a few lectures. The New School continued to pay him his salary, but he was confined to his house most of the time, up in Scarsdale. By this time, Helen Roberts and George Herzog and I had founded the American Society for Comparative Musicology. We became worried, about 1933, in the Hitler attack on everything non-German, and feared that he would close down the little Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Musik des Orients that Hornbostel, Wolf, Sachs, Lachmann and Schiinemann and others had recently formed in Berlin, that was publishing a journal, a Zeitschrift , which was the only publication for non-European music in the , which was the only publication for non-European music in the world at that time. So the three of us. Miss Roberts and Herzog and I, hastily drew up a prospectus for an American Society of Comparative Musicology, sent it out, and got about 150 members with the understanding that all but a dollar of the membership fees would be sent to Berlin to keep the Berlin society alive. The Berlin society was an international soclety--it had memberships from other countries than just Germany. As things turned out, we did keep it alive for a few more years than it would have lived otherwise. The second volume came out, but by the time the third volume was being gotten ready, Hornbostel had left, Sachs had left, Lachmann felt he must go, and Johannes Wolf was left as president. Finally a letter came from Wolf saying that he must resign from the organization and leave me (I was vice-chairman) in charge so that the seat of the society could move to the United States. We were able to bring out with George Herzog's help the last number of the little Zeitschrift feur Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft , and then I wrote to the treasurer, asking about the remaining funds in the treasury. He said they had been devoted to m.ore worthy ends, which meant that the society, as far as its Germanic base went, was completely out of the picture. What records I had of the ASCM have been deposited in the library of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Just at this time, a very strange thing happened. Helen Roberts had designed with the help of a technician in New York what was to be the latest thing in electronic equipment for comparative musicology for her laboratory at Yale in the Institute of Human Relations. The equipment was built and installed by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, and the Carnegie Corporation finally asked Miss Roberts, "Do we give this to you or to Yale?" Miss Roberts, of course, in the proper way, said, "Of course, give it to Yale." Very shortly afterwards the director of the institute called Herzog and Miss Roberts up. [Continued on the following tape.]

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE A
NOVEMBER 10, 1966

SEEGER

The director said, "I'm very sorry to have to tell you that our legal advisers tell us that we are employing you illegally. We can't employ you any further." I was already moved to Washington. Herzog went to Columbia with his collection, part of which had been left him by Hornbostel, and Miss Roberts was left high and dry by everybody. I was too busy, and Herzog was too busy to do anything about the Society of Comparative Musicology, or the bringing out of a fourth volume of the Zeitschrift feur Vergleichende Musikwissenschaf t . She was too disgusted with the way Yale had behaved, and she decided to simply get out of the whole comparative musicological situation. She had an independent income and built herself a little house down at Tryon, North Carolina. We had a small amount of money in the treasury of the American Society; I think it was $l40.00. Lachmann was in Palestine and offered to start up a new journal or continue the old; "But," he wrote to me, "we are not going to compare anything." I said, "All right, do anything you want, only just keep the journal going." We gave $100.00 to I think it was Harold Spivacke, who got another hundred from the American Council of Learned Societies [ACLS], and a little more money I think from some other place, to send over to Lachmann to start in with the fourth number of the Zeitschrift . Lachmann died; Chancellor Magnes of Hebrew University decided to put the money into paying for the publication of Lachmann' s research work in the island of Djerba. And that's the end of the Gesellschaft fur Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft and the American Society for Comparative Musicology. The conglomeration of misfortunes was too much for it to stand.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE B
NOVEMBER 17, 1966

TUSLER

Earlier in the tape you spoke of drawing up plans with Hornbostel for an Institute of Comparative Musicology. That collapsed because of his death, I understand.

SEEGER

Yes. I still have the first draft of the proposal that we drew up, but with Hornbostel' s death, I felt that I couldn't go to the Warburgs, who were old friends of my first wife's, from whom I had become estranged, and say to them, "Will you do this," with the idea that I would be the only person who could implement the situation; so the whole thing was dropped. The Phonogramm-Archiv went under wraps, as they say, for the period after Hornbostel's death. There was not much work for them. The Berlin society had collapsed because its officers were exiled or forced to resign, and as I understand it, the materials remained more or less locked up in a room until the Russians came in, and the first report I had was that the soldiers were seen shoveling the cylinders into large boxes for shipment to Russia. Those that were not destroyed in the process became part of an archive in St. Petersburg, which so far as I know has struggled along until this day. A recent traveler told me that the archive was there, but nothing much was being done with it, although there were some people in charge. They had made an arrangement with the West Germans to give the West Germans a tape of what they had, but when George List, of the University of Indiana, and Moses Asch, of Folkways Records, went about bringing out a disc dubbing of the demonstration collection, it had to be made up mostly from what was left of Henry Cowell's two sets that he brought over in I think it was 1931 I'm not sure. Berlin might have contributed a few items; I haven't checked on it.

TUSLER

The American society was never an actual part of the Berlin society.

SEEGER

No, the American Society for Comparative Musicology was an entirely independent organization, but we considered ourselves affiliated with the German Gesellschaft feur Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft in that we sent all but one dollar of our members' dues, partly to keep them alive and partly to finance the journal. We kept the remaining dollar for our own postage, mimeographing, and so forth. But the whole thing collapsed about the same time, and that was due to the transposition of the three leading members of the American society. Miss Helen Roberts, George Herzog, and myself, all of whom found themselves suddenly in new practical situations in life, Herzog and myself without time to do anything about the situation, and Miss Roberts feeling that she could not carry the whole load herself. Now starting in on the life in Washington from 1935 to 1955, I must say that I was entering an entirely new universe. I was under no misapprehensions of the time it would take, but I felt that I would learn a great deal. The pure learning was in many cases learned from the applied learning, and I was never one to be afraid of application. In fact, I felt that in myself there was great need of application, because I had never had a chance to do field work. I'd never taken a course In muslcology myself and was really a musicological "sport" if there ever was one. My first job in Washington was as technical adviser in the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, whose fortunes were directed by Rexford Tugwell. The head of the Special Skills Division was Adrian Dornbush, a painter. We had on our staff a half-dozen painters, Ben Shahn, Charles Pollock, the brother of the better-known Jackson Pollock, a man named Jones, and two or three other able painters. There was a specialist for theater, for weaving, for woodworking, interior decorating, sculpture--a very able young sculptress; and we made an enthusiastic and idealistic group that had Tugwell's complete confidence and support. We started out in an old loft building just off Connecticut Avenue near the Mayflower Hotel, but shortly were set up in a separate building by ourselves, which had been some kind of a small industrial plant--new, clean--and began to be provided with all the necessary equipment--a woodworking shop on the second floor. The job of the Resettlement Administration was to handle rural unemployment and misery, and unsound agricultural practices which partly led to the unemployment and misery. I was appointed to engage three hundred musicians to put into three hundred resettlement communities, pretty much covering the United States. A resettlement community was an aggregate of destitute farm families--one to three hundred--drawn sometimes from the rural, but more often partly from the city slums, who were victims of dust bowls and the Depression generally, who were to be put in viable communities, on good land, under competent agricultural direction, with cooperative buying and marketing facilities, their own schools, medical services, and so forth, managed by regional administrators. I've forgotten how many regions there were --eight or nine, I suppose --in the country, each one with its regional staff directed from Washington, where there were specialist of all kinds ready to help and to travel over the country seeing that the latest methods were being used. The Resettlement Administration was set up to get fast action. Roosevelt and his advisers knew well enough how long it would take to get anything done through the established Department of Agriculture and how completely altered any plan would become in the course of going through the administrative red tape. There was, therefore, a cold war between the Department of Agriculture and the Resettlement Administration. The Department of Agriculture, of course, was totally integrated with Congress by way of the pork barrel and by way of political control, and the Resettlement supposedly was not. So it began to get under fire about as soon as it got under way, along with the other emergency administrations that Roosevelt set up, such as the WPA. The idealism of the Special Skills Division was nothing unique in the Resettlement Administration. It permeated everything. The architectural end of things was taken care of close to the cities in the way of building "greenbelt" communities, like Greenbelt, Washington. The more rural communities were supposed to be little rural villages, which would not only be successful themselves but would give the surrounding villages some impulse to modernize their somewhat antique ways of going about things. I can't trace in too much detail what happened in the two years I worked in the Resettlement Administration. I was under no misapprehension of the difficulty of finding proper people to put into rural communities in the United States--rural and suburban, but mostly rural. My life in Staten Island as a boy gave me an idea of what suburban life was. My living in Pinehurst, North Carolina in the trailer had given me an idea of what rural life was in the Southeast. I had seen something of the employment situation in California, especially in the inner valleys and among the Indians, but these were somewhat views from above down. I had not lived myself in any of the communities. I could merely see from the outside some of the things that were wrong and some of the causes for the existence of those things. My work in the Composers' Collective in New York had, however, given me two or three years of discipline in trying to make music for people entirely in a different musical world from the musical world that I had grown up in and was trained in. My wife and I and two children and a friend of hers, Margaret Valiant, drove down to Washington in our little Chevrolet, packed to the ceiling with worldly goods, the rest to follow in a van. We found lodging was difficult to obtain and things not too easy, but whatever difficulties there were, were overcome in the enthusiasm of the work. The first person that I engaged was, I think Miss Valiant, and I'll tell something more of her history presently. Herbert Haufrecht, one of the members of the old collective, was taken on, and I managed to get ten musicians into ten communities. By that time. Congress began to whittle away the budget, and the Special Skills Division and Resettlement Administration began to wither away. We had about two years of exciting work. I spent a lot of time in the Library of Congress reading up on folklore, about which I knew nothing. I had already made the acquaintance of John Lomax and his son Alan early in the '30' s, and that's rather amusing; I might tell the story here. Henry Cowell and I were commissioned by Macmillan Company to pass judgment on John Lomax' s book, American Ballads and Folk Songs . Part of the ceremonies was a presentation to us of the material by John and Alan, who was a young man and extremely belligerent once he saw these two highbrow musicians who were going to pass on something they knew nothing about. Cowell and I were tremendously enthusiastic. John's truculence was immediately mollified, and even Alan came around eventually. The book was published later. John was at that time honorary dollar-a-year curator of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress. The archive had been set up by Carl Engel, chief of the music division, and had been headed by Robert W. Gordon, who had a very proprietary attitude about the material and his activity with it. The archive was housed at the top of one of the front towers of the old building of the library, the southeast tower, a huge room some forty or fifty feet square which was never cleaned. My first visit to it was shortly after Lomax took over. There were piles of records on the floor, anywhere from two to four feet high, most of them without covers--covered with dust, no catalog; only some rickety machines for playing; a table and a desk or two; it was the strangest looking place you ever got into. Gordon, who was a passionate folklorist, had been a younger member of the staff of the University of California in Berkeley when I was there and we were good friends, but he was very difficult to get along with and spent a great deal of time in the field. John Lomax, Sr., the story goes, got him fired, got the archive out of the attic and began to make something of it. Cataloging had begun and was being continued, and I began to hear the records. One of my first acts in the Resettlement Administration was to order a Presto sound recorder, which plowed channels in aluminum discs. I was able to get off in the field occasionally to make some records, but I was able to send some of my young people off into the field with the machine. Among these, Sidney Robertson, who later married Henry Cowell, was most successful. On the whole, she made something like 150 discs of 78 rpm, much good stuff. Her outstanding achievement was the complete repertory of Mrs. Emma Dusenberry, an elderly blind woman living in Mena, Arkansas, whose family had left Georgia with Emma when she was eleven and lived in Arkansas ever since. When she was a girl, Emma had planned to learn all the songs in the world. Mrs. Cowell asked her, "well, did you?" She said, "No." "Why?" said Mrs. Cowell. She said, "They kept up making them so fast." But Emma had a repertory of about 120 songs, many of them old English ballads. Her husband had come to Arkansas through the Lake States and had something of a northern repertory. They courted each other in music. He had died; she had lived on, and had a lively memory. One of my other field workers never used the recorder, but he took tunes down by notation. (Incidentally, he wrote down the variant of "The Wayfaring Stranger" that I published and Burl Ives sang and put on records and has now become part of the repertory of the folk music revival in the United States.) He was an ex-Socialist and did some very interesting work picking up ballads of union organization, picket lines, and unrest in the southeastern towns. Each field worker was given two weeks training in Washington before going out into the field. Perhaps I might read one or two of the directives. The first job of the worker in any one of these resettlement communities was to survey the resources of the community, and by the resources of the community, I meant the human resources first and the material ones afterwards. Life would not be too easy from the point of view of the comforts of home, but their first job was to make themselves liked. To make themselves liked, perhaps the first thing to do was to make themselves useful. The members of a resettlement community lived in all kinds of makeshift ways while they built their houses, barns, and other buildings. The government would build the houses, but with the help of the members of the community. A store and a school were being built, an administrative center, and so forth and so on, at the same time that the houses were being built, and it was pioneering work. So there was plenty to do for any person "out of Washington," as they said, regardless of what he was supposed to do. The last thing my music workers were to do was to try to do anything in music that they wanted to do or considered themselves capable of doing. The first thing they had to do, after making themselves liked and useful, was to find out what was going on in the way of music --what music the people had in their heads and hands, what they liked, and what they would like to do in the way of music. This, you can imagine, would be difficult for an unemployed musician from the city, with the inferiority pressures upon him for being squeezed out of professional life and seeing here a chance to have a small income and at last to practice his beloved art. I won't say that I was very successful in keeping them from doing it, but at least I did the best I could to try to persuade them that they shouldn't try to do it, until they were perfectly sure that what they did would be liked. I can best show how the program worked by telling the story of Miss Valiant's entrance into the Cherrylake community in western Florida. Miss Valiant got off the train at a little way station at night. She was supposed to be met, to be taken to the community five or ten miles away in the back country. No one came up to her. Everybody else left, except an old man who was way up at the end of the platform who was leaning against a pillar and smoking . She went up to him and she said, "Good evening," and he grunted a return, asking him if he were supposed to meet somebody at the train; she was expecting to have somebody meet her and there was nobody there but him, so she was emboldened to address him. It turned out that she had to volunteer that she wanted to go to Cherrylake. "I'm the new music teacher there," she said. The first word that she got out of him that seemed at all interested was, "Who said you weren't?" [laughter] Well, they got to talking, and after a while he volunteered that she had a strange accent. "Oh," she said, "I'll get over that." To which he replied, "You'd better." [laughter] He was the man sent for her, and she finally got to Cherrylake. It was cold, it was drizzly and a pretty miserable evening; but she was hauled up on the platform of the shed where the tools were kept, which was the only place where the community could meet, and introduced by the community manager with: "Well, folks, you know the things we want from Washington. We need a doctor, we need some trained nurses, we need more drugs, we need this, that, and the other thing, and vhat do you think they sent us? They sent us a music teacher. Here she is." [laughter] So he got off the platform. Miss Valiant did the best she could with that introduction, but I understand that she wasn't any too welcome news. The first thing she did was to pitch in to the music in the school. They had a rackety old piano, but with her guitar she was able to get the children singing with her and to teach some of the teachers some songs, so that things began to go there. Fortunately, Miss Valiant had come from the South herself--Memphis, I believe--and had a fairly good repertory of local songs in the vernacular. We'd call it "old-timey" music now, or country music, and she knew some blues. Fortunately also she had taken a cours de couture in Paris, and one of the first opportunities she seized upon was a chance to show the women how to make their clothes. They were dressed in old rags that they had gotten through charity and what was left of a wardrobe of years of poverty--many of them had used feed sacks and flour sacks. She showed them how to cut up feed sacks and flour sacks into fairly attractive dresses, and then she put on, within a week or two, a fashion show to entertain the community. Each woman ascended a little bit of a platform, I think in the school building, while Miss Valiant played on the old piano that woman's theme song. In other words, she knit music into the situation. The next opportunity came to her in the form of a visit from the local hillbilly band. Some of the boys whose families were in the community sang in the honky-tonks on the mainline from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, and they heard there was a music teacher up here at Cherrylake, so they thought they'd go up and have some fun with her. Well, they found that Miss Valiant was a rather pretty girl in her middle thirties, and an interesting session was started. They had their instruments along, so she was quick to get them playing. "What should we play?" Well, she suggested something she thought they would know, of course. Oh, yes, they would play that, so they played that. After they'd played a number of her suggestions, she thought she might risk one that perhaps they didn't know. "No, don't know that; how does that go?" She reached over and took the guitar and sang it very prettily. They were conquered. Shortly afterwards she became one of them as far as the appearances in the Cherrylake community [were concerned]. Word got around about this little success, and the next opportunity that came Miss Valiant's way was the local baseball team. They had an idea that they wanted to play a neighboring team, and they needed uniforms. So they thought they'd give a prize fight, but they didn't have much in the way of pugilists, so they'd need some music to sort of string along through the intermissions. They came to the source of music in the community. Miss "Valiant, and they hit up a very nice cooperative idea. Just as they were going out. Miss Valiant said, "Well, hold on just a minute. We haven't talked about financial affairs at all." "Oh," they said, "financial af fairs--we' ve got to have all the money for the uniforms." "Well," she said, "no split for the music, no music." So she got her split, with the idea that the money would go to get musical instruments for the children in the school. The gate was sufficiently large to net something at the music end of things. By this time, the next item on the agenda, of course already planned in Washington, was to put on during the summer some kind of a show, some kind of a theatrical performance that would jell the community. Naturally, you get a lot of poor people together, living in very difficult conditions, being directed by people that they considered foreigners, and there's a lot of friction. One of the things that music was supposed to do, and had already done, was to begin to pull things together and make people get along with each other; and of course one of the biggest ways in which this could be done would be through a theatrical performance which would have a certain number of principals, choruses, dancers, and involve the audience if possible. So presently a telegram came to my desk: "Send at once four scripts for such-and-such principals," the idea being that of course these scripts would be rented from some rental agency. The answer, of course, was: "No scripts being sent. Make the play out of the life of the community yourselves." Miss Valiant then got busy. Talking around, it seemed that a large obstacle was looming. The dominant religious sect was rather bigoted and led by a man who would not have anything to do with the theater. The theater was an instrument of the devil. To get around him. Miss Valiant thought she would use some strategy. His wife picked up an egg or a cup of flour occasionally by doing some of the women's hair, so Miss Valiant had her hair done. She said she never had such an experience in her life; but in the course of it she was able to sound this woman out about the opposition that might be expected from this religious group. "Well," the woman said, "my husband would never allow it. You simply can't have anything to do with this kind of thing. It's the work of the devil, and we are God-fearing people." "Well, wait a minute," Miss Valiant said, "this is different. This is a different sort of thing. Let me tell you." She was clever enough to have outlined a scenario which was typical of the recent history of the people in the community, and particularly this woman and her husband's life. "Oh," said the woman, "now, that's all right. I think perhaps my husband might approve." So that evening she met with the husband, who was furious at the very Idea at the beginning, and at the end consented to take the leading man's part, with his wife taking the part of the leading woman. Well, things went on. The hillbilly band did the music, and the children sang, and the women's group sang, and they had a square dance, and everything went very nicely. By this time. Miss Valiant's stock was at the top. The weather began to get a little bit better; people moved out of the chicken houses into the barn, which they'd been building, and built the house while they lived in the barn and then were moving into the house. The furniture was being sent to them from factories that had been making it on the designs of the Special Skills Division woodworking shop. The women had been taught weaving by the weaving specialist in the Special Skills Division, and were weaving some of their own cloth by this time. There were some paintings in the administrative building in the school; some books were beginning to be in the library, and the community was getting on its way. To make a long story short, when Miss Valiant's time was up after five months or six months, a meeting was called. The project manager got up and said, "Folks, I have some bad news for you. You remember when Miss Valiant came here, how I introduced her? I said what we needed from Washington was such and such, and now they'd sent us a music woman? I'm here to eat crow. It's the best thing Washington ever sent us." Of course, she had a tremendous ovation. The success became known in Washington and she was sent off to another community, where she was introduced by Mrs. Roosevelt. My other nine music specialists scarcely made a ripple in the situation. They simply couldn't do what they were supposed to do. They were supposed to get out and learn how to sing the songs that the people sang in the community, and they didn't do it. There was one man who gave a recital of Italian opera arias, in spite of the rule against such a thing. One man did learn a great deal, and that was Herbert Haufrecht, who has made a specialty of work in folk music ever since. My own work progressed; I began to talk to the other technical people in Washington about the integration of music with their work. I wrote a syllabus of instructions for the Recreation Division. Ben[jamin Albert] Botkin and I worked up a project for a folk arts collection expedition. I came to realize vihat could be learned through the historical records survey of the WPA about the history of the United States, and in those two years had a course in the history of the United States, taught me mostly by my colleagues. I had a good deal of work in the field, mostly in the Southeast, not any farther north than New York. Unfortunately a very disagreeable situation had arisen in the whole Roosevelt administration about these emergency agencies. One day when I was not in the office, there was a telephone call to Mr. Tugwell from (Senator) Vinson. He demanded to know before the next morning how it was that the Resettlement Administration had published a song called "The Candidate's a Dodger." He said this was an Insult not only to the elected officials in the United States, but to the American government as a whole and the American people thereby; unless satisfactory explanation of the song was given, the Resettlement Administration budget would be reduced from $14,000,000 to $1,000,000. As I say, I was out of the office and never knew anything about this. The telephone call was routed to Mr. Dornbush. Fortunately, we had the knowledge that this song," which is one of the songs sung by Emma Dusenberry and collected by Mrs. Cowell,was a Democratic campaign song of the election of l884, between Cleveland and Blaine, which was a very dirty election in which Blaine was charged with having been a dodger in the Civil War--that is, paying somebody to take his place in the army. The explanation assuaged the senator, who was a staunch Democrat. You could imagine the naivete of this city musician thinking that he could get away with a thing like that in Washington! But this was typical of the intellectual idealist who was called in in those days, and still is. In Washington. The State Department is full of them. You see them going in there and doing the same thing, even to the present day, though nowadays they usually have some coaching from the outside, and we never had any coaching. The song goes [sings]: "The candidate's a dodger, yes, a well-known dodger, yes, the candidate's a dodger, yes, and I'm a dodger, too. He'll meet you and greet you and ask you for a vote, but look out, boys, he's a dodgin' for a note. Yes, we're all dodgers, dodgin', dodgin', dodgin', yes, we're all dodgin' our way through the world. Well, the preacher's a dodger, the lawyer's a dodger, the lover's a dodger, and the farmer's a dodger, he'll make a living just as sure as you were born." It's a nice song, a parody of that type of thing which was probably produced in one of the early agrarian reform movements in the country; it might have been the Grange, it might have been any farmers' organization. We did the same thing with our painters. Early in the life of the Resettlement Administration, they wanted paintings to put up in post offices all through the country, showing the reasons for the setting up of these emergency agencies, to try to get some support from the grass roots that would show in Congress so that the emergency agencies could be kept alive. Well, they had an exhibition of fifty paintings, and the administrative people from Tugwell's office came around to look at them. The verdict was, "My God , you can't put those things up in post offices! " "Where did you get these?" I asked of a painter. The answer was on a certain river down in Georgia. "Oh, there was some splendid misery there." Well, four of the paintings were selected as being possible, with some changes. Whether the painters consented to change them I don't know, but I do believe a few did get put up.

TUSLER

What was the objection to them? The subject matter?

SEEGER

Yes, they were too miserable. They said, "We can't represent the American country in this light. We'd have all the senators and representatives in the country down on us. We couldn't present ourselves to the outside world this way; in other words, we can' t have people see how this Depression has hit the country." Another rather pretty example of the excess idealism of these agencies was our sculptress. She was engaged to make a number of small bas-reliefs to be put under the big windows in the school in Greenbelt, Washington, illustrating the Bill of Rights. One was to secure Justice, and her clay sketch was this: about two feet long and about one foot high; on the left, a man hanging from a rope; on the right, a man sitting on a dais or a desk with the head looking the opposite direction; in front of him, twelve men all looking the opposite direction. You can imagine what the Housing Administration thought of this performance. She was asked to submit another model, and at the end of long wrangling, they finally watered it down enough to get it put up. Another example of this excess idealism, and also some very good ideas, was the [Federal] Theatre Project. The project had been set up almost entirely in New York. Did I tell the story of Marc Blitzstein and The Cradle Will Rock ? Marc Blitzstein, who was one of the members of our old Composers' Collective, had been working on a theatrical show with his own libretto and music, in which the leading man was Mr. Mister. When the evening of the first performance came, a large audience, which had grape-vined information of what was going on, and the performers appeared at the pitch-black theater. The assembled multitude was so enraged that they got hold of the manager of an empty theater nearby and asked if he'd open up. He did, for a consideration, and the whole crowd went in. There on the stage without scenery, just against the brick wall of the back of the stage, and with an old, out-of-tune piano. Marc Blitzstein sat down, played the orchestra part, and directed The Cradle Will Rock . It was a tremendous success. The next day, the seats were sold for six weeks in advance. The theater never got over it. This, plus some of the other successes of the same sort--the American theater's never been the same since the WPA Theatre Project. But Congress cracked down, closed it up. I was asked to write a memorandum on the subject, and I did. By this time I'd learned something about Washington; you couldn't expect anything else. It was a wonder they kept alive as long as they did. It would have been better if they had taken the idea that Miss Valiant so beautifully carried out and had worked from the grass roots up. But there wasn't enough time in those days; you had to start at the top and work down. There were too few people who knew that there were grass roots to work up from and anything else except utter poverty and deprivation; but that there was a whole culture of America there that could have been made something of, very few people had any idea. My friend Tom Benton had, and from him I learned a great deal, because he'd knocked around the country a lot. But that's the story of the Special Skills Division, so far as I can record it right here. By the time we were closed up, I was looking for another job, and went in as assistant director of the Federal Music Project.

TUSLER

Before you go on with that, I would like to ask you how you had come to be part of the Resettlement Administration in the first place.

SEEGER

I had gotten into the Resettlement Administration the way lots of people did in those days, by somebody who knew somebody. Charles Pollock was one of Tom Benton's pupils, who had played with me in the little band that we initiated his murals at the New School with. When they were looking around for a musician, Charles Pollock said, "I know just the man for you. Get him on the telephone, and he'll come down, I'm sure. This is just the sort of thing that will interest him." It was as simple as that.

TUSLER

Was your job at the New School ending at that point?

SEEGER

Well, I gave it up. I had a consultancy at a private school that paid me rather well, and I had some private students still left, and I was teaching at a small music school called, I think, the Metropolitan Music School; but this was a chance to put my musicological theory to work, and naturally, I jumped at it. The WPA Music Project didn't have any of the joy of the Resettlement Administration. Instead of getting a director of the music the way they'd gotten the director of the music for the Resettlement Administration, they engaged Nikolai Sokolov, a very competent Russian musician who had emigrated to this country, who thought American music was beneath notice and was rather contemptuous of American musicians. It ' s a question whether he'd ever even heard of the existence of the American folk song at that time. He probably thought American popular music was pretty bad, too. So the whole orientation of the Music Project was from the Europeophile music viewpoint looking down upon these poor, benighted Americans who needed to be spoon-fed with "good" music, very much the point of view that I had when I departed in the trailer in 1921 to give good music to the backward peoples of the United States. By this time, I was pretty much convinced that the music of the American people, what they call folk music, what they call country, race, western, hillbilly, what have you, had a lot of good stuff in it, and it was rather marvelous. I had been fortunate enough to meet Mrs. Roosevelt on a number of occasions, and this viewpoint was just what would please her; she had seen and heard something of the working of the Resettlement Administration program, so that when the king and queen of England came to vist the Roosevelts later, I was asked to draw up a program of American folk music to entertain them in the East Room of the White House afterwards. Dornbush did the mechanical and managerial end of things, and between the two of us, for he had caught the virus of American folk music by that time, consorted in bringing up some of the best folk musicians we could get. We had Bascom Lamar Lunsford from Buncombe County, North Carolina; the Coon Creek Girls, who were hillbilly singers from a kind of a barn-dance radio show in Ohio; we had the Soco Gap Square Dance Team of eight couples; and I think a few others. The committee who is always hanging around to manage things at the White House managed to filter in some things that were rather out of key, but it was the folk music that gained the evening.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO A
NOVEMBER 17, 1966

SEEGER

At the afternoon rehearsal one of the aides came up to me and said, "Mr. Seeger, we just can't present this to Their Majesties. You've got to do something about it; the racket is unbearable." The Soco Gap Square Dance Team danced a heavy clog, and the platform was about a foot off the hardwood floor, making a superb sounding board. So I said to him, "Don't say a word about this. I'll fix it up, I know the caller very well, and I'll just tell him to slip the word to them to just ease up on that clog." "Oh," he said, "for heaven's sake, do." So I went up to McQueen, the caller, afterwards and said, "If anyone speaks to you about the clog being too loud, don't you pay any attention to them at all. It's magnificent. Some of these sillybillies around here are afraid that the noise will make the king and queen uncomfortable, but I'll bet they'll like it." Well, as a technical man in the situation, I, of course, was not invited to the illustrious gathering, with its cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and senators and political bigwigs, but I was able to peek around the corner of the door and watch the faces of President and Mrs. Roosevelt and the king and the queen and the celebrated personages around them, all wreathed in smiles; Vice-President Garner and some of the Americans who came from the country had their feet tapping. We were all taken in and introduced afterwards, and I was very much pleased when--I was at the end of this long line of performers--Mrs. Roosevelt told the king and queen that I was the man who had planned the program; and so I had an especially hearty handshake from them. But it simply proved that this kind of music is the only kind of music that kings and queens, presidents and cabinet ministers and ambassadors could make for themselves--if only they dared. They can't make it very well; they can't make it half as well as the ordinary child could. But at least it is the kind of music they can try to make, and they can't try to make any better and they know they can't make any better, but whether they will or not, it gets a reaction out of them, if the circumstances are such that it's all right from the point of view of status for them to accept it. Well, the thing was a great success, and I still have a couple of recordings of the Coon Creek Girls singing "How Many Biscuits Can You Eat," and "The Soldier and the Lady." The situation in the WPA music program when I hit it was very bad. I was brought into it with the information that Sokolov was not interested any more; all he wanted to do was to conduct the orchestras , and he was not in the office very often. His assistant, a man named Mayfarth, was having troubles. Mayfarth then was my direct superior, and frankly speaking, I expected to take over almost any time, but realized that the WPA program was beginning to be shut down just the way the Resettlement Administration had been, so there was not much chance of my doing there anything like even what I'd been able to do on such a small scale with the Resettlement. Still, I was hopeful of trying, so I produced a book full of memoranda about how the education work should go and how the program should be oriented, and so forth and so on. After a while Mayfarth said, "Well, there's no use your just sitting around here and making up memoranda; you'd better go out in the field and see what you're up against." So I went out, and he kept me going pretty busily through the Southeast--that is, from New York on down to Florida, New Orleans, Texas and Arkansas, in that triangle. I found the regional officers of the WPA heavily bureaucratized, and the "cultural programs," so-called, in the charge of women politicos who were quite charming people, rather masculine and domineering, and not too difficult to get around to a viewpoint that, after all, this Sokoloverian highbrow music, while it was very respectable and all that, was a good deal of a bore. Most of them really liked hillbilly music better than the symphonic and chamber music that the Music Project was trying to back, and were quite frank in saying so, once you could assure them it would be safe for them to say so. So I made several warm friends among them, and things began to go rather well. But, of course, I could not even pretend to uncover to them my dismay at what went on in the way of music teaching. It was even worse than what went on in the North. At one union school that I saw in North Carolina, you could see through the boards of the floor to the ground underneath, and you could see the sky through the boards on the side of the room--the roof leaked. We went by one building one day driving with the supervisor and I said, "Hold on, that's a school over there, isn't it? Hadn't we better stop in and see it?" The supervisor was silent for a while, and said, "Mr. Seeger, I can't show you that." I said, "Well, what's the matter?" "It's a Negro school." "Well," I said, "it's a school building, isn't it?" She said, "Well, you can see what it is from the outside." I said, "Is it worse on the inside?" She wouldn't answer. I said, "Where is the teacher, and where are the pupils?" "Oh, it's not in session now." "How often is it in session?" "Oh, a couple of months a year; they call it when they lay over." The situation was absolutely appalling. I had one situation to deal with that's worth putting on record here, with the expectation that nobody' ll read this until everybody concerned is dead. In one state (I won't mention the state) the Washington office had been having a great deal of trouble with the state director of the WPA music. The national director, Sokolov, had tried to see the assistant director during a visit of inspection to this state, but he was unable to see him. He noticed that when he went to see the state director there were two men who met him at the elevator and took him up in the freight elevator, which went straight to the director's office. It was so arranged that all the people in the office were out when the national director arrived. These things and some other curious situations made Washington rather suspicious about the situation, so I was sent down to look into it very seriously. I went to see the state director and he put on a symphonic rehearsal for me; a full symphony orchestra, playing Tod und Verklarung of Strauss, or rather I should say, trying to play it. It was a million times too hard for them. The director tried to keep me from talking with the assistant director, but I made a date with him out of hours at a private house afterwards, and through him met some of the people on the project who played in the orchestra and interviewed off the project, too. They were scared to death until I was able to prove to them that I was out of Washington and I was investigating this situation with the idea of reporting one-hundred percent truth of it. As I gained their confidence, I heard an appalling story. People, for instance, who had no income whatever but a miserable emergency stipend from the government, were forced to leave the little shack that they might have built for themselves on the outskirts of some city and come to the capital in order to play in the symphony orchestra. In the capital they had to pay rent and pay for food that they had had to buy instead of grow in their little back garden or exchange for work with some friend 5 and the hardship was monumental. I've forgotten what percentage of this group of seventy-odd musicians were brought in from the outside, but it was quite a large number. Things began to become clearer and clearer, and it finally turned out that this was a one-man tyranny on the part of practically a psychopath, who had sufficient strings in his hands to control the situation and keep himself from being bothered politically. I got the man fired, and a better man, the assistant, who was a conscientious fellow, a church choir director, put in his place. There were not many of these very bad situations to deal with, but the worst of all the situations that we had to deal with was one which arose in the national office at the time of a calling together of the eight or nine regional directors to meet and plan future work. Plans for future work were being cut down on very gradually, and so at great expense people were brought from California, from Texas, from Washington State, and from all over the country for a week's conference. Mayfarth had been presented that morning with what they call a "pink slip," firing him. He had refused to resign, and they finally told him that if he wouldn't resign they would fire him, and he was fired the morning that this conference was to get under way. This sort of thing, while maybe extreme in both cases and not typical of the administration of the WPA projects as a whole, was typical of some of the things that went on. During my work with the Music Project, Ben Botkin and I had got the Folk Arts Committee well under way, and Herbert Halpert, a highly competent folklorist, "borrowed" from the Theatre Project, made a several month's trip in an old broken-down automobile, collecting a fine lot of stuff from the Southeast--children' s games, tall stories, ballads, courting songs, all kinds of things. They were all put in the Library of Congress. My collection from the Resettlement Administration went to the Library of Congress, and I think I was instrumental in getting in all about one thousand records into the Archive of American Folk Song during the five years in which I was connected with these emergency agencies. My contacts with the Library of Congress became closer and closer, and presently John Lomax asked me if I would do the transcription of the music for his Our Singing Country, the second volume of American songs and ballads. By this time I had too many other things to do and told him, if he would be willing, that my wife Ruth would be Interested in doing it, and I would, of course, consult in the matter. The transcriptions were eventually published in the book. They are models. By this time I began to go to meetings of the Folklore Society. I remember one quite delightful meeting when we were talking about the attitude of the conservative folklorists and the actual living folklore situation in the country, and one of our most distinguished folklorists spoke quite at length] at the end of it my wife Ruth, who became more and more indignant, burst out with, "Why, that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!" [laughter] He was an urbane, charming fellow, and a few years later when I met him he said, "You know, she was right." [laughter] By 1939, my paper read at the first meeting of the American Musicological Society was published in the Acta Muslcologica . I had not gone, I think, to any earlier meetings, leaving them a perfectly free hand to develop as they wanted. In that same year, Carleton Sprague Smith, who was president of the American Musicological Society, arranged for the First International Congress of Musicology to take place in New York. He had some difficulty in cooperation from the still very small group of American musicologists, and he came to me in despair, saying he couldn't get a suitable paper to lead off the congress with... would I please frame my paper so that it would throw down the gauntlet, so to speak? Nothing pleased me better, so I wrote a paper called "Music and Government: A Field for an Applied Musicology." A distinguished group of eight or nine Europeans were invited, and the typical New York conference, with suppers in the Rainbow Room and visits to Fraunces' Tavern, and so forth, quite ran beyond the pocketbooks of most of the members. I got up to read my paper at the old Beethoven Association, a rather pretty drawing room of an old house on the West Fifties. My colleagues, the historical musicologists, stayed in the hallway, and they talked so loudly that some people from the audience had to get up and shut the doors. I had a small audience, however; most of the Europeans, I think, were courteous enough to listen. At the end, the applause was adequate, the doors were opened, and the historians came in to listen to Edward Dent's paper on the Camerata, which was of course to be, as they expected. In his most elegant style. For some reason or other. Dent was pleased with my paper and he gave me nearly a minute's eulogy, apologizing for the triviality of his paper which would follow, which was upon such a small matter as over against the very large matters of importance that I had spoken of. The few words were received with deathly silence, but it happened that for the first time I was accepted by them as perhaps a gray, not an entirely black, sheep. Dent's paper was as exquisite as everybody had expected it to be. But the World War II had just opened, and you can imagine what the effect was upon the entirely European-oriented meeting. Many of the European members realized that they couldn't return, and were left high and dry in the United States. Every effort was made, and eventually successfully, to place them in American universities, and historical musicology became firmly established, as a result, by these outstanding men. The joke about the publication of this paper and the others that were read was that when it came to actually going to print, it was wartime and the American Musicological Society didn't have paper. I was working in my next job in Washington at that time, and I got them paper through the Music Educators' National Conference, an organization which was so contemptible to their mind that it could hardly even be mentioned in polite society. But the Music Educators' National Conference gave them the paper, and the papers read at the International Conference on Musicology came out under the joint imprint of the American Musicological Society and the Music Educators' National Conference, vfhich gave me immense pleasure. In this same year (it's funny how things happened in years: 1905 was one of those years; 1930 was one of those years; and 1939 was another), the State Department called four conferences on professional activity in the Americas. One of them was on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music. The others were education, philosophy and letters, and fine arts. The meetings were held in the Library of Congress, and attended by people from all over the country and from some Latin American countries. I was a member of the organizing committee, for music, and it was a very good committee. It pitched right into the practical situation, didn't spar around about history and theory, and was the most efficient committee of the four, so efficient that it sent a memorandum to the State Department urging that the organizing committee be continued with a permanent secretary. William Berrien, who had been a professor of Spanish and Portuguese I think in the University of California, had been very active in the organizing committee; Harold Spivacke, Carleton Sprague Smith, Evans Clark, myself, Charles Thomson of the State Department, and a number of others thought very highly of him, and so we took him on as executive secretary. He had a little bit of an office in the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, right opposite the White House. Things went well; one of the recommendations of the committee and of the meeting was that an inter-American music center be set up, preferably at the Pan-American Union. I had my candidate and pushed him as hard as I could until he refused, and then they asked me if I would take the thing over. I said, "But I don't know anything about the situation; I'm not a specialist in that; it's not my field; I'm sure we can get somebody who's more knowledgeable." But they couldn't find anybody more knowledgeable, and they continued pressing me; perhaps they'd heard of the organizational work in the Resettlement Administration and the WPA, so that it looked as if perhaps I might make something of it. So I said I'd take the job. I was cleared by the FBI, mirabile dictu , and it took about three months for my appointment to go through. During those three months I had been active editing the Army Song Book for the United States Army. Early in the war. General [Carl] Spaatz and his wife and a number of other ranking Army, Navy, and Air Force men had gotten together, realizing that there must be an up-to-date Army song book. They went to Harold Spivacke at the library to get materials, and he persuaded them that I'd be the person to do the editing. When we went to the WPA and asked for permission for me to be relieved of some of my work for the WPA, they first refused! Typical of the idealistic attitude, I was hired to do work for the WPA, and by gosh, I should work for the WPA. Period. Presently, however, I was liberated of most of my work so that I could do it. The Army Song Book eventually came out in a first edition of five million copies. I had asked if it wouldn't be possible to put in a few American folk songs that I was sure would be popular, and I cited the fact that in the Civilian Conservation Corps they had made some surveys of what songs were most liked by the boys who were in those units. These were unemployed boys taken from the city streets and somewhat from the country, but mostly city, I think--perhaps a cross section of the late teenagers of the American people. I can't give you the five that were listed: "Red River Valley" came first; "Barbara Allen" came second; and then there were three songs that everybody knows; I've forgotten what they are. So, with my argument, they said, "All right, go ahead, you can put in eight or nine." So I put them in, and they are there now with my piano arrangements as songs to be sung by the American soldiers in the field. I don't know how much they were actually sung, but I think they probably were, seeing that most of these boys from their Civilian Conservation Corps units went into the Army. [When I began working on the Army Song Book , I was supervising the compiling] of a checklist of recorded songs in the Archive of American Folk Song to July 1940. The manual labor was done by WPA workers, and I supervised it with the help of Helen Bush, a cataloger at the Library of Congress. The work was hasty; there was no time to play the records over; the work had to be done on the basis of the envelopes. It was only when an envelope had nothing on the outside that we played the record to find out what the dickens it was; but I'm quite sure that some of the discs in those envelopes didn't conform to the titles. The work was completed and eventually printed by the Library of Congress in 1942 in three volumes. Along about this time I was able to take part in a meeting of the American Historical Association, which had one amusing episode in it that's worth recording here. My paper, Ben Botkin's, Jeffrey Gorer's, and two or three other papers were read at a meeting on the Cultural Approach to History. I happened to be in the corridor out-side the meeting room when my old adviser Merriman from Harvard came along. I hadn't seen him since the Harvard days, so we shook hands and greeted each other effusively. When it came time to break up, I said, "Are you coming in? " He said, "Into what?" "Oh," I said, "the meeting on the cultural approach to history." "Certainly not , sir," he said, and turned on his heel and walked off. [laughter] The last thing he would want! It was a good meeting, but it was a meeting of the black sheep and the irregulars. Eventually the papers were published. It was like a stretto in a fugue; all these different strands began to draw together in 1939 . The war was on and it was pretty grim. So I probably could leave that period now and go on to the next installment, which would be the period of the Pan-American Union.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO B
DECEMBER 1, 1966

TUSLER

When you left the Resettlement Administration, was the administration closed at that point?

SEEGER

No. The manner of disposing of these emergency agencies that President Roosevelt set up and that Congress did not very much approve of, because their patronage privileges were rather limited and were therefore not too closely connected with what's ordinarily called the democratic processes of the United States government--positions were filled mostly by appointment of the executive branch--the manner of disposing of these agencies was to cut off a finger here and a toe there, and then an arm and then a leg, and then excise some of the internal organs, and finally change their name and turn over what was left to one of the regular departments of the government. In that way, the Historical Records Survey was merged into the Library of Congress; the extraordinary Photographic Division of Resettlement (now known as the Farm Security Collection) got into Agriculture (it's now in the National Gallery); the theater and music were just lopped off and went nowhere. It was a gradual process; it probably took place over a couple of years in most of the cases.

TUSLER

Did you have a successor there?

SEEGER

No. Nobody took my place.

TUSLER

The Music Project, then, was finished when you left.

SEEGER

Miss Valiant was kept on for a little while. I had a desk at the office, which is what they call a courtesy in Washington; after you leave an agency, you have a desk there for a while. One day the accountants came in from the material supplies department, I don't know what they called it, and began to decide what they'd throw away and what they'd keep. Paint pots that had been opened and used, even down to half pints, were measured carefully and entered in the books. I had about one hundred aluminum dubbings of the recordings that we'd made (the originals were all by that time deposited in the Library of Congress), and I asked the men what they were going to do with these; they were going to throw them in the trash heap. So I said, "Well, could I take them?" They said, "Sure. They're no use." They were just raw material that would go into the trash heap. Similarly, there were a couple of model chairs made by the furniture department, which were never used; they were somewhat modernistic , perhaps you might say, and I asked what was going to happen to those. "Oh, they'll be split up into kindling wood." "Well, could I take them?" "Oh, sure, take it," and I believe to this day one of my children has one of those chairs. That's the way the thing went.

TUSLER

Did you personally observe while you were there specific attacks on the administration other than the one that you already mentioned on the tape about "Vinson?

SEEGER

No. They were continuous. The ideas of the young intellectuals that Roosevelt brought in to manage these agencies and their divisions were very often anathema to Congress, and they razzed the Brain Trust, as they called it, unmercifully, and most of those men went back to the academic life. A few went on into government. Take, for example, the head of the Historical Records Survey of the Works Projects Administration, which eventually became the Federal Works Agency, I think. Luther Evans went into the Library of Congress and became head librarian; from there he went on to the director-generalship of UNESCO. After his term there was over I think he went back into academic life in the United States some place; I've lost track of him lately. But most of the men either left the government entirely, or were absorbed in established agencies, or went back to their university positions.

TUSLER

Was he in the WPA when you were?

SEEGER

Yes.

TUSLER

And you knew him there?

SEEGER

Yes. He was very friendly to me. When I was in the gap between my service in the WPA Music Project and going to the Pan-American Union, I had a job with the National Resources Board. I think Waldo G. Leland was chairman of it at the time. My job was to make a bibliography of the publications of the WPA, and Evans was a great help there. He later offered me a place in the Library of Congress for the Music Division of the Pan-American Union. We didn't have to take it, however, because Dr. [Leo S.] Rowe gave us his salon.

TUSLER

You spoke before of a kind of cold war existing between the Department of Agriculture and the Resettlement Administration.

SEEGER

Yes. The bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture regarded the Resettlement Administration as really something that shouldn't have been set up at all. It was an invasion of their area, their domain and their prerogatives, and they were not too cooperative, as I remember. The Resettlement Administration was set up in a way opposite to Agriculture. It was supposed to cooperate with it; and we did get some cooperation, yes. But it was hard sledding. I think I told the story of the time when I went around to the, I think, assistant director of the Bureau of Agricultural Extension, and tried to persuade him to put folk music into the 4-H Clubs and women singers organization, and so forth and so on; he was very friendly. Yes, many of the individual men were friendly, but the general policy was, I think, more or less at odds. The Department of Agriculture was just growing, then, from its rather small beginnings to the enormous and populous agency that it became in the later Roosevelt Administration. I remember amusingly when President Eisenhower was a candidate for office, one of the things he was going to do was reduce personnel in Washington government offices. I think at the end of the first four years of Eisenhower's term of office, or was it the second. Agriculture doubled itself.

TUSLER

Did you yourself have anything to do with setting up the program of the Resettlement Administration?

SEEGER

I didn't have anything to do with it.

TUSLER

It had already been devised before you came.

SEEGER

Yes. And I made it a rule in Washington to live on what they used to call "the technical level." There's the executive level and it tapers off in its own hierarchy; then there's the congressional, law-making level; and the Supreme Court and the courts and the judiciary-- but these are really more domains than levels. But the policy-making level on top ran rather neck and neck with the diplomatic set, and so forth, and that I strenuously avoided whenever I could. There was no use trying to mix the thing. The technical level was extremely interesting itself; you met all kinds of people from all over the world, and also through the United States, and it was completely absorbing. We were like a fish out of water in the diplomatic or the executive end of things. But you kept clear of the clerical end, which was an enormous multitude; you saw it on buses, and where it lived and how it lived you didn't know. Then there was another domain, which was the lobbyist domain. That, of course, permeated everything, but least of almost anything, the technical level, because they realized they couldn't get to first base there, anyway.

TUSLER

Did you have a predecessor in your job?

SEEGER

No, I was the first person there.

TUSLER

What was the major difference as you look back at It now between your vrork in the WPA and your work in the Resettlement Administration?

SEEGER

The WPA was ill-conceived from the beginning. A foreigner who looked down on American music should not have been chosen to head up such an agency.

TUSLER

But the Resettlement Administration aimed its program more at the people.

SEEGER

The Resettlement Administration was well planned from the beginning, except that they didn't know the country well enough. They were politically naive, they were culturally naive, and they didn't realize that to build these Resettlement communities, they'd have to build them up in terms not only of the techniques of learning and engineering, but in terms of the folklore of the rural people and the folklore of the political parties that governed upwards from town to township to county to state to region to government. They were utterly naive there they learned their lesson in the process of being turned out of business. It's something which we have still in this country to learn, that the home learning of the people cannot be manhandled by the technical learning of the universities and the educated classes. We see the same thing in the study of folklore now in the American universities. I've just received off-prints of a paper that I have written for a festschrift for Ben Botkin, my old associate in the WPA, in which I twit the folklorlsts for their inability to extend their own field of learning into the legitimate areas of folklore study that have grown out of the more archaic folklore, which most of the folklorlsts are interested in. The study of folklore in this country was very largely initiated by the scholars, such men as Francis J. Child of Harvard and his famous big set of English and Scottish Popular Ballads , and it gradually spread over from that in a kind of a common-law marriage with the study of the American Indians' primitive lore, and has made an academic discipline which studies archaic survivals in the form of mostly literary sources. That folklore in the United States is a vastly larger and more varied field than academic folklore ever considers it to be is something they have still to learn, and [while] sitting back rather complacently and complaining that there are no departments of folklore (there are very few courses in folklore given and they usually have to be given in language departments or anthropology departments; there are very few places where you can get a degree in folklore), they neglect going out into the broad panorama of American life. They fail to realize that there's a folklore not only of the most backward people in the Appalachian Mountains, but there's a folklore of the local county boss and city boss, and a folklore of the businessman and the clerical workers and the workers in the factories; and if they would follow this strand of folklore up into the higher echelon of the government, they would find that Congress runs Itself very largely in terms of a folklore more or less of its own, with its roots in the state legislatures, the state political parties, and the ward bosses. Then there's also, of course, the folklore of all the branches of human activity, whether it's law or religion or science; so that if we were going to start in such a thing as the Resettlement Administration or the WPA nowadays, and the leadership should fall into the hands of people who are not aware of this broader aspect of the knowledge of our own people, you might find not as many mistakes as were made before, but many of the old mistakes still are being made. We send, for instance, our missions into foreign countries, completely ignorant of the folklore of the traditions of the countries they're going to live in. As I point out in this somewhat skittish paper for the Botkin festschrift, they will buy themselves a state dinner in Indonesia and will pass to a Javanese gentleman, or possibly even lady, the salt with the left hand, and there's no greater insult. Similarly, they will shoot their hand forward in Mohammedan countries, which is one of the worst things you can do; they will not belch at dinners in some countries, where that is a very, very impolite thing not to do, and so forth. Our ambassadors, ministers, secretaries to embassies, down to the lowliest clerk should have quite a thorough course in the folklore and the customs, as well as the languages and the politics of the countries in which they're going to represent the United States; but we're still quite far away from that. The same old problem would come right now, and it's happening in the poverty program and things of that sort. Fortunately, in the Peace Corps the young people are given some training--not enough, but they're given some training in the customs and the oral traditions and manners of the country that they're going to work in, and that is one of the reasons why they are so amazingly successful in some places.

TUSLER

In this sense of the word, folklore is really the same thing as the mores of the society.

SEEGER

It practically is, yes and it's not realized by people in the government still. The Great Society and the poverty program, the civil rights movement and lots of these from-above-stimulated movements of the Johnson administration are running into snags for the same reason that the Resettlement Administration ran into snags. It's a lack of knowledge of how the American civilization runs.

TUSLER

Was there a significant difference in the type of people that were working on the WPA and the type of people who were working for the Resettlement Administration?

SEEGER

Yes. I think the Resettlement was a much higher level. It was a higher level in music. In the Writers' Project it was about the same; in the Historical Records Survey it was the same; in the theater and there were some very skilled photographers who went out and photographed the United States from the grass roots up. No, I think it was just in the Federal Music Project that there was a rather lower level of qualification and competence. Most of the other WPA projects were better staffed, but quite as naive.

TUSLER

You spoke earlier about the idealistic crew of people in Washington then.

SEEGER

Yes, that was the character of the different men that the Roosevelt administration first brought in. We all of us went in with a feeling of: at last, here's the chance for us to show that there's a connection between our aspirations and ideals and life work and techniques, in which we think we're quite competent, and the less privileged of the American people, and running up against them was in many cases an eye-opener for anybody.

TUSLER

Was the WPA under as much attack as the Resettlement Administration was?

SEEGER

Yes, I think it was under attack for the same waste of money. What's music got to do with anything? Music has improved its status in the American civilization enormously in the last thirty years; whereas sixty years ago I was laughed at because I said I was going to be a composer, thirty years ago I received a certain amount of consideration and respect from ordinary, nonmusical Americans in the cities and often in the country. In the country you were considered a little queer, perhaps; but still, there had been music men there before in the form of singing-school teachers so that you didn't feel too hopelessly a fish out of the water. Now, you can travel almost anywhere in the United States as a musician and be well received, but of course you are best received by the very large public if you are interested in popular music and connected with rock and roll, or country and western, or even perhaps blues. Jazz--there' s almost a nobility of jazz. So there's been a great change there. These emergency agencies of the Roosevelt administration were spearpoints in a vanguard to sort of homogenize the American people, to have the country people know what the city people were doings and have the city people know what the country people were doing. In spite of the mistakes, and perhaps even through the mistakes, there's been a tremendous shaking down of oppositions between city and country that viere on the danger end of jelling around 1900. We were very close in 1900 to fixing on the United States a European class system, with the kind of differences between the upper classes and the lower classes that are very difficult to unfix once they're fixed.

TUSLER

TUSLER: Was the issue of Communism mixed up in any of the attacks?

SEEGER

Not too much, no. There was not too much excitement before the post-World War II period. People went around and said they were Communists, they went to Communist lectures and plays, they read Communist books. The idea of Communism that was in the United States up to about 1940 or 1942, at the beginning of the Second World War, was the idea that they got from the '20's in Russia, when Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote their book very favorable to the Russian experiment. United States intellectuals had gone over and found that there were many good things. The Russian musicians and writers were pretty free to experiment, very much as the American writers and musicians and painters were in the 20's. The idea of Communism that we had In the '30's was mostly based on reports of the '20' s. We had no idea of what was going on in the '30's. As I spoke before, when the purge trials of the '30's occurred we were very much disturbed, but the reports that were given by Stalin were in such a form that they could be believed. Some people were beginning not to believe them. It was very hard for me to believe. I was very friendly to Russia on account of my hostility to the czarist government, and I was not inclined to believe ill even of Stalin up to 1943. I had a feeling that it was the kind of hostility to Russia that would have been friendly to Russia under the czars. When finally in 1943 I got a translation of the trials, I had the shock of my life. The Socialists and the Communists got along pretty well; they were beginning to go apart during the '30's because the issue of Hitlerism drove them apart. The Socialists were trying to live with Hitlerism, and the Communists were fighting--and that meant fighting in the streets --and there was something rather romantic about the idea of fighting Hitlerism in the streets, especially for those of us who knew Eisler's music, which was infinitely better than Hitler's music. I think I spoke of my collection of the music of those times, didn't I? and how I finally put it in the Library of Congress under a ten years' prohibition that it should be opened, as "subversive music." The music of fascism was equally bad, and the music of the antifascist and the anti-Nazi movement was so much better that many of us musicians were friendly simply on that account.

TUSLER

But the fact that the Resettlement Administration set up these various communities in a "somewhat communistic" fashion. . .

SEEGER

Yes, it was attacked. It was attacked. I wouldn't be surprised if you went over the Congressional Record that you'd find the word "Communism" used; certainly "socialistic" was. The cooperative movement in those days was even more vociferously attacked than the political movements were. Cooperative movements, which Tugwell brought into the picture and encouraged, were fought tooth and nail by many of the industrialists. The history of that very interesting period will be written some day.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 1, 1966

TUSLER

When we stopped the tape last week, you were just beginning to speak of your association with the Pan-American Union.

SEEGER

Yes. The association with the Pan-American Union began with the membership in the organizing committee for the conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music. It was called by the State Department in 1939. I should, perhaps, list some of the members of this committee. There was a man from the National Broadcasting Company, the international division; William Berrien I've spoken of--he was in the Department of Romance Languages in Northwestern University; Evans Clark was the executive director of the Twentieth Century Fund, New York, and had the largest collection of Latin-American phonograph records known to exist at the time; Eric Clarke, an Englishman, was with the Association of American Colleges; Nina Collier was the secretary of the committee, and had been in and out of Washington offices for a number of years, a woman of varied talents and independent character; Howard Hanson, of the Eastman School of Music; there was a man from the motion picture project of the American Council of Education; Mrs. James, the chief of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation in the Pan-American Unions Earl Moore of the Federal Music Project myself; Carleton Sprague Smith of the Music Division of the New York Public Library; Harold Spivacke, chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress; and Davidson Taylor of the Columbia Broadcasting System, New York. As I mentioned earlier, this was the most efficient committee of the four set up by the State Department, and I think the only one that provided for its own continued existence after the 1939 conferences were over. I think I said on a former occasion that I had my own candidate for the job at the Pan-American Union, but eventually they put me in it and thank heavens they did, because it was one of the most interesting experiences in my life. It took several months to see the appointment through, and the arrangement was that the Carnegie Corporation would give a $15,000 grant for three years. The first year was to be administered through Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs. From then on, it was in the hands of the Pan-American Union. The director-general of the old Pan-American Union was Leo S. Rowe, a Philadelphian who had risen to a fairly high post, I think in the Treasury, at one time. He was a gentleman of the old school, almost stone deaf, used a little silver ear trumpet, but was a remarkable lip reader, so that he might not pay axiy attention to the man sitting to his right around the large conference table but he could see what somebody said way down at the end of a long table. He had a beautiful office at the Pan-American Union, and had his chair built up six or eight inches so that he would not be dwarfed by it. I had many occasions to take people in to see him, from the United States and from other countries, and however hostile they might have been when they went in, they never left without feeling that he was one of the real friends of their lives. He didn't spend much time with them, as a rule, unless he thought it was really worthwhile, but he had a way of cutting an interview short that was really masterly. He would rise at the proper time to the split second and offer to show them the beautiful building, and he would take them into the big salon with its gilded, slightly rococo, baroque architecture, and open the door if the weather was fair and show them the gardens, and we'd shake hands and the parrot would squawk in the coffee tree in the patio, and the visitor would depart With a smile on his face. We got along beautifully from the first moment and until his tragic death. I never took anything to him for a decision, except things that I expected him to say yes to. [laughter]

TUSLER

What did you do with the things that you expected him to say no to?

SEEGER

I either operated them on the sly or else I decided I'd drop them. Fortunately, there were so many things to do, it was a question of taking things to him that had to be taken to him that needed his approval. But he left me very free, and I could do almost anything I wanted. My relations with the other divisions were very cordial; everybody was helpful. I think they were a little envious of the beautiful room that we were operating from, with brocade furniture and a view out over the gardens, while some of them were working in little cubbyholes and in corridors, but they didn't show it and everything vent very well. The assistant director, William Manger, was an American and perhaps my staunchest friend, and helped out in more ways than I could even pretend to remember. Harold Spivacke, at the Library of Congress, was a strong ally. Out over the country, the notice that there was a Music Division of the Pan-American Union probably received no attention whatevero My first concern was to build an activity that would have a base of operations larger than a small office of one room, with a man and a couple of assistants and three or four secretaries. Looking out over the United States as I had become aware of it through my work in Resettlement and WPA, I realized that there was only one music organization that could do me any good whatever. The Music Teachers' National Association would meet once a year and pass a resolution of aid about which nothing would be done until the next annual meeting. Sundry other organizations would be meaningless, and perhaps might even hang a lot of--we don't say lame ducks, here--useless millstones around the neck. The musicians' union could conceivably do a great deal of good, but under [James C] Petrillo I couldn't expect anything from them. We didn't have enough money to give big concerts by union musicians, and that was about the end of it. There was one organization, however, that seemed promising, and that was the Music Educators' National Conference. It was an organization started early in the century by the music supervisors in the public schools; it had developed a central office that I knew was very efficient, and it had a leadership that was way out in advance of its membership, which was at that time something like 25,000. They ran a slick-paper magazine full of advertisements in which there was a very narrow rivulet of text of no particular value. Inquiring around how I could get in touch with this organization, who would be the best person in it to get in touch with, someone fortunately told me that the associate director was a young woman who was a live wire, and she would be talking to a state or regional meeting, up in Wilmington, Delaware in a month. So I went up to hear Miss Vanett Lawler talk to the meeting, and afterwards I planned to meet her. I arrived in the middle of her talk and listened through a crack in the door, and could see that she was spellbinding them; as she fielded the questions, you realized she had them in the palm of her hand. So I made her acquaintance, and asked if I could borrow her for six weeks. The war was imminent: this was just before Pearl Harbor, and the conference realized that they were going to have hard sledding financially during the war, especially since we realized in the United States at that time that the odds were against us for the first couple of years. So I got her for six weeks, and began to set up the office February 11, 1942. I had also a need for a person with excellent Spanish and was fortunate in meeting Gustavo Duran, who had just arrived in the United States and wanted a job. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant in Madrid, who had joined up with the Loyalist Army and become a brigadier general. From the defeat of the Loyalist Army, he found himself In Valencia with the Franco forces converging, and a hopeless situation. Fortunately, the Franco general in charge had been an old school friend of his, and he went to him and told him of his plight. The Franco general said, "Well, I can protect you for the next twenty-four hours, but after that I'll be helpless." The general got him onto a British man-of-war in the harbor; he just had the clothes on his back, and he landed in England with probably the proper kind of letters of introduction. He became a teacher at a famous school, a progressive school, DartIngton Hall. About six weeks after that, he was engaged to a very lovely girl, and after their marriage, came to the United States. Gustavo was not only a speaker of beautiful Spanish and English, but a very good musician and a charming man; so I took him on. We needed beside a Spaniard, a Latin-American, and fortunately. Bill Berrien and Carleton Sprague Smith recom mended Luis Heltor Correa de Azevedo, a professor in the conservatory of music in Rio, who was a specialist in the folk music of Brazil. So we started off with this trio, and I think I can say now, thirty years later, that I couldn't have found three better people. In a small office, all in one room, with my three assistants and three secretaries, we went to work, full of enthusiasm. While I knew almost nothing about Latin America, and Gustavo not much more, Luis Heitor knew almost nothing about anything outside of Brazil; but Miss Lawler knew the United States a lot better than I did. The first thing that we set ourselves to do was to get it known in Latin America that we were there, and had some projects. The first project was to get the music of Latin-American composers published in the United States. I should preface the method of organization of this project with the facts that it faced. Latin-American music had been making a headway in the United States for a number of years, especially in the field of popular music. Latin-American popular music was published by a number of publishers, among them, probably the most successful. Southern Music Publishers. Edward B. Marks had done quite a bit; Schirmers had done some; and there were probably a dozen or so other publishers who'd picked up some money. The general feeling in Latin America was that the United States publishers made a lot of money out of their music, and that the composers didn't get much for it. So we had an inter-American situation to deal with that we could do something about . The project at the Pan-American Union was set up as a separate project, under the direction of Henry Cowell, who was taken on half time with a little office in New York. The first job that Henry had was to get to work on a uniform contract under which Latin-American composers could be contracted for publication of their work in the United States, with a feeling that they were getting just what a North American composer would get. So he started to work on that. The project was outlined by Miss Lawler. First we brought in a Latin-American composer who happened to be at hand, who was well-thought-of, and an American composer, and someone else, I've forgotten who --a first committee of three. They combed all the available Latin-American music, all that they could get their hands on. The Library of Congress had been receiving quite a bit, the Pan-American Union had quite a lot, and there were pieces of music published in Latin America that could be published in the United States in the hands of some of our friends and private individuals. They got this music all together, selected the things that they thought were musically good and suitable for publication in the United States, with the understanding that the principal purchasers of this music would be people connected with the public schools. So they laid the music out on tables, some of it in manuscript, some of it printed, some of it even out of print. Then a second committee, made up of seven or eight key people in the music education field (mind you, this was in the middle of war--we got money to pay their travel expenses to Washington and put them up per diem), looked over this music with the idea of its being published with a view to use in the public school system. These seven or eight men were at the same time music editors of the leading public school music textbooks for the leading music textbook publishers of the United States. Everybody was aware of the importance of the project. Germany and Italy had propagandized Latin America very heavily, with emphasis on music, pointing out that the real loyalty of Latin America should be to Germany and Italy as the greatest producers of music, and that the inhabitants of this northern hemisphere of the Americas were nothing but a bunch of barbarians; they had no orchestras, they had no opera houses, they had no music public --they were just barbarians. The Italians actually put out a specific book, calling attention to the beauties of Italian music, and how young musicians should go to Italy to study, and how Italian operas should be performed in Latin America. At the same time, it had been rumored, I don't know on how good authority, that Germany was expected to base airplanes on airstrips in Colombia and Venezuela and bomb the Panama Canal. The idea of getting hold of the friendship of Latin America by all and any means possible, legitimate or illegitimate, was of course in everybody's mind. The capture of the Panama Canal, or its disablement, would have meant a great deal to the United States at that time. So the music project at the Pan-American Union to promote good-neighbor feelings between Latin America and the United States was right in line with the kind of work I'd done in ¥PA and Resettlement--in other words, it was trying to make friends between somewhat different groups of people by means of music. Well, it goes without saying that the seven or eight music educators who came to Washington to select from this initial gathering of possibly publishable Latin-American music would be friendly to the idea of having Latin-American music in their schools. They were mostly state supervisors or supervisors of music in the big cities, and they were men of good will, picked especially by Miss Lawler because they were not only important to the music education picture but because they were men who were, in the real sense of the word, patriotic. They did their job well. Then it was Henry Cowell's job to peddle the music that they chose to the publishers, whose advisers these music educators were. The project worked, of course, like greased lightning; all of the big publishers and some of the smaller ones accepted works for orchestra, band, chorus, schoolroom, all kinds of things j and the publishers went right to it, sent out the standard contract which by that time had been arranged, and the project went like greased lightning. Henry Cowell actually almost worked himself out of a job; in a couple of years--! think it was less than two years--he got two hundred pieces published. At the same time, one of our jobs was to get North American musicians and music performing groups down to Latin America. We had cooperation there from the outside, which we didn't even have to bother about. The Yale Glee Club was sent around Latin America independently of the Pan-American Union, and there was a dance group that went down, sponsored very largely (I think both of these were) by Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs. He had a committee there of advisers that I sat in on; Carleton Sprague Smith I think was chairman, and the conductor of the Yale Glee Club, Marshall Bartholomew, was on it. Then there was a third group who went down, a wind quintet whose players were all composers. Those three groups--the Yale Glee Club, the dance group, and the wind qulntet--had fantastic successes. Having more or less believed the propaganda of the Italians and the Germans, the Latin-American city people, who were the ruling groups of the countries of Latin-America, were absolutely dumfounded. They had no idea that young men whose fathers were prominent in business and industry and government sang in a glee club of such technical excellence. They had no idea that we had in the United States five composers who were virtuosos on a wind instrument. There were misfortunes, of course, on the way--as for instance when the dance group got stranded in Buenos Aires and had to have thirty or forty thousand dollars sent to airplane it over the Andes to Santiago; the members of the wind quintet got into a fight among themselves in a Buenos Aires cafe--but on the whole it was a phenomenal success, those three ventures of Nelson Rockefeller's office. We cooperated, of course, in every way that we could through introductions and so forth.

TUSLER

How was Nelson Rockefeller's office related to the Pan-American Union?

SEEGER

That was an emergency office in the Roosevelt administration, a war office. I was on Nelson Rockefeller's payroll for the first year. Its music committee voted Pan-American Union funds for operation of projects. I went around to find out in the middle of the first year how my budget stood. I had had no reports of the expenditure of my budget I knew perfectly well that the government wouldn't pay the prices that I said I thought such and such things could he bought at, but I wanted to be perfectly sure that I didn't overdraw because I knew that I'd be personally responsible. I went around along January or February and said to the accounting people there, "I haven't received any accounting. I'm getting worried; I'm getting toward the end of my budget, and I don't want to overdraw it." "Well, just wait a few weeks and we'll be able to tell you." Well, a few weeks went by, and another complaint from me, and finally it got quite late in the year and I was getting really worried. I think it got on to the end of April, and I said, "Look here, we can't let this go on any longer. I'm scared to death about the situation." The man happened to be human, and he leaned across the desk and he said, "Mr. Seeger, don't worry. Spend up to your budget as near as you think you can. We haven't the slightest idea, and we never will be able to give you an accounting." Well, I went back, and in the short time left to me (I think that must have been on toward June 1), I went well beyond my budget; I never heard from him. One of the things I bought was the most expensive loudspeaker radio-phonograph setup that I could--! think it had thirty-three tubes and was able to fill the gardens back of the Pan-American Union in spite of the traffic on Constitution Avenue and (what was it?) Independence and Virginia avenues, which is quite heavy, with marvelous sounds, so that you could dance to it or entertain a meeting with it. Meanwhile, Miss Lawler and I got busy with trying to reach people, peoples of countries, not just ruling classes. The glee club, the dance group, and wind quintet went just to the music lovers of the capitals of Latin America. The less well paid people, the nonmusical people in those capitals didn't pay any attention to it at all. Of course, these groups, in getting in touch with the music elite in these capitals, got pretty close to the ruling elite, because they're all the same thing. That doesn't mean to say that the military dictators in charge of most of the Latin-American countries are music lovers, but their wives usually made music-loving a part of the maintenance of their social status; whether they really liked the music or not didn't make any difference — they patronized it, and they said, "Music is fine." So these three groups did a great deal of good for inter-American relations simply because it was so close to the ruling class; but Miss Lawler and I wanted to dig deeper. We wanted to get into the city populations and, to what extent we could, even enter rural populations. We approached this in a double way. First, and easiest, was through the United States. We worked up a program for a meeting of the Music Educators' National Conference in Milwaukee, I think it was the fall of 1942, in which there would be programs pushing the arms of our program, the different divisions of our forces, you might say. It was a military operation, and we had various divisions. One division was musicology. Music educators throughout the country were hostile to musicology. We thought that one of the ways we could get an interest in Latin-American music was through the music that could only be approached through musicology--its primitive folk, popular, and of course composed music. We could do that all up in a bundle, as comparative musicology or musicology, as anyone would want it, and we could present it to the more academically oriented of the music eduators, so that even in a primary school they could talk about the music of the Indians in the Amazon, or something, being like the music of the Indians in the United States and that sort of thing, and they could begin to make these cross-cultural relations between Latin America and the United States that ethnomusicologists and musicologists were beginning to try to open up. Of course, the schoolteachers would make it on a basis of utter ignorance and mere enthusiasm, and some marvelous distortions of the truth would result; but at least it was getting things started, and if first an untruth was taught, a truth could replace it later, hopefully. So musicology was one thing. The next prong of our offensive was in folk music. I was pretty much convinced from my work with Resettlement that you could, without too much idealism, expect the music educators to become interested in American folk music (by American folk music, I mean British-American folk music, folk music in the English language) as their next logical step. Back around 19OO, there was practically no American material in the school books, except imitations of imitations written by schoolteachers. Stephen Foster's songs and some of the older popular songs were put into these school books in the first decades of the twentieth century as a result of an increasing interest in the history of the United States on the part of some of the leading music educators, especially Will Earhart. It seemed to me that now that the older popular music had gotten into the schools, the next thing was to put the folk music in. The third prong of Miss Lawler's and my offensive was to get Latin-American music into the schools, and a program was organized toward that end. The fourth prong was to get the younger American composers connected up with the public school music programs, people like Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and others. So at this meeting in Milwaukee, we arranged to have section meetings devoted to these separate programs. The lot were drawn together in a big meeting at which we had a two-way radio contact with Rio de Janeiro, and we spoke to Heitor Villa-Lobos, the leading Brazilian composer. He spoke back, and Luis Heitor translated the Portuguese into English. We had on the platform, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson and others; it was a very successful meeting, and three of our objectives were gained. The folk music putsch stuck, the Latin-American music stuck, and the contemporary composers stuck. The musicology fell down; they couldn't take it. The music educators were so much convinced that musicologists were snobs, and they weren't interested in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, that we didn't make any headway there, but we made astonishing headway on all these other three objectives, and the momentum has been carried right on down to the present day. So we felt that from the point of view of the United States we had attained our objective as early as 1942 or '43. The problem was getting hold of the counterpart of this popular audience in Latin America. That was going to be much more difficult. The strategy there was to send Miss Lawler to South America. We got a project up, paying her way around Latin America in I think two installments. She was to visit every country, and she set forth; I've forgotten what the date was, 1943 or '44. Mind you, the war was going on. Peron was in the saddle in Argentina, Batista in Cuba, and a lot of other gangsters in the other countries, well beribboned as benevolent dictators but representing the very small units of banking and land owning that had controlled the countries for generations and have continued to control them ever since. The prospects of reaching the people in a way that would be a counterpart to the way we were reaching the people in the United States were, of course, pretty dim. It led through the antechambers of ministers of education, deans of schools, rectors of universities, and a very few musicians who had shown some human interest in education, folklore. musicology, and God knows what. It was Miss Lawler's job to work the thing from the top down, not on the technical level as we'd been able to do it in the United States, but from the executive and diplomatic level down, and partly from the professional music level dovm. Well, I won't go into the details of her trip or its fantastic success. I can only give a few stories which would more or less give an idea of how she went to workj of course she had letters of introduction, the best we could get for her, of all kinds, to all kinds of people. I think perhaps the first story I could tell would be in Buenos Aires, where Peron was in the saddle. She arrived in Buenos Aires and everybody was very polite, but they brushed her off. The Americans did nothing for hero Our letters of introduction were inadequate except to the British embassy, and the British embassy said, "Why, of course, we have a special music office in connection with our embassy." I think she had a letter to the man, so she went around to him and he did everything for her. What he did was to take her around and introduce her, or give her a letter of introduction, to the Minister of Education. So one day she sailed in (she hadn't been in town more than a few days — she works very rapidly) to the antechamber of the Minister of Education. She met the First Secretary of the American embassy sitting there. After she'd given her name, they exchanged a few words j he'd been sitting there for two hours trying to see the Minister of Education. The word came, "Oh, Miss Lawler, come right in." She went in, had an hour session with the minister, buttered him up in her special way so that he was ready to do anything she wanted. On her way out, she was approached by the secretary and he walked down the corridor, and he said, "You've been here — what is It, three or four days? and you walk right in to the Minister of Education. How did you do it?" "Well," said Miss Lawler in her best mollifying accents, "I'm representing the Pan-American Union. You're just another country." He said, "You travel on an American passport?" "Yes," she said, "unfortunately the Pan-American Union hasn't the privilege of issuing passports." Next day, he called with a couple of others at her hotel and said, "We are escorting you to the steamer to Montevideo." Meanwhile, I had a telegram: "I'm being put out of Argentina. Is there anything you can do?" So I went up to Dr. Rowe, showed him the telegram. and he wheeled around in his chair in a kind of a whimsical way he had and looked out the window. He said, "Unfortunately, we don't have passports. If she were traveling on a Pan-American passport, she'd stay." [laughter] She went.

TUSLER

Was this a purely vitriolic act on this person's part?

SEEGER

They were ready to think she was working against the United States. Meanwhile, my old friend Gustavo Duran was the man Friday, or what was it--Hopkins, to Ambassador [Spruille] Braden from the United States; and the United States couldn't put up with this. They suspected subversion. Well, after a while she found herself in Chile. The American embassy heard that this charming American woman representing the Pan-American Union was there and they waited, in their typical manner, for her to come around and call. After three weeks, no call; and the ambassador finally met her at a party, and said, "Miss Lawler, I've been surprised you haven't called at the embassy." "Oh," she said, "I've been too busy." "But," he said, "you're an American, aren't you?" "Yes, but I represent the Pan-American Union, and I'm not representing any member of the Pan-American Union. I'm representing the Pan-American Union in Chile." Wellj it was pretty hard for him to take, but he did. I've forgotten just how the denouement did take place; but when she went to take her place on the plane leaving Santiago, the chief of the armed services or the head of the navy, or something, of Chile was going to be on the same plane, and he had four handsome young men there as his adjutants to say good-bye to him. "Oh!" when he saw Miss Lawler--she' d met him some place and they were great friends; she made friends with everybody--he turned to the young men and said, "Salute! " so they all saluted her. [laughter] The result was that she had a very pleasant trip to Lima, or wherever it was, sitting next to the admiral. And that's the way she ran things. Naturally, when we wanted something done in one of those countries to help music, we had ways of getting things done. What little we did was to get organizations started. It's a long story getting things organized down there; they haven't much of an idea of how to organize. Their idea of organization is for a few friends to get together and keep everybody else out and just have some fun by themselves. The contacts were pretty close, especially since the people who were in charge of music education in most of the Latin-American countries were also their leading composers, and since we were getting compositions of the leading composers published in the United States, they returned the favor by helping us with the music education situation. Our idea was that we'd get Chilean songs into Mexico and Guatemalan songs into Uruguay and United States songs into those countries and some of their music into our school books, so that there would be building up an American solidarity which would be useful in the war and culturally real after the war was over; because whether you know it or not and whether you admit it or not, the culture of the Americas has this very strong bond in it; that its dominating force is colonialism. We were completely colonial up to the time of our secession from the mother countries, the colonizing countries. Then we were politically free, but the British empire kept the seas in a state where the United States wasn't much bothered by other countries. Economically, all of the Americas were dependent to a very large extent upon Europe, up to the First World War, and most of them up to the second. The United States became economically free, really, at the First World War. The British owned all the railroads of the Latin-American countries. They owned many of our railroads. Economically we got free about with the First World War, and I think culturally we became free in the period between the wars; but most of the Latin-American countries were still pretty much bound to Europe culturally and still are. Mexico broke away in its revolution in 19IO. Brazil broke away, culturally, between the wars. In fact, they were even ahead of us in some ways; Brazilians were putting Brazilian words in place of the Italian words of allegro, presto, andante, and so forth, before we were putting English. They were naming their music after Brazilian subjects and folklore, national events, before we were--that is, their best composers were doing it, not just some freaks who, just to help their somewhat faltering music professional advance, would say, "Oh, American music must be based on Indian music," or something like that. There is_, since the Second World War, a growing feeling of a cultural bond between South America, Central America, the Antilles and North America that has reality. Of course, it was realized by students pretty far back, but it has been increasingly realized, so that now there are Latin-American programs in many American universities; the University of California has its project of cooperation with the University of Chile. In all of this, we had at the Pan-American Union an influence. I became an honorary member of the faculty of the University of Chile sometime way back in the '40' s, and more Americans have become members of the faculty j it's an honorary position. I even received a decoration as commander in the order Al Merito. This sort of thing, first started by the Pan-American Union, has kept going. We thought we were doing pretty well for the University of Chile when we sent them $5,000 worth of office machines, recording devices, and that sort of thing. The University of California just sent them $35,000 for recording equipment, and so you see things are advancing. Many of the friends that I formed in those years at the Pan-American Union I've kept; unfortunately, a great many of them have died, but the projects we started were started on a firm basis, and it has kept going ever since. The music education project first began to flower with an invitation that came to Miss Lawler to go down to Chile and spend I think six months working with the music educators. This was a private affair, of course stimulated by the Pan-American Union; but it was a private arrangement with her. I forgot to say that after our first borrowing of Miss Lawler for six weeks, I borrowed her for six months and then for six years. By that time, the whole universe of the Music Educators in the United States was a different thing. Her work at the Pan-American Union was very interesting. She asked me, "Well_, now, how should we plan this?" I'm borrowing her from the Music Educators: they would pay her half her salary and the Pan-American Union would pay her half her salary; she would spend half her time working for the Music Educators and half the time for the Pan-American Union. But we looked at each other laughing because it occurred to us both at the same time that you couldn't distinguish the two. Everything that she did for the Music Educators was also for the Pan-American, and everything she did for Pan-American was for the Music Educators. The two things were so much one bundle. So she went down there, and as a result of the work with the Chilean music educators, an Inter-American Institute of Music Education was set up, and that has gone on, and I expect a third meeting will take place next year. The way the work shaped up was really polyphonic : the projects sometimes seemed to have no connection with each other. Of course, building a music library at the Pan-American Union was something. I was music editor of the Handbook of Latin-American Studies for six years, I think, or was it longer than that? eight years, and that enabled me to keep in touch with the bibliographical end of things. We began to build a small phonogram archive at the Pan-American Union, and we were in touch with folklore collection all through the Americas off and on; we sent machines down for recording by responsible people and sent discs down, also to be copied, and I regret to say that the machines never came back, and in only one case did the discs ever come back filled with anything worthwhile. There was a lively exchange of materials. They were very friendly and sent us more, probably, than we were able to send them. But this whole picture changed with the setup of UNESCO. Now this tape is nearing an end, and I'd better start off on a new tape with the change which came into the picture at the Pan-American Union when, in the same year the United Nations was set up, the Organization of American States was also set up as a regional organization, and in that way my work at the Pan-American Union became putatively, at least, a regional music operation under UNESCO. My idea was, taught by my experience in the Roosevelt administration, that I would form an inter-American music council and then hope that there would be a European music council, an African music council, an East Asian music council, and so forth, and that they would eventually come together in a federation of world regions and we would have a world music council. But with the formation of UNESCO, they jumped the gun, and a music office was set up in Paris. I think I should begin with my activity in that connection with the next tape.

TUSLER

To what extent do you feel North American musical influences were brought into South America as a result of the Pan-American Union?

SEEGER

Well, they were brought in to a tremendous extent; they began to play our music, and we sent down more and more organizations playing our music. Finally whole philharmonic orchestras went down, and they played North American compositions as well as South American compositions, so that I think now you can say that the knowledge of North America in South America, and of South America in North America, musically, is very close. There's great admiration down there for our best composers, and from the reception of some of the Latin-American composers' music in our big cities here, it certainly is reciprocal. I heard a concert in Washington, one of the great string quartets playing at the Library of Congress, at which Beethoven and some other European composer's work was performed, and the quartet of [Alberto] Ginastera of Argentina got a standing ovation. It was a magnificent work. Ginastera' s operas have been played at the new opera center in New York. I think he's had almost more commissions from the United States than he's had from Argentina; in fact, there's some jealousy in Buenos Aires that he's gotten so much backing from the United States that he's really not a real Argentine. That sort of thing goes on.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 5, 1966

SEEGER

Before starting off with the subject of the present tape, I ought to tell the story illustrating the manner in which a clever woman can operate in Washington. The setting is a meeting during the later days of the war of the eighteen music men in as many different Washington offices who were trying to make music serve the war effort in some way or other. I say eighteen music men--one of them was a woman, Vanett Lawler. By this time, everybody 'd been operating for a couple of years, but they thought that they might exchange reminiscences, plans, and so forth and so on; I suppose there was some intention of working toward survival. At any rate, there were eighteen of us seated in chairs around the walls of a rather smallish room with no table in the center, something like a French provincial salon. Don't ask me how it happened that the man at Miss Lawler 's right started off; there was no chairman, there was no agenda, there was no plan. It was an informal gathering, and it might very well have been the fate of the lone woman to be more or less in the middle of the circle, or perhaps even at the beginning out of a survival of chivalry. But a clever woman doesn't allow herself to be in those very unstrategic positions. So the man to the right of Miss Lawler started off and he did his little spiel, of course building up a nice story of what he'd done and how clever he was and so forth. As those present spoke one after another, about half of them wound up saying, "Well, I don't know too much about this development, but Miss Lawler can tell you more about it." By the time Miss Lawler had to speak--the last one, of course, of the eighteen--she didn't have to say anything about what she had been doing. All she had to do was to say a nice word about those of the members (as I say, about half of them) who'd mentioned her, and to thank them for their mention, and perhaps expand a little bit, not too much, so as not to show that she knew more than they did on what they'd said, spreading a few nice words about everybody else in the room--and that was the end of it. She didn't have to say anything about what she was doing. Each one there knew that she knew more about what was happening in Washington than they did, and an ordinary career woman might have spread herself to show how she really did know more than all the rest of them and that they all, so to speak, played into her hands; but not Miss Lawler. She let it go at that, and of course everybody loved her at the end and kept on bringing her their troubles and going to her for advice. It's worthwhile recording a story of that sort once in a while, because there are women in Washington who make every man who works with them or under them hate them. We're now coming to the matter of the relations of the Pan-American Union and the United Nations and UNESCO. The United Nations formed in 1945. [UNESCO was established in November, 1946.] UNESCO is a specialized agency of the United Nations and, of course, there was the question of how, into this new world order, the established agencies of the new world would fit. The Pan-American Union had gotten busy, as soon as it heard about the impending organization of the United Nations, with an Organization of American States which would be a regional organization under the world organization of the United Nations. But since the Pan-American Union had well-developed, so to speak, "cultural" offices, it also had a special relationship with UNESCO, which was the "cultural" arm of the United Nations. (How I dislike that word "cultural" in that use.) In fact, UNESCO is the United Nations' educational, scientific, and cultural arm. UNESCO went off in the way of a kind of an explosion under the guidance of Julian Huxley in Paris, and concocted a music program that was enough to alarm almost anyone. I don't have the program at hand, and I believe it's thoroughly forgotten; but among the items, just to indicate just how crazy they were, there was an expensive project to send groups of lecturers, dancers, musicians, poets, and theater people around the world to educate the masses of the world in ancient Greek music and dance, If there's any subject musicologists and historians will quarrel about, it's Greek music and dance. If you want to make dissension, one of the best ways is to bring up the subject; otherwise, you just let it lie, or "leave it lay," as they say in the United States. So I dispatched a memorandum to Julian Huxley, tearing the program to pieces. I received a letter of thanks which brushed me off beautifully, and that was the end of the matter. I had no expectation that they would pay any attention to it. But I got a program drawn up, what they ought to do, and I still have that. The question was how to present it. It so happened that Julian Huxley came to the United States on one of his early official tours, and I heard that he was having dinner one night at the brother-in-law of Gustavo Duran, who had worked for me in my first year at the Pan-American Union. So I called Gustavo on the telephone and told him about what had happened, and he said, "well, come right up. I can take you over, and you'll join us; they'd love to have you." I said, "Not a bit of it. I'm not horning in on this dinner party. I'll bring you up my draft of the program, and you can present it for what it's worth." He said, "Sure, I will." So he waited for me in his office on Lake Success until I could get up there by plane and taxis, and I gave him the outline and came back to Washington. He presented it, and Julian Huxley liked it very much, and said, "Well, now, how will we get this thing started? Would you come over?" (Oh, I had said to him, "Don't present it as my idea, present it as your idea.") I don't know what he did; but at any rate, Huxley asked Gustavo if he would come over and get this thing started. He said, "I like this program." Gustavo said, "Well, I'm working for the United Nations now in the secretariat." (I think it was the Division of Economic and Social Affairs.) "Maybe you could borrow me." So, no sooner said than done. He was borrowed and he went over with one promise to me, that when he left he would get Miss Lawler in for six months. His promise was duly fulfilled, and Miss Lawler went over to Paris and headed up the section on, as far as I remember, mostly the arts, she more or less filled the whole cultural program for a while, very competent, and Huxley relied on her extensively. The correspondence (I wish I still had it) with Miss Lawler during this period was hot. It turned out that Huxley was inflexible; the one thing he wanted all his subordinates to do was to prepare very elaborate questionnaires that would go out all over the world. On the basis of these questionnaires, they would work out programs. Miss Lawler didn't like questionnaires because she knew perfectly well they don't amount to a row of pins, at least in the music educational end of things. But Huxley insisted, and among the many services that she performed, she drew up a questionnaire to end all questionnaires in music education. As I remember, it was thirteen single-space pages long, and the only people who could have answered it would have been a commission working about a year in the United States, which would in turn have to send out another perhaps more elaborate questionnaire, with a whole corps of people to see that it got answered. Well, some day she must write it up; she must report on her six months' service in Paris. As I saw what was happening, I realized that Huxley's whole music program would be defeated at any meeting of internationally minded people, intellectuals who had some idea of the proportions of things. In a real agony of reappraisal, I sent a telegram to Helen White, who was (I think) a professor in the University of Wisconsin and was one of the delegates of the United States: "Would you be willing to present the following resolution at the Mexico meeting of UNESCO." (Its annual meeting was in Mexico.) "The secretary-general is directed to inquire into the feasibility of forming an international institute of music." No money, nothing but an inquiry. I was pretty sure it would go through. Well, in comes Huxley and his cohorts to Washington on their way to Mexico. At a tea (I've forgotten where it was now--one of the hotels --I think it was that one out on Connecticut Avenue) we listened to his plans for UNESCO, and among other things was his decision to have the Americas represented in two groups, a Latin-American group and an Anglo-American group. We sat around and said, "Oh, yeah?" the Pan-American Union having been founded and being continued and particularly interested in having the Americas represented as one , not as two; but English politics had for many years tried to drive a wedge between the Americas while the United States was trying to tie them together, and as an Englishman he was putting over the English policy. Well, it was quite obvious that Miss Lawler's whole program would be defeated. I neglected to say that her promise to me was that when her six months were finished, she would try to get in Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo, who had been my third man in my first year at the Pan-American Union, as permanent man in UNESCO to implement the music program which Huxley hoped would result from the questionnaires, and I hoped would result from my simple little resolution that I hoped Miss White would present. I go into these details because it shows one of the ways of operating in Washington. If you can't get what you want through channels, you "go around," like the Boyg in Peer Gynt . Well, the cohorts went off to Mexico, and as I expected, Huxley ' s music program was ignominiously defeated and Helen White's little resolution was un9.nimously accepted. Luis Heitor was duly established in Paris, and then came the chance for me to enter. A meeting was called in Paris in 1948 or '49 I've forgotten which, to draw up the plans for the International Music Council. I went over and discovered that the basic documents for the institute were, unfortunately, already drawn up by the legal officers of UNESCO, and they were drawn up in the European fashion, which would guarantee the setting up of a bureau of control that would not be seriously disturbed by voting. In other words, the nominating committee was formed of the officers and the representatives of four professional organizations: the International Musicological Society; the International Folk Music Council; the Jeunesse Musicale, which was a Belgian, supposedly nonprofit, international organization for giving concerts for young people, but I wouldn't say how non-profit it was; and the other group I can't remember. At any rate, the French idea of an international organization was that it would have its seat in Paris, that its bureau would renominate itself and would not nominate any double slate or any such democratic processes as that, and would be sure to be an example of what the Latin-Americans call continuismo . Well, I fought it as hard as I could, but I was voted down. The general atmosphere was very friendly, but I was unable to do the sort of thing that I had tried to do in the little project of the Inter-American Music Council which had been going through the committees of the Organization of American States, and so I just had to go along with the group. The headquarters were in the old Hotel Majestic; it was very crowded. The work was pretty hectic; everybody had much more to do than they could possibly do; but Luis Heitor was the ideal man for the job. His English had improved enormously and he set himself to cultivation of French, which by the time I reached Paris was on the way to being remarkably good. I was a member of the organizing committee because I'd been sponsor of the resolution and they regarded me as the father of the International Music Council; they were awfully nice that way. The constitution was so arranged that, beside the representatives of organizations and the representatives of countries that had national music organizations, there were I think four persons elected to be members in their individual capacity, and at the first meeting, I think it was in 1949 I was of course duly elected an individual member. The United States didn't have a national committee. They came to me to advise upon who to get in touch with in the various Latin-American republics who might form national committees, and of course I was in a very good position there to know who were the musicians in the various countries who might form national committees, and in those countries that had a fairly strong music life like Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, I got good men. For some of the smaller countries, there was more doubt whether it was worth electing them as national organizing members. I was afraid I might get into political troubles in some of the smaller countries, especially of Central America. I've forgotten what the final outcome was, but in the course of time there was a national commission in Mexico, in Chile, Venezuela, I think Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, so that some of the leading musicians of those countries got over to Paris with their fare paid. I attended meetings for four years, from 1949 to 1952, and became personally acquainted for the first time with many leaders of European musical life, some of whom I had been in correspondence with. There were several meetings in 1952, one of the International Musicological Society, which comes every three years, and one of the International Folk Music Council. I attended both of them. I read papers at both. As I remember, in 1949 I was not present at any meetings; it was a winter meeting and there were no learned societies meeting at that time. The situation was a very peculiar one. There were some very strong personalities in the early days of the International Music Council. The secretary of the Jeunesse Musicale, Marcel Cuvelier of Belgium, was a very smart negotiator. The elected president was Roland Manuel, a Spaniard, part French, who had fled Spain with the defeat of the Loyalist armies, one of the most popular lecturers over the national radio of France, a composer, and one of the most lovable men in the world. Musicology was represented hy [Knud] Jeppesen of Denmark, who had kept the International Society going over the years in the true European style of the benevolent dictatorship, and kept it very conservative, very small, and very inactive. There were a couple of budding organizations, in unions and band associations and that sort of thing, that were not represented by very strong people. I remember especially [Fausto] Torrefranca, the Italian musicologist, and Samuel Baud-Bovie, the Swiss ethnomusicologist, always were present to represent something or other. I think Torrefranca was an individual member. There was very strong feeling that Spain should not be invited to join UNESCO, on account of its general attitude toward science, education, and culture, and on account of the dictatorship there. The meetings were pretty much planned ahead; you knew what was going to happen. Luis Heitor was a very astute politician who did not pretend to dominate. He interpreted his function as simply being the secretary of the technical contact with UNESCO that would see that the power structure that was being built by IMC functioned harmoniously with UNESCO. Cuvelier was secretary, and handled it like a tyrant. I could, if my French had been better, have had a knock-down, drag-out battle with him. His English was rather poor and my French was very poor, and we both of us decided that we would not dispute issues. The result was that the International Music Council, like most international organizations that are domiciled in France, became almost more French than the French, thoroughly under the influence of French ideas of culture, French ideas of music, and French ideas of every thing else. It was a case of the naive provincial, in the shape of myself, being simply unable to buck the integrated cohorts of the European capital. I could see by the second year, I think it was 1950 or '51, the general directions. The rest of the world would be told by this French-dominated clique what was music and what they ought to do in the way of music, and when meetings were called, the proper authorities would be called upon to read papers and tell the rest of the world how they ought to behave, and that the contacts of UNESCO, far from trying to reach the peoples of the world, would content themselves with reaching the ruling classes and the elite of the professional music groups. I became increasingly disenchanted with the situation. When the nomination of the secretary from England came up, I said, "Well, that's better than having this continental/' so I backed it, and frankly, I made the mistake of my life in letting a radiobroadcasting man get in as secretary, and he's still there. He's a charming fellow, but the International Music Council has been disc-jockeyed ever since (I think It was 195 1) . I don't want to deal with this too much in detail, but some very amusing things happened. I could sense the partial dissolution of my carefully built up bond of friendship between Latin America and the United States. For there still remained in Latin America and to a certain extent in the United States, too, the feeling that they wanted European--more than each other' s--recognition. Performance in the United States of their works very much pleased the Latin-American composers, but performance in Europe meant much more to them, and frankly, performance in Europe meant more to a North American composer than performance in Latin America. So I had to see my carefully built house of cards of the Latin-American musicians and North-American musicians in a way falling apart--not entirely, but to all intents and purposes. They were still friendly with the United States because the United States was giving them money, publishing their works, performing them, and so forth and so on; but they wanted European recognition. Cultural colonialism still lived. American composers had stopped studying in Europe in the '20' s, but Latin-American composers, young men, were still going to Europe in the '50' s. The whole matter came to a climax in 1952, when the nominating committee walked in with the renomination of the officers then in office. I protested that this was the way to either ossify the International Music Council or to destroy it; that naturally the secretary would have to be a permanent office, perhaps even the treasurer, but the governing committee should have one or two fresh members in every year; the permanent professional organizations like the International Music Council, International Folk Music Council, and so forth and so on, should rotate their representatives; and when it came to the president, the president should not succeed himself. Well, there was Roland Manuel sitting up in the chair, he was nominated to succeed himself, and I was telling him that he shouldn't run for president again; and there was the nominating committee, aghast at my impudence. So they asked me to propose some nominations, of course knowing perfectly well that I'd be voted down; I nominated them. I nominated anybody I could think of, just off the cuff. [laughter] The British representative, Sir Somebody Wilson, who was an ex-singer who somehow or other had got knighted, I nominated for chairman and he promptly refused. My colleague from the United States, Samuel Barber, whom I nominated for vice-chairman, also renigged, [laughter] and did the same thing when I nominated him for chairman, and the whole thing fell apart. The nominating committee's slate was unanimously elected before I'd given my dissenting vote! [laughter] Then came the rest of the nominations--I think it was the individual members next. I think they were taking them alphabetically, and I came of course toward the end. When my name was proposed, and of course I would have been elected, I withdrew my name. Consternation. Torrefranca jumps up and says, "But he's father of the council; we can't be without his presence. I nominate him for honorary president." [laughter] Everybody was rather aghast, because there was no post of honorary president. [laughter] So I very gracefully managed to say, "I thank Mr. Torrefranca for his nomination, but since there is no post for such a thing in the constitution, I suppose the only thing for me to do, having suggested that the president not run for re-election, is that I myself should not run for re-election." So the matter was over and done. Well, of course, in typical European fashion they felt that this had to be smoothed over; so there was a large dinner party at one of the UNESCO officer's homes. Jean Thomas, Roland Manuel and I were formally taken up before the crowd and were supposed to shake hands, did shake hands, and we had no bad feelings at all. Everything all went off very nicely.

TUSLER

Did he succeed himself?

SEEGER

Oh, yes, yes. He did succeed himself. But shortly afterwards, Spain was elected a member of UNESCO, and he promptly resigned. Since that time, I think they've taken my little reproach to heart, and they elected a different nationality for each term.

TUSLER

But you were really a one-man opposition at that time.

SEEGER

I was a one-man opposition. In fact, I was absolutely a bull in a china shop. I objected to so many things in that 1952 meeting, it was almost expected. [laughter] I got a little note from one man, I've forgotten his nationality, saying something to the effect that you seem to be the only man here who says what you think. [laughter] Well, at any rate, the council was pretty firmly established of the more permanent professional organizations, and they got more money and they branched out, but the general program was a disc-Jockey program. It was: "We know who the great composers are, and we know that all the people in the world should hear their music, and one of the ways of hearing their music is to have symphony orchestras and string quartets and opera companies play their music; and we want, of course, a good stock of capable composers in the coming generation, so we must encourage young composers." So they went at that tooth and nail, and did everything they could to get more contemporary music performed and more young composers a chance to hear their works--a chance to get enough money to live on and compose and have their works performed and so forth and so on; and that was that. I was not interested in that sort of thing.

TUSLER

Was that its primary activity, then?

SEEGER

That was its primary activity. I was bored to death; I told them they were on the wrong track, that they should get out and do more with popular, folk, and even primitive music, and should try to organize among the masses of the people and not spend all their time just with professionals; but they didn't pay any attention to it. Meanwhile, at one of the meetings, I've forgotten which one it was, I had proposed a resolution that an international society for music education would be set up under the auspices of UNESCO, and would in due time become a professional member. This was my best deal in trying to get the council into a more democratic way of operating. Naturally, it received unanimous approval; an organizing committee was set up. I was a member of the organizing committee and was asked to draw up the constitution, which I did. I spent a good deal of time on the constitution and think I worked out a beautiful document that would be a model for an international organization. Among other items in it was representation on its highest governing body, not only of countries, but of branches of music. I divided music up into three main bodies --a performing group, the composing group, and the scholarship group --and gave them definite functions in the governance of the organization and in the meetings. I went to a couple of the organization meetings--Miss Lawler and I went together. She was representing the United States for that time. Finally the organization was set up and it had a meeting in Liege. I was getting all ready to go over to it when the State Department refused to give me a passport, and I had to get somebody to take my place.

TUSLER

Why was that?

SEEGER

Oh, I had been connected with too many dangerous, subversive organizations. By this time I think they had some kind of a dossier on me. When I'd gone into the Pan-American Union, they had nothing to speak of. This was in January, 1953.

TUSLER

Those were the days of McCarthyism.

SEEGER

At the height of McCarthyism, yes. I told the State Department that they were acting unconstitutionally and would be found to be so presently when the McCarthy hysteria went over, but as one laywer told me, "You have [less] chance of getting a passport than a snowball in hell," so I didn't fight it. It would have cost a great deal anyway, and I would have been black-listed and my whole family would have gotten into trouble, and it was not worthwhile. My wife Ruth died a few months later. I had had a chance right before this experience with the passport business to sit in on a joint committee meeting of representatives of UNESCO and representatives of the Pan-American Union at the pretty oval table in the council room of the Pan-American Union, at which the old project from the International Music Council came up. This was in 1953. Mind you, the International Music Council had been going for three years. UNESCO stated its case that the Inter-American Music Council was unnecessary. The International Music Council was quite sufficient to do the business. The Pan-American Union, when asked for its opinion, didn't say anything. There was silence around the table, till finally somebody said, "Well, perhaps Mr. Seeger would speak up." Mr. Seeger, seeing complete silence on the part of his colleagues in the Pan-American Union, said he had nothing to say, so the motion went down to defeat. My little project had gone through twelve committees, "through channels," taken uncounted years--I don't know how many years, four, five, six years--finally emerged in a fairly practical document approved by everybody, with a few thousand dollars for an organizing meeting, and it was defeated. The picture was a very pretty one: the defeat of a project that had gone through channels and the success of a project that had gone by the back stairs, as my handling of the International Music Council had. You see I think it took no longer than ahout six months from the time I got Duran to present the project to Huxley-down at his brother-in-law's house on Long Island, to the installment of Luiz Heitor as a permanent officer, and it was a foregone conclusion from the beginning that it would work. Meanwhile, my project that had gone through channels had to be rewritten each time by the twelve committees. The amount of work was incredible. The amount of work for the International Music Council was minimal. So I decided that my interest in the Pan-American Union and my usefulness there was over. The Organization of the American States had set up a bureaucracy in 1948 in which, in the course of five years, most of the employees except the typists (that is, the technical men in between the clerical level and the executive level who were heads of divisions, about six of them) spent at least a third of their time in the corridors gossipping, and probably another third of their time intriguing, each one of them trying to get ahead of the other and spending about one-third of their time on the business that was to be done. It was getting worse and worse, until finally in 1953 the personnel department had all the rest of the four divisions in its hands. You had to spend hours every week filling out their damn blanks. Fortunately, they were directed by a man who was inordinately ambitious, and he overstretched himself. He finally reached the point where he had practically the whole Pan-American Union filling out personnel blanks. Some time after I left, I don't remember how long it was, he was demoted to wrapping packages in the shipping room and the division was abolished. [laughter] That's the way, however, things happened; and that, together with the defeat of my Inter-American Music Council project and the feeling that I was practically straight-jacketed in the bureaucratic system, led to my voluntary resignation. I was two years over retirement age and had a right to stay on two more years, but I just felt I'd had enough. The last couple of years at the Pan-American Union I was bored to death. About all I could do was to prepare memoranda, and then on the outside, write private letters. The new secretary-general, Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia, was, however, very able, a liberal Colombian politician, and did an excellent job with the Pan-American Union as a whole. I had more money to spend; the library grew; the record collection grew; and I finally was given some money for consultants from Latin America by which I would be able to bring, with travel and a good fee, Latin Americans to help with the Washington office and take the place of my first specialists who had all gone off in different ways: Miss Lawler back to her Music Educators' National Conference Luiz Heitor to UNESCO, and Gustavo Duran to the United Nations. Among the men that I brought up was Francisco Curt Lange, who was a pioneer in bringing the Latin-American musicians together. They were more prone to fight with each other than to cooperate, and he had founded an institute in Montevideo and had started publishing an annual Boletin [Latino-Americano de Musica], the fifth volume of which I had been associated editor. So I got Lange on as consultant and set him down to the desk in my nice little office and set him to work. He didn't do a damn thing but after a few weeks go to the Secretary-general and denounce me, saying that I was a perfectly good musicologist, but I hadn't the slightest idea how to handle the office at the Pan-American Union, that he could do it much better. Well, of course, that sort of thing never succeeds, and Lleras, who didn't know anything about the music program, got in touch with William Manger, the assistant secretary, and Manger said, "You leave Seeger alone," and that was the end of Lange. Meanwhile, there' d been some finagling on the out-side on the part of a more or less exiled Colombian musician. Guillermo Espinosa, who was an intriguer like Lange, a conductor who wanted in. I was not too enthusiastic about him, but as the candidates were ranged alongside of each other, I talked it over with Lleras, and Lleras said he would like to have Espinosa appointed. So I said, "Well, if you recommend your countryman so strongly, I'll be very pleased to accept him." Disregarding the barb, Lleras very gratefully appointed Espinosa, and he took his office. At that time, Espinosa was interested in just one thing and that was getting hold of an orchestra that he could conduct; and that was one of the reasons why I wasn't particularly happy about having him come on, but I thought he had potentialities. Returning from the 1952 meetings in Paris, I discovered that over my desk had come my request to set up an Inter-American Music Council, and Espinosa had opened it and rewritten it as a project to give him opportunites to conduct orchestras all over the New World--Sokolovian style. Well, by the time I retired, it wasn't even reborn again; but a couple of years afterwards Espinosa got it through and it now exists as the Inter-American Music Council, and in practically the form that I outlined. It has not done too well; it has been torn to pieces by personal jealousies; but I think now after--how long has it been going? five, six, or seven years, it's more or less on the level and it's acting the way it ought to.

TUSLER

Who was that organization responsible to, the Pan-American Union?

SEEGER

It ' s a kind of a child, just the way the International Music Council is a child of UNESCO. The parent organization gives it money, gives it prestige, and secretarial help.

TUSLER

And the parent organization is the Pan-American Union.

SEEGER

The Pan-American Union --that is, the Organization of American States. The Pan-American Union is the secretariat for the Organization of American States. So things, as far as international organization goes in music, are operating, but they're limping. Take, for example, a meeting called by the International Music Council in Paris a couple of years ago. Mantle Hood was invited from here, UCLA, and a number of Oriental musicians were invited from Japan, Indonesia, India, Africa, and so forth and so on. He knows them all well, personally. From the announcement that there was now going to be real, inter-continental music relations, everybody was rather hopeful that the Parisian tyranny would be abandoned. But as the initial speeches unrolled, the Orientals began looking at each other, sideways glances, and at Mantle, and he says that by the time the initial speeches were over, the introductory speeches by ministers of culture and secretaries-general of UNESCO and that sort of thing, it was quite obvious that the session was going to be just one of the regular Paris-dominated sessions, where everybody sat around and listened to the same old speeches by people who tell the world what to do. This has been going on but there was a regional meeting in Manila last year (or was it early this year?) that was planned from here, and it's significant that the secretary of the International Music Council and the president of the International Music Council weren't even there, and that everybody at the meeting said that it was the first real international music meeting that they'd been to. There were no introductory speeches telling you what to do. There were speeches from the authorities in each country, saying what they were doing and what they wanted, so that I think things are on the way, perhaps, to breaking this vicious circle of continuismo in Paris. But the Inter-American Music Council is still struggling. It has called two very good meetings on music education, where primary teachers in the schools are actually present. It's true they're told what to do, but they're listened to. We're getting down into the schools, at least of the capital cities, through this little organization; its seat is in Chile, where there are some very intelligent women running it, and I think it's on the way to doing what is good. Still, there is a little too much control from above, but government-wise you have to build first from the top down and that they are trying to do. A first Inter-American Ethnomusicological Congress met in Cartagena, Colombia several years ago, and was successful. They had another meeting in Indiana, at the University of Indiana, last year (or was it two years ago?)--I read papers at both--so that's on its way. The third meetings in both of these subjects are starting, and there is a hope that an inter-American institute of ethnomusicology will be started. Meanwhile, the Inter-American Music Council had set up an inter-American institute of masicology at Tulane University, under the director Gilbert Chase. It's called there the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, but personalities have disrupted the relationship with the Inter-American Music Council, and the Inter-American Music Council is going ahead with an attempt to form an inter-American institute of ethnomusicology. At the joint meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans this Christmas, a week after Christmas, I'm going to try to bring these two things together. The personality problem is always a serious one. I will speak in the next tape about the musicological goings-on of this period of the '40's and the '50' s. There is there, in the International Musicological Society, an illustration of this point, where the effort on the part of very able men to hold their positions indefinitely in professional societies make trouble. The revolt in the International Musicological Society in Utrecht in 1952 was really something to live through.

TUSLER

Are the proceedings of the International Music Council published by the United Nations? Are they available in any form?

SEEGER

They publish a kind of brochure, called The World of Music . They're on the frosting of the cake of music; they're floating around on the top of it; they haven't the slightest idea what the world of music is. It ' s a tragedy. They may publish minutes or something like that, but I haven't kept them. I really haven't wanted to see them. Their actions are so depressing. We have enough managers; we have enough patrons of music; we have enough music lovers who all concentrate on the professional field. There have been a few very nice things done by the International Music Council. One of them was to help form an International Association of Music Libraries. I had the pleasure in 1952 of nominating its first president, Richard Hill, and getting the thing elected to regular membership in the International Music Council. That organization has gone ahead and done a magnificent job of organizing.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 8, 1966

SEEGER

At the end of the last tape, we were just about to take up the matter of the International Association of Music Libraries. After the Second World War, there was a very interesting mushrooming in different parts of the world of projects to continue the old [Robert] Eitner bibliography of musical sources. These projects more or less came to a head in the early days of the International Music Council. I think I was active in a small way in pushing the matter through the American Musicological Society, and I took it up again in the International Music Councilo Meanwhile, the West Germany, France, England, United States axis got underway with some actual meetings. Richard S. Hill, who was reference librarian in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, was very active in this; in fact, he was more or less a spark plug, or perhaps an organizer, who drew various drives or pushes together. The association has gone forward now in a most amazing manner, and not only publishes a journal, but is making rapid headway with the survey of the monuments of musicology on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course what I'm hoping for is that it will eventually get over into the Orient. This makes a good time to break off the trend of this series of memories from international organization of music to the national organization of music in the United States. During the war, the American Musicological Society was quiescent. There were chapter meetings, but many of the members were in war service. There were three business meetings in 1942, '43, and '44: in '42 no papers were read; in '43, three papers were read; in '44, two papers. The meeting in 1945 was held in New York, and as I remember, I read a paper on a unitary field theory for musicology. It rather bypassed the membership. The secretary, [Arthur] Mendel, asked me what it meant, and Curt Sachs, after I had finished reading, came up to me, shook my hand, said it was a most interesting paper, but he couldn't understand it. I have oftentimes wondered how a thing could be interesting if you couldn't understand it. At the end of it, they elected me president of the American Musicological Society, and the word went around, "God knows what's going to happen now." [laughter] This was reported to me by the grapevine from several sources, so I suppose that it was authentic. Things were not easy in 1945 and '46. The country hadn't recovered from the war effort. Peoples' minds were still wandering on how to orient their owners in a new situation. Paper was scarce, and it was not easy to get things started again. I have already told how the society couldn't find paper, and how Music Educators' National Conference provided it, and that gave me immense pleasure. Well, my administration of the American Musicologlcal Society's affairs began with a very small membership and a constitution written by me as secretary of a committee of three which required prospective members to apply in writing and get the application signed by two members in good standing. If any device was ever invented to keep a society with a small membership, there was that device. I had fought it in the constitution committee. I've forgotten how the constitution came out of the committee, but this device was put into the constitution because there was a very strong feeling when the society was founded that there were a lot of dilettantes around who were beginning to call themselves musicologists, and it would be very important for the new society to have a group of fellows who would keep a firm hand in the management of the society's affairs and keep people out that it didn't like. Fortunately, there were enough opponents to this view, among them Otto Kinkeldey himself, to keep any classification by class out of the society, but it kept cropping up during the first ten years, and during my presidency it was a waning issue. But I felt that it ought to be laid to rest quietly, and in order to do this and straighten out a few other things in the old constitution that needed repair, I got to work upon a new constitution, not with the idea that it would be put into force during my administration, but during the next. The rails had to be laid, so to speak, the atmosphere had to be created in which the project to adopt a new constitution would be favorably received. I had an executive board in both years, but it was practically impossible for it to meet except at annual meetings, and when it did, it didn't seem to have much gumption in it. After having dictated in the last tape the importance of democratic processes in international organizations, I must here recite an adherence to the exact opposite in the conduct of the affairs of the American Musicological Society, which I conducted in the form of a strict dictatorship. Glen Haydon, who died I think about a year ago, and George [Sherman] Dickinson, who died a couple of years ago, and I formed ourselves into a triumvirate that decided in camera all matters that had anything to do with the society. We decided that the man who had practically kept the society glued together during its first ten years of existence should be relieved of his responsibility. I won't mention his name, but he would be easily located. He's one of the best friends I have and an admirable man and a great musicologist; but he wanted to hold on to his particular job, and we felt that the society would be somewhat channeled in a rut if any one person should hold the position for more than ten years. So we arranged a nominating committee with Glen Haydon as the chairman (I've forgotten who the other two members were) and we didn't nominate this man, but we had in mind that he would be president in a few years. And he was. It was very important for my plans to be sure that the man who would follow me would follow out the policies that I had in mind, and that our small triumvirate had in mind. This man was George S. Dickinson of Vassar, and he was duly nominated and elected. The last meeting of my presidency, at Princeton, was a stormy one for several reasons. One of the older members who was no longer in office stopped Glen Haydon and myself in the foyer of the Princeton Inn on his way out and said, "Well, now, I hope you're satisfied. You've ruined the society." As a matter of fact, the society had doubled its membership, was presented with a new constitution and a fully planned project for a journal. And in the second year of Dickinson's administration, the journal was launched. It's a pleasure to pick up Volume I and to note that it is still published in exactly the format planned during my administration.

TUSLER

What year was that. Dr. Seeger?

SEEGER

That was 1948. It so happened that Dickinson was an expert in topography and layout, and he planned the whole appearance of the journal from the most minute detail to the largest consideration. The margins are good, the type is beautiful, the paper's good, the binding's good, the various issues are all the same height j and on the whole, the journal has been a very successful venture. There was much opposition to starting a journal during my administration; that was another reason why I thought we'd better work to prepare an ambience before we would actually get down to voting. There was a great inferiority complex among the Americans, and I'll have occasion to speak of this musicological inferiority complex later on in connection with the work of the Committee on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies. It was overcome and there were no real grounds for it. It's true that we had neither the tradition nor the numbers of promising graduate students that Germany did, but we had enough, and that has been abundantly proven by the subsequent issues. With the constitution and the journal taken care of and the membership increasing rapidly, I felt that far from ruining the society I had put it on its feet, perhaps for the first time in its life; but that may be a little subjective in the way of a judgment. I was tyrannous enough in my handling of the affairs of the society, but Dickinson was a real tyrant. I remember when the new constitution came up to be voted upon in a meeting in Chicago, there was a lot of objection to it. He had a gavel in his hand, and he pounded the table and stopped the discussion when it seemed to be getting out of hand. The last time the gavel went down, there was a rather vociferous murmur of objection, but it had no effect and the constitution was rammed through. As I went out into the corridor afterwards, I met a knot of the younger men who said they were going to start a new muslcological society. They couldn't put up with this sort of manhandling; so we talked for about two hours in a room that we managed to get ourselves in and managed to calm ourselves down and no new society was started. Since that time these objectors have become the staunchest of members in the society, and I can see that at least two of them are likely to be presidents in their day. Now the society, then, was on its feet, and by this time it was the late 1940's. 1 had been on the Committee on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies since 1952, first under the chairmanship of Kinkeldey, and then under the chairmanship of Haydon. I've forgotten whether there was anyone else before my chairmanship of the committee from 1950 to '52. The committee functioned as a regular committee of the Council and took the form of a long-term planning unit for the development of musicology in the United States. It had fairly broad interest; it had been started back in the '20' s by Carl Engel and Oliver Strunk, and had a tendency to be rather holier-than-thou, puristic, and touch-me-not. I had attacked at least one of their publications as being both astigmatic and with blinders on. I had been useful to the Council during the war, and they had helped me enormously in the Pan-American Union. The Council was very active in the State Department conference on inter-American relations in the field of music, so that I got to know and trust implicitly Waldo G. Leland, the head of the Council. The work on the committee was extremely interesting. There were five or six or seven members; we would have a two-day meeting in Washington and would he fed royally by the Council, and we would discuss the various possibilities of rausicological development in the country, with an increasing tendency to extend the field of activities of the committee to music, itself, and to music education in the sense that graduate students have to be educated and that the education of graduate students depended to a certain extent upon what was the kind of music education they got in the undergraduate years in universities and colleges. I urgently pressed that you couldn't do much in the undergraduate years of the university, or even much in the graduate division of the university, unless you could improve the music education in the high schools, and you couldn't do much in the high schools unless you got busy in the secondary schools, and the secondary schools depended upon the primary schools, and you were nowhere except with remedial music education in the primary schools unless you did something about nursery schools, I must say that my colleagues were patient with my urging, but I didn't get to first base in getting the Council to form a total view of either music life in the United States or music education in the educational structure as a whole. I believe I even sometimes worried them by pointing out that music education begins a few days after the child is born, and if the mother does a good job, that child hears a lot of music, so that by the time the child is two it has a fairly good repertory of tunes in its head, many of which it can sing with a number of stanzas, as in a folk song or a ballad or something of that sort. One of the projects that most interested me in the Council was the project to compile an encyclopedia of music. The American branch of the Macmillan Company, which was quite independent of the British branch by that time, had offered in reply to some scouting question to put up a million dollars for the printing of a ten-volume set. Obviously, this was to knock Grove' s Dictionary of Music and Musicians out of business, and the British company was not particularly pleased with the idea. We spent a good deal of time in our regular meetings on it and had some extracurricular meetings on the matter of the encyclopedia itself. One subcommittee took care of the business angle; I asked to be relieved of that because I felt that somebody else could take care of the business. I was interested in the content, and George Dickinson and I (there was one other person on the committee, but I don't remember who it was) got tremendously excited about the classification of subject matter in the journal. I remember we sat up nearly all one night in the enthusiasm of working out this classification. George and I were both so pleased with our work that we thought we had entered a new phase in encyclopedia making. The work progressed and became more and more interesting. MGG was coming out in Germany, and they were approached with a suggestion that we include in the American encyclopedia those articles in MGG that would fit into our plan, translated into English, of course. The Germans answered they would like to have the whole MGG translated, but not in pieces, and negotiations broke down. There was in this committee on the encyclopedia the same division of opinion that had existed in the musicological society from 1936 on to 1946 and even '47, one side feeling that America couldn't do this sort of thing. It was holding back the development of musicology in America. It was timorous and unwarranted; we had enough money and were assured by Macmillan that we needn't worry about the million-dollar limit being too tight. Articles were all to be paid for at a decent, respectable price, and we could have drawn from the complete world of musicology for brand-new articles, many of them written by the authors in English or translated from other languages. The committee retired its members as a rule after ten years of service. Meanwhile, there were initiated in various parts of the country symposiums on various subjects, mostly social, in which one or another of the musicians was drawn in to read a paper. American studies were getting under way and I was interested in them as a matter of principle, although I was not a specialist in the study of American music. I was, however, a member of the small number of people who had done some work in parts of the field of the history of American music that were pretty much neglected: that is, folk music, popular music, hymnology, and the hybrids among these, such as the blues, jazz, country and western, hillbilly, and so forth. One day, I had a call from a professor who was one of the leaders of the American studies program, saying they were having a meeting and they wanted somebody to read a paper on music and class structure in the United States, and who would I recommend? I said, I don't know anyone in the United States who could write such a paper. If there were such a person, I certainly would know him. "Well, then," he said, "you're just the person to write it." "Oh," I said, "I can't do it. I don't know enough about class structure. I'm only an amateur sociologist." Well, he insisted, and so as usual I would take the dare, always ready to go out on the limb. The paper was read at a meeting in the Library of Congress, distributed ahead of time, by the way, and read by everybody, discussed by a discussant, and then opened to the floor. There must have been sixteen or eighteen people whose papers were similarly treated. A man who discussed my paper, an old friend of mine, a close colleague, spent all the time pointing out that I had not spent enough time on the importance of the Chautauqua lecture series, and he sat down. I admitted that I hadn't, and would be very glad to insert a paragraph on the subject, but felt that it was perhaps almost included in some of my generalizations. He was not quite happy about that. The chairman asked for further discussion, and there was dead silence. The chairman tried to brush things up a bit. Finally I rose and said, "Gentlemen, I've gone out on a limb here. I'm not a trained sociologist, and yet I've ventured to write a paper that has made a number of assumptions, perhaps you might even consider them hypotheses or postulates of a sociological character, and I would benefit greatly from any criticisms or comments that you could make." Still there was nothing said. Finally, I spoke even more urgently, and one man said rather nicely, "It sounds as if it were written by a sociologist." Well, I put my head in my hands and said, "That's too much for me," or sone thing to that effect, and we went on to the next paper. However, I was pleased with the reception of the paper on the whole and at its publication in the journal of the American Studies Association; I think it was a leading paper in one of the early issues. (As I remember, I was one of the eleven members who founded the society. The society's since grown, and now practically all universities have American studies programs.) Unfortunately, this bound copy of papers that were presented for this conference is not to be found on my shelves. I have a little feeling I may have given it to the music library here. At any rate, we'll see if we can't exhume a copy; the Library of Congress surely has one. I was chairman of the Committee on Musicology of the Council for my last two years, 1950 to '52, and in planning this conference, we really tried to have the musical life of the United States represented in all its important facets. I've forgotten how many there were; there must have been something like sixteen. The principal manager in the United States spoke for music concert management. We had a leading conductor; we had a leading music educator; we had a representative of the National Music Council; there were people from the universities and the colleges; the instrument makers; and so forth and so on. Folklore was represented. I'll give the table of contents because it was a rather unusual meeting for the United States. It was an indication of the broadening of the Council's interest, and after I left the Council, I seem to understand that the name of the committee was the Committee on Music and Musicology. I had written an article or a series of articles for the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences back in the early '30's, the title of the article being "Music and Musicology." It was partly historical. I engaged Helen Roberts to write a section on primitive music, and there was no one else in the United States that I could get except Henry Cowell to write on Oriental music. I think I would have done better if I had asked George Herzog, but under the circumstances it didn't seem feasible for various reasons which I needn't go into here. I had written a paper on "Music and Musicology in the New World." This was published in Hinrichsen's Musical Year Book and it was very generously reviewed. It was translated into Spanish and published in the Revista Musical Chilena , so that in a way the changing of the name of the committee to Music and Musicology reflects my little putsch of the years 1942 to '52. I must speak now of the end of the project of the encyclopedia. (This is saddening.) We arrived at the meeting of the Muslcological Society in Boston, I think it was in 1954, and found distributed a preprint of the project for the encyclopedia, a preprint with the stamp of the American Muslcological Society on it; in other words, it was a preprint of an article that was to appear in the next journal of the society. It was a horrible mishmash. The English was unbelievable. I remember at one point it said, "There will be many phenomena in the encyclopedia," and then it went on and listed some classes of articles. There was only one thing that could be done to this project and that was to oppose it as strongly as one could; so I delivered an impassioned attack on it, a motion that the preprint be excluded from the journal and sent back to the American Council of Learned Societies to be edited in proper fashion. The discussion wandered along for some reason, or the chairman didn't keep the subject on the track, and the time for the afternoon meeting came at which I was to read the third paper. I had to get up and say I was very sorry, but I couldn't argue for my motion any longer, that I was not going to be guilty of the discourtesy of arriving late at a meeting at which I was reading a paper and not hear my colleagues' papers in full. As I walked out to the door, the chairman said, "well, what will happen to the motion?" I said, "Well, either somebody can second it and carry it on, or else somebody else can propose it all over again," and I went off to the meeting. I don't know what happened, but the preprint was never published and the whole project collapsed. It was a tragedy in a way, but it was a result of a political division in which, I think, wiser and more knowing minds were not consulted; and it's just as well it did die if it had to be run in that way. It would have been a catastrophe if anyone had tried to build an encyclopedia on that project.

TUSLER

I thought the encyclopedia was the project of the Committee on Musicology.

SEEGER

It was a project of the Committee on Musicology of the American Council of Learned Societies, but it was put up to the American Musicological Society for approval. The project was put up also for publicity purposes, for the purposes of getting the membership of the society to discuss it with the idea that the society would also be very closely involved with the carrying out of the project, which was given a life of ten years with the hope that in ten years the ten volumes or more could be actually seen in print. Originally, it was to be a worldwide encyclopedia, as over against the European encyclopedias which are Europcentric, and it would need an editor and a board of editors who were ethnomusicologists, not musicologists--that is, in the ordinary, cant use of the term today. My own position is well known, that ethnomusicology is no name for a separate discipline of study. There is an approach to the study of music that can be called ethnomusicological, but musicology is the proper name for the study of the music of the world. Period. Everything in the world. I made this point clearly enough in the meetings of the Council's committee to have it thoroughly accepted by everybody. After this tragedy in Boston, Oliver Strunk, who was president of AMS came up to me and asked me if I would be a member of a committee of the society to discuss this project, with the idea that an ad hoc committee of the society would report to the executive board and then either bring about a rewrite of the project, or salve peoples' feelings, or do something, I don't knovf what. I told him no, that I was getting out of committees at that time, and he said, "Well, can you recommend anybody?" So I recommended Mantle Hood. Hood duly met with the committee and voted for, as I urged him to do, the revamping of the project in a properly written up, universal coverage form, but he was voted down by the other two members, who evidently were of the old, conservative branch of musicology. So the encyclopedia died. When I think of the number of hours put into it, it's really sad, but I suppose that happens nine cases out of ten in affairs of this kind. From 1949 to 1952, I was going to Europe every year to the meetings for the International Music Council and managed to meet quite a number of musicologists there. In 1952, I read a paper at the triannual meeting of the International Musicological Society in Utrecht. The paper was a preface to the description of a music, which was very well reviewed in Die Musik Forschung a few years later. At that meeting. Mantle Hood was out of Holland for the moment. Jaap Kunst was there. Early in the days of the meeting I went to Knud Jeppesen, the president of the society and editor of the journal, and asked if he would rather have a society for comparative musicology or ethnomusicology--whichever you called it--formed within the International Musicological Society, or outside it. He said, "Just wait a minute--I'm going into a board meeting and I'll put the question right up to them, and I'll tiring you an answer within half an hour." So he brought me the answer within the half hour: "outside," which was definite enough. The meetings were held in the university, and the business meeting was in the beautiful faculty room, with the portraits of the past rectors of the university lining the walls, and old Jeppesen in the chair where he had been for years and years. There was a feeling on the part of the membership that the European way of managing things like this had lasted long enough. The Americans especially were fed up with it, but there was a question who would lead the attack. It turned out to be Manfred Bukofzer, seconded by Paul Henry Lang, and the third I can't for the life of me remember--it might have been [Edward] Lewinsky. But as the argument developed, their attack became more and more vitriolic, and it was a tragedy to see the old man trying to maintain his position while his cohorts and supports fell rapidly away from him, and he was finally displaced. The journal went into new editorship, and the administration was completely changed. A little bit later, in the 50's, the American Council of Learned Societies concocted a radio program with Broadcast Music, Incorporated, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and sundry other organizations, to put out a broadcast called "The World of the Mind." There were papers on astronomy, physics, and all the subjects, and among them, musicology; and for some unknown reason, they asked me to prepare the three-minute broadcast on musicology which would be read by one of the regular announcers, because he would have the unctuous voice that would convince everybody that there was a world of the mind. [laughter] I hope that was a form of delivery that the American Council of Learned Societies will never consent to again. However, my paper was read exactly as I wrote it and it was mostly on ethnomusicology. I forgot [to mention before something] important. After going to Jeppesen and asking him about the formation of a society for ethnomusicology in connection with the International Musicological Society, I went to an officer of the American Musicological Society and asked him to sound out the board of the society about the formation of a society for ethnomusicology within or without the American Musicological Society. I had always hoped it would be within, and that there would be two sections in the society, and that they would be equally important: they would have equal space in the journal, they would have equal representation on the executive branch, and so forth and so on. The word came back: " outside ." I happened to be at a meeting in Boston (I think it was the same meeting at which the old encyclopedia project had been blasted), and found myself standing in the aisle of a train all the way to New York with Alan Merriam and Willard Rhodes. They had been to a meeting of the Anthropological Association sometime before and had talked over the possibility of organization of ethnomusicology with David McAllester; we started talking about the matter and kept it going all the way to New York. I told them of my two approaches to the international and the national musicological societies. So we formed a group that we called "The Colleagues," and we addressed all our letters to each other "Dear Colleague" and sent all three copies and kept one ourselves. Shortly, we decided to publish a newsletter at our own expense, and this ran for a couple of years. Just about six years ago, it finally led to the Journal of Ethnomusicology , which is now going strong. We managed the early society very much as George Dickinson and Glen Haydon and I managed the American Muslcological Society ten years earlier. It was a benigni benevolent dictatorship and the results showed the wisdom of the decision. There was a meeting in Philadelphia of the Ethnological and Anthropological Society, and I wrote a constitution for the Society for Ethnomusicology, patterning it as closely as possible after the constitution of the American Musicological Society, so that when the time of amalgamation should come it would be easy for them to amalgamate. Needless to say, my three colleagues were not enthusiastic about amalgamation, and I was not hopeful of it. I gave twenty to twenty-five years as the time, and I think they expected to stay independent indefinitely. Well, to follow this strand on a little farther, I was elected president of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1960, and discovered that one of the first matters to handle was a proposal from Oliver Strunk, who was president of the American Musicological Society, that the two societies amalgamate. We are getting so close to the end of this tape that I'm not going to be able to continue this, so I won't get too definitely launched on it. The situation in the Society for Ethnomusicology was a difficult one, and I had to be a tyrant again. I discovered, for example, shortly after my term began that the society had no budget, that people just drew on the treasurer for what they wanted, and that was the end of it. The affairs of the society were carried on in complete ignorance of the constitution; so to anybody you wanted to do something sometime, you could say, "Come on, let's do it," and nobody liked to be disagreeable, you know, in saying no, so they all did it. The affairs of a society run in that fashion could be imagined as running up against a stone wall sooner or later, so I had to stop it. My two years as president of the society were a continual war with my executive board. The executive board was all in New York, thought it ought to run the society and that the president should be a kind of an errand boy; he had been, but he no longer was going to be. So it was not a very pleasant situation, and I needn't go into too much detail about it here except to say that at the end of the two years, a strong administration was put in, as had been the case formerly with the American Musicological Society, when I left the presidency. The society has thriven ever since, though with one amusing little paradox which I'll deal with next time. I think I've covered all that I can say of interest about musicology during the period 1940 to 1960. There was an enormous increase in graduate students of musicology throughout the country. No one spoke any more of "grandmotherology."

1.17. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 12, 1966

TUSLER

In speaking about your term of duty with the AMS, you referred to It as "a tyranny" of Seeger and Dickinson, and I wondered If this tyranny that you spoke of. . .

SEEGER

It was a dictatorship, yes.

TUSLER

. . .was In any way opposed by the other members of the organization. In any specific way.

SEEGER

No, there was no opposition. There may have been some indignation somewhere, especially when Dickinson put the gavel down about the new constitution so firmly; but I think people realized that things were getting done.

TUSLER

They realized that your Intentions were good.

SEEGER

Yes, I think so. AMS is pretty easygoing most of the time. It gets hectic sometimes in a meeting, but people let things slide most of the rest of the year j at least they used tOo I think it's vastly tightened up since the days of Strunk, back in 1960.

TUSLER

You also spoke of the troika or "triumvirate," I guess was your word, of Seeger, Dickinson, and Glen Hay don.

SEEGER

Yes.

TUSLER

Was this a strictly informal arrangement that you had?

SEEGER

Oh, nobody knew about it. We didn't try to make it secret; it just simply worked out that way.

TUSLER

Was this while you were president?

SEEGER

Yes, it developed while I was president, and it kept going through George Dickinson's presidency, and then we felt that the society was enough off on its new postwar career that it would take care of itself.

TUSLER

Why was it those particular two people?

SEEGER

Well, they happened to be congenial. Haydon was an old student of mine, and he and Dickinson had been warm friends for many years. I came to know Dickinson later than Haydon did.

TUSLER

Did you come to know him through the society?

SEEGER

Mostly through the Committee on Musicology of the Council of Learned Societies, but then, of course, through the work in the society, where we developed a very fine intimacy.

TUSLER

It was under Dickinson's presidency, wasn't it, that the new constitution was achieved?

SEEGER

Yes, that was adopted, and the first issue of the journal came out.

TUSLER

Is there anything you'd like to say in describing that new constitution, how it differed from the old one?

SEEGER

It would have to be compared; they're both published .

TUSLER

Were you instrumental in helping to write that constitution?

SEEGER

Well, I was the secretary of both committees, and as secretary, I wrote the thing; and when I wrote something that my two colleagues didn't like, they voted me down on it, or supported me, as it happened. I did the work. You know, it's usually that way with a committee; somebody does the work.

TUSLER

There was no substantial opposition to the writing of a new constitution.

SEEGER

No, everybody wanted it.

TUSLER

Why was it that right about that time there was a great increase, as you said, in the students taking up the field of musicology?

SEEGER

Well, I think it was partly the influx of Europeans who had to stay here as a result of the war. They were brought over, you remember, for the 1939 International Conference; and then it was just natural growth, and it was a very rapid growth.

TUSLER

Do you think it was related in any way to the growth of the organization?

SEEGER

Yes; it would have started earlier, with a little bit better luck.

TUSLER

About your work on the Committee on Musicology for the American Council of Learned Societies: how did you become a member of that, are you selected or elected?

SEEGER

You're just appointed, you're just invited by the Council; and usually the committee, when a member retires, selects a new one.

TUSLER

In connection with the paper on music and class structure that you spoke of reading, I believe it was through the Committee on Musicology that you did it. Why was it, do you think, that there was so little reaction from the audience?

SEEGER

I think that's a good question. The average person, when he finds himself in the company of a musician, unless he is a very reckless person (and academicians rarely are) becomes tongue-tied; he doesn't dare pipe up. Once they get away from the music specialists, then they'll talk very freely among themselves; they all have ideas, but they don't dare let them out. Now this, of course, is true. If I found myself in company with a physicist, I wouldn't feel very cheerful about volunteering anything; I'd sit down and listen to him, and that's the situation. There was myself there and the discussant of my paper-- that was two musicians, and they sort of let it go at that.

TUSLER

They surely thought of you as a musician or a musicologist rather than a sociologist, didn't they?

SEEGER

Yes. Even though I told them I wasn't, one of them, as I said, volunteered that it sounded as if it had been written by a sociologist, which of course pleased me very much. But still it had attackable things in it, and I think it would have been a good idea if they'd been willing to risk it. Maybe it is a little better nowadays, in these panel discussions; but when they were first initiated back there in the '40's, people hesitated to pitch in and ask questions that were valid from the viewpoint of their own specialty o I think we've reached a point now where I would go into almost any meeting on any subject that was in discursive speech that I could understand, and even though it were on a subject that I might not know much about I might find a question to ask about the method of attack or presentation. But in those early days, that was not so true. The discussions were in my experience not very meaningful.

TUSLER

Of course, this whole subject was a kind of upstart one, wasn't it?

SEEGER

It was a conference on American culture between the wars, and the papers were written by all kinds of people, I said that the situation between the wars was no different between what went before and what came after--it was all one piece --and I didn't think the period between the wars was particularly striking musicologically speaking, although I did bring out some peculiar points of it.

TUSLER

But within the musical world it would have been considered a rather upstart subject, wouldn't it?

SEEGER

You mean if it had been a musical conference? No, I think there 'd have been very lively arguments. It would have been a very much better argument than it was with the sociologists. The sociologists had, so to speak, almost a mutation, a sport--music--to fit into their picture, which they had not given much of any attention to, whereas all musicians and musicologists have plenty of ideas about music and society--not that they've studied sociology or anthropology, most of them haven't; but they've got ideas just the same. It would have been a hectic meeting, the reason for it being that there was a little touch of irony in my paper on the effort to "make America musical" in the music appreciation scheme of things, pointing out that only a small percentage of the population of America at any time has even been to a concert or to a chamber music concert or to the opera. The great mass of the people get along, and especially at that time were still getting along, with very little knowledge of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. They hear more of it now over the radio, whether they like it or not, and I think that the audience for the professional art of music has increased by leaps and bounds through the radio.

TUSLER

I want to ask you a question about the preprint that was distributed at the Boston meeting of the AMS that spelled the doom of the encyclopedia. Why was it, do you think, that neither you nor Mr. Dickinson nor somebody who had worked on this encyclopedia project hadn't had something to do with getting out this preprint?

SEEGER

Well, we were no longer on the committee; and I think it was simply a situation that--whatever the committee was, I don't know--the committee perhaps didn't pass on it. I don't know. Maybe it was a pushover; I don't know what it was. I never heard.

TUSLER

You never knew who it was that had actually written the thing?

SEEGER

Oh, yes, I knew who had written it; not at the time--I was told afterwards. It was an old friend of mine, incidentally.

TUSLER

Last time you began talking about the Society for Ethnomusicology, and you spoke about its beginnings in the group that you informally formed and called "The Colleagues;" and I wonder if you will tell now more about all the people who were involved in that.

SEEGER

Well, Alan Merriam was a graduate of Herskovits' training; Herskovits thought very highly of him at Northwestern University. An anthropologist who had an interest in music and had done the largest bibliography of jazz up to that time, David McAllester was also an anthropologist, and significantly, he was the only man that George Herzog ever gave a PhD to--I don't know whether he got his PhD when Herzog was at Columbia, but I think it was in Indiana. McAllester was set up at Wesleyan in Middle-town, Connecticut. Merriam and McAllester were very warm friends and saw things very much in the same way. Willard Rhodes was at Columbia for many years as a member of the Department of Music. McAllester and Merriam had mostly collected in North American Indians, and Merriam was getting into Africa. Rhodes had collected also in American Indians, and was getting into Africa. He was an older man and came to the ethnomusicological viewpoint through music rather than through anthropology, but he had a thorough anthropological background o I came to the group through music, with an informal training in anthropology, beginning way back in the old Berkeley days with Kroeber and Lowie . We formed a rather well-balanced group. It was a very harmonious group. It cost us something like forty or sixty dollars apiece each year to run off the little mimeographed sheets that Alan Merriam edited; and when we organized and adopted the constitution in Philadelphia at the meeting in 1956, I think it was, and decided to publish the journal, everything went very nicely and smoothly. I've forgotten what the order of the presidency was, but it was decided among the four of us that it would be suchj and it has led us for the present time to Mantle Hood as president. He was the last one of the planned order. The order was Rhodes, Kolinski, myself, McAllester, and then Hood. That brings us to our ten-year anniversary this December.

TUSLER

But in these formative years there was just the small group of you, the four people.

SEEGER

There were just the four, yes. It was a very nice piece of [work], beginning from very little in a very modest way, and not , interestingly enough, by calling it an American society. It's the Society for Ethnomusicology. At the last meeting in New Mexico last fall, some foreign members were elected to the council, and chapters in foreign countries are now being organized, so it may possibly become a worldwide society, we don't know. It'll be run from here for a while simply because most of the members are here. and that means the treasury is here; but I'm rather ready to believe it might turn into an international society-- or it might amalgamate with AMS. That's a decision for later on.

TUSLER

Was there any one particular leader in those early years before it became an official society?

SEEGER

No, we were a very democratic and cooperative group. Merriam put more work into it than anyone else, because he edited the newsletter.

TUSLER

To whom did the newsletter go?

SEEGER

To as large a list as we could find of those interested in it.

TUSLER

You spoke of the early years of the society as being, like the AMS, a dictatorship.

SEEGER

Well, it had to be. We were putting up the money and in continual correspondence. The correspondence, by the way, is being deposited at Wesleyan [University, Middletown, Connecticut]. We are all sending in our files.

TUSLER

These early years are documented only by means of the newsletter.

SEEGER

The newsletter and our correspondence, which was in the form, mostly, of identical letters--the exchange of Identical letters among the four of us.

TUSLER

When you stopped talking last time you had just gotten to the point where the AMS had approached the society.

SEEGER

Yes. Well, the irony of that was that by the time the SEM was five years old, actually eight years old but five years old as an organization, we had a pretty good idea that if we'd become amalgamated with AMS they'd eat us alive, and that would be the end of us. So we realized that we'd have to develop our own program, and I must say that as time has gone on and successive AMS presidents have sought amalgamation, the stand of the Society for Ethnomusicology has been stiffer and stiffer. I think there is almost an even chance now that we might turn into an international ethnomusicological society. We would have to settle matters with the International Folk Music Council there, because the International Folk Music Council is moving in that direction, too, and there are bound to be clashes, so that conversations will probably be held in both directions. The journal of the Ethnomusicological Society is getting better and better, and bigger and bigger; it's attracting more; our membership is growing very rapidly; I wouldn't be surprised if within five years we'll have a membership as large as the American Musicological Society. We do not have the standing with the sources of funds--foundations--that the American Musicological Society has earned, but we'll earn that in time. We became members of ACLS this year, and I shall be first delegate to the meeting of the Council in January, 1967 . On the whole, the little society is doing very well. It has quite a number of chapters; I don't know how active they are; the one in Los Angeles is most active. It meets pretty nearly every three weeks and it is doing very nicely.

TUSLER

Do you feel that it would be good to have amalgamation with the AMS?

SEEGER

Eventually perhaps yes, but not for quite awhile. Did I tell the story of Strunk's inquiry about the future of musicology? He had circularized eighteen musicologists in Europe and America as to the future of musicology (I was one), and seventeen of them said "ethnomusicology." He also circularized his own board, which has twelve members, and only one of them disagreed that ethnomusicology was the future. I think they're very anxious to effect a union, and I'm very sympathetic with this, because to my mind the field of musicology is all music, not the study of any particular music, but the study of all the music in the world. Now, I think the members of the AMS are not ready to give that definition yet, but I feel quite sure that the leaders of AMS feel that eventually music history, which is the specialty of AMS, is going to move over into the history of the great Oriental musics and the connections among them and that to thoroughly understand the history of any area or of any idiom, you must have a theory of history that's grounded upon universal postulates. I'm very sympathetic with the AMS desire to amalgamate with SEM, but SEM is very strongly anthropological. When we have a knock-down, drag-out discussion of what is ethnomusicology, we usually come to a friendly agreement at the end that it's half anthropology of music, and half the music of anthropology --that is, it's half anthropology and half music. The anthropologists promptly forget the musicological half and the musicologists, the anthropological half; but there are a few of us, like myself, who try to keep pulling them together all the time. I think more and more there is a consensus, let's say, that you've got to balance between the two things: the view of music from outside as a cultural factor, and from inside as a means of communication itself. Personally, I find myself not too much in agreement with, I'm afraid, any one person, in that I think the study of music from outside also involves biology, zoology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, ethics, comparative religions, communication theory. I find I get ready agreement with this view from almost anyone I talk to, but then he promptly forgets it and goes ahead and deals with the situation as he's been accustomed. We've gotten into ruts in musicology, too, unfortunately, and our problem for the next ten or fifteen years is going to be to either get out of the ruts or else run them together all in one big rut; I don't know, probably both will happen. I only hope it doesn't reach the point where there'll be a split, either between musicology and the rest of the humanities, or ethnomusicology and the history of European music. We announced a series of lectures here at the University, just finished, I think, last week, in which there was a marked agreement about what the series of lectures as a whole covered. The subject of the lectures was "the many languages of music" I objected; it made no more sense than "the many musics of language;" if they would accept them both I would not quarrel, but a music is not a language, and a language is not a music. Most of my colleagues hold that the field of ethnomusicology is all the music in the world except the fine art of European music, which strikes me as one of the most ludicrous positions that you could take. It would be almost as funny if a psychologist said, "Well, the field of psychology is the left lobe of the brain; we have nothing to do with the right;" or a physicist would say, "I only study positive particles;" or an astronomer, "I never study the southern hemisphere, just the northern hemisphere." I feel convinced that people will come around to my viewpoint, but I'm the only person in the United States, except Mantle Hood, so far as I know, who's put himself in print as saying that the study of musicology is the musicality of man, all the music in the world, and all that's related to either. Many persons have held this view since before 1885, when Chrysander and Adler put it into print.

TUSLER

Surely this must be the view of most ethnomusicologists, though, isn't it?

SEEGER

They vary. It started off way back before the Second World War with the old German society, the Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Musik des Orient. They were just going to study Oriental music. Then the first thing you know, they were studying primitive musics from all over the world, and they had to change the title to comparative musicology. Then, when Kunst formed the new title, ethnomusicology, in 1950 or a little after, he specifically said that its field was non-European music, and Bukofzer agreed with him. "But," Kunst said, "European folk music must be studied with the methods of ethnomusicology." Well, then I get into an argument with him and point out that It's as foolish to try to study the fine art of European music without the study of its folk music as it would be to study the written literature of music without studying its oral literature; so that we are in a transition stage now, when the term "muslcology" is going to cover the whole field, and I feel confident that the term "ethnomusicology" will be reserved for an approach to the study of music, and for a person who spends most of his time emphasizing that approach. It's futile to say that you can study music in society without knowing what the music is that's in the society; so you've got to study the music as well, and that's the job of muslcology. I hope that the members of AMS are going to take a more active and aggressive attitude and say, "Now look here, you ethnomusicologlsts, you're using knowledge that we've given you from our study of the history of European music, and sometimes you're not using it very cleverly and with as much competence as you might." On the other hand, the ethnomusicologlsts are now increasingly active and aggressive. They are the most aggressive of the two, saying, "You music historians of the fine art of European music, you have a practically bankrupt terminology; it's a terminology that you've inherited from ancient days; it's been encrusted with so many barnacles that it means a different thing to almost every person. Look here, what do you mean by this?" I think in the next ten or fifteen years, some of the orthodox terms like tone, rhythm, melody, harmony, form, and content, and a lot of those old terms are going to have to be redefined. I perhaps should point out at this time the project for an international commission on musical terminology. I've been worried about it for a great many years, and I suggested it informally about thirty years ago, but finally put it into writing about ten or fifteen years ago. I heard that the International Organization of Standards, which is the body that fixes the diapason normal, the A-440 was interested, but this was unfortunately about tvfo years after an exchange of letters across national boundaries, which disclosed there was not enough interest among those corresponding. I promptly wrote to the secretary of the international organization and was told that the interest had flagged. So I put it up to the American Musicological Society, at the meeting in Boston I think I've spoken of already; Harold Spivacke jumped up and said that this was just the sort of thing for the Council of Learned Societies to handle. I think he was the representative of the society on the council at that time, at any rate, he said he would pursue the matter. Nothing happened. I think there is a little more of a ground swell in the way of an interest in this, but we'll have to have a conference on a cross-disciplinary and a cross-cultural music vocabulary. It would be in the form, I think, of a continuing committee, made up of Western musicologists, Japanese, Indian, African, and perhaps someone from the Middle East; I don't know if we could find an interest.

TUSLER

But nothing is really being done about it.

SEEGER

Nothing's being done just now. We've been talking of having an international meeting on ethnomusicology for years, but it seems too big a thing to swing just for the moment.

TUSLER

Are there any other ethnomusicological organizations elsewhere?

SEEGER

No, there's no other. We have in the Ethnomusicological Society a growing split between the people who approach their field from anthropology and those who approach it from music. There could be conceivably another group that could be approaching it from psychology and physiology, but that has not defined itself yet. There is a small nucleus which has not made itself vocal yet, which is consumed with interest in computers and information theory. The increasing stresses among these very different approaches might split the Society for Ethnomusicology if we're not careful. I see a danger there.

TUSLER

At the end of the last tape, you just barely touched upon when the society was newly formed and just beginning to move, you used the work "paradox" --there was some paradoxical situation that you didn't describe on the tape.

SEEGER

I think I was referring to the fact that the AMS wanted us to form separately in 1953 and wanted to amalgamate in 1960. I think that was it. The members of the historiographical branch of musicology are definitely running short of what you might call major matters of attention. They've done a very thorough job, and more and more of the papers that are read are details of the field. Edward Dent was very well aware of that and he saw it as a danger to musicology, and I know would have been very friendly. If it had been Dent that I'd asked in Utrecht in 1952, whether ethnomusicology should be developed within or without the international society, he would have said within, but he was old, then, and died shortly afterwards.

TUSLER

It's true, is it not, that the field of ethnomusicology is spreading very rapidly now?

SEEGER

It's an enormous field, and it's enormous not only in the number of people involved, but the integration of the music with the people. Take for example the fine art, or what I'd prefer to call the professional art of European music, which is the field of most of the members of the American Musicological Society. That music is supported by a very limited percentage of the population: the ruling class of Europe and America and now of Japan, the educated classes, and increasingly the middle classes that get snatches of professional music over the radio and phonograph. They do not make it, it is made for them. But that professional music I would not say is integrated very closely in the culture of the great continental countries or England or the United States. It's a frosting to a cake. I made the metaphor in my paper in Acta Musicologica that was published in 1939 and quite a number of musicologists have said to me that it amuses them very much that I speak of the professional art or the fine art of European music as the frosting on the cake. They admit somewhat ruefully that it is. But you come to a place like Java and it's not the frosting on the cake of Javanese music. Mantle Hood tells us that even poor rice workers in the paddy, when it rains very hard, will pull straw mats over them to protect themselves as well from the rain as they can, and pull out their little wooden anklungs and play the same music that's played at the prince's court as well as they can; and they play it pretty well too, because some of them might he musicians in the gamelan of the prince's court. So we have a very different situation with music in the rest of the world than that which it enjoys in what we ordinarily call the West. Take, for instance, the song of a shaman who is curing the sick person. That song is either inveighing against the devil that possesses the sick person or trying to get the help of the benign being that will help get the devil out. It's a life-and-death thing, and it has to be done just right or else it won't have the proper result. The interesting thing is that some modern scholars are coming to the conclusion that these songs sometimes are as efficacious as some pills that we use--that is, they actually do build up the courage of the sick person to make a fight for life, in that vague limbo between what we have to do and what we want to do. As ethnomusicology makes more and more clear the vital function of music in non-Western societies, quite a different view is going to be had of the music of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven, which was made for the courts of the noble and the salons of the well to do; not that the music wasn't great and fine in its way, but did it have the impact on the people who heard it that some music does that you find in some non-European cultures? For instance, in ancient Hawaii, I think Miss Roberts told me, if I can quote her correctly, that if the singer did not sing the sacred songs in the right tone of voice, he was promptly beheaded; a particular tone quality was an essential factor in the efficacy of the song. I think our whole view of European music, in other words, in another ten or fifteen years is going to be modified, and when we get at the ethnomusicology of the history of European music it's going to be fascinating, because there is music way down at the bottom of the pile, whether you call it pop or folk or whatever it is, that while it may not mean as much as a shaman's song may mean to the patient he's trying to heal, it does approach it.

TUSLER

It's surely significant that there's a great growing interest in this whole field of ethnomusicology. It is spreading and attracting more and more students all the time, isn't it?

SEEGER

Oh, yes; if we could only resolve our inner differences. What I'm trying to do is to make an overall presentation so that the student will know what he's getting into. If a student thinks, "Shall I go into physics or chemistry? "--well physics and chemistry can present to the student perfectly intelligible patterns of thinking and feeling; the same can be done with a person who, suppose, is wobbling on the border of zoology and the physiology of man--there is the work with the primates that involves them both. All through the present structure of learning, there are clearly defined alternatives that have become so sharp that they develop new fields between them, and a student who might be wobbling between, and not be able to make up his mind whether to follow one or the other in an either/or proposition, finds a middle point which just suits him and sometimes hits the nail on the head. That's one of the things that we have to do in not only musicology, but ethnomusicology. It's emerging now. My slogan, that the crux of historical method is how the present is coming to be what it's going to be, I think is going to be more understood later. The next ten or fifteen years should see more or less a clear dividing up of special interest, and it may mean not more integration of societies, but more splitting up into pieces.

TUSLER

Is the institute at UCLA the largest such enterprise anywhere in the United States or the world?

SEEGER

I don't really know how large a group McAllester has at Wesleyan or Merriam has at Indiana. Indiana is developing a composite program. Merriam has an anthropology of music and List has an ethnomusicology of Latin-American studies; of course they work together, I suppose. List, however, was a musician; his approach is from music. It's a very good combination there, if the two can work together well. I suppose here, from the point of view of the number of people involved, we have the largest group, but what we're famous for here is performance. I was sorry to see one student that I'd hoped would come here go somewhere else, because the emphasis here was felt to be on performance rather than theory; there is an emphasis on theory here, but it doesn't show itself to the extent that the performance does because the performance simply does get more publicity. I suppose that the ethnomusicological work here is world famous now, whereas the theory will go a long time before it gets to be world famous, or even nationally famous. How theory is going to compete with performance in ethnomusicology in the United States is going to be very interesting to see. The centers for ethnomusicology are increasing, and I have yet to see one that is looking toward amalgamation with anything, except at UCLA. That reminds me, I must get out a paper on that. Some university ought to try to make it its special job to tie the two together, over the heads of both.

TUSLER

The two--niusicology and ethnomusicology?

SEEGER

Musicology and ethnomusicology, and the anthropology of ethnomusicology and the musicology of ethnomusicology.

TUSLER

Are there any other society connections that you've had?

SEEGER

I've been on the fringes of the American Folklore Society for a number of years. I read papers--I think about thirty years ago I read my first paper-- and attended some meetings. I'm not involved with the special interest of folk tale and riddle and proverb that they are almost coming to concentrate on. Some very fine work has been done in ethnomusicology by people whose main affiliation is the American Folklore Society, especially [Bertrand H.] Bronson in Berkeley and Samuel P. Bayard in Pennsylvania State. They are two outstanding older students of folk music, and they are loyal members of the American Folklore Society. Some of the younger men in the American Folklore Society are turning to fields that have been ignored by ethnomusicologists; I think especially of jazz, blues, country and western, hillbilly, rock-and-roll music. These young men find themselves working under the aegis of folklore more congenially than under the aegis of either the ethnomusicology here or the ethnomusicology of Indiana or Wesleyan. They are forming their ovm little group and I don't know just exactly where they'll settle. They can take just so much technical descriptive work and technical descriptive work is what is specialized in here, because technical description goes along with performance. Theory has a tendency to go off by itself and finds itself uniting with philosophy and psychology and information theory and anthropology and zoology and so forth, so that we have a field which is at once manifesting centripetal forces and also centrifugal forces. These two sets of forces of course mean a livelier life, but they may mean more need for overall organizations. For some unknown reason, they made me a fellow of the Folklore Society and look upon me as a respectable member; I've never taken a course in folklore, but I've tried to find out what it is, and written as if I thought I knew something about it. Still, I don't consider myself a folklorist. But I'll tell them any day, as I have in a paper that's just been printed, that I think folklore is one of the most comprehensive studies that we have, and that it's a shame that folklorists have been specialists in a rather small part of their field. As some nonfolklorists have pointed out, there's a folklore to medicine, there's a folklore to law, there's a folklore to politics, there's a folklore to practically everything--and folklorists pay no attention to it. They leave it to others to point out. Some day the techniques of folklore are going to be extended into these fields, and when that happens no ambassador will there be sent to another country without a course in the folklore of the country he's being sent to. Now, we just make one disgraceful and sometimes fatal error after another for ignorance of the folklore of another country; not wishing to get too much embedded in contentious issues just at the present moment, but what's been going on in Indonesia and in Vietnam would not have been going on if we knew something about the folklore of those countries, and our governmental people and even our learned people don't know the folklore of those countries.

TUSLER

Or think it's of greatly inferior substance, compared to ours?

SEEGER

Yes. This superior/inferior business, of course, is one of the things that learning is supposed to batter down.

TUSLER

Is there any kind of cooperation between the Folklore Institute at UCLA and the Ethnomusicology Institute?

SEEGER

Yes, we work together as well as we can. But the daily work takes us off in such diverse directions that there's not as close daily consultation as I would like to see. The places of work are separate--that's one misfortune. If we were both in the same building it would be much better; it's hard to get from one building into another, and that's sad. Also, another thing that hinders us is that the work in the Institute of Ethnomusicology is mostly instrumental, and the instrumental music doesn't touch folklore the way the vocal music would; and yet, although the actual performance work is all in the instrumental performance, in the first report of the institute three articles on folk music were published, which is significant. So there will be closer cooperation, but it's hard to manage it .

TUSLER

Now what we have to do is go back and pick up the story of your life where you stopped. You've been talking about your organizational activities, but I believe that chronologically the point at which you stopped was when you left the Pan-American Union. What year was that?

SEEGER

1953.

TUSLER

And then did you come directly to UCLA?

SEEGER

No, my wife died that year, and I didn't want to stay any longer in the house or in Washington. I can tell that story when it comes; there's not much of any importance.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE
June 19, 1970

SEEGER

It's now several years since I dictated the first seven tapes in this oral history. When I first received the transcript, I was horrified. The plan that I had adopted for making them seemed to be inadequate. There was an enormous amount of trivial detail. I don't know whether the second or third reading of it might have quite a number of cuts made. My idea was that I'd put myself on a psychoanalytic couch with only such censorship as would be required by the fact that I was interviewed by a lady, the wife of a friend of mine, Mrs. Tusler. The plan was to avoid any attempt to make a picture of my autobiography. The trouble with most autobiographies: they're written to present the person's idea of himself to the readers, and very often it's a pure fabrication that is literarily interesting but perhaps, as data for a study of a personality, misleading. Of course, there is a certain amount of that in any presentation. Even on the psychoanalytic couch it's hard not to "artificialize" the situation. This is the very nature of the art of speech. It's a construction, and try as hard as we may, making the speech construction correspond to a situation which one would like to present as reality is very limited by the means of communication, much more limited, I think, than the average person would like to admit, but which I am a little hit inclined to exaggerate because of my distrust of the art of speech, which basis I think this oral history shows, way back before I became anything else except a user of speech in terms of common sense--that is, as Mantle Hood says, the kind of speech you use at the time you're eighteen--but it was the kind of speech that I used up to the time I was twenty-six. And I've never given it up, because I think it is one of the pillars not only of human intercourse, but of academic study. The attempt of academicians to rule out common sense seems to me a hopeless one, and a matter which is more likely to present everything it presents in a false light than to say what one really would want to have stand as truth. This, of course, is to a certain extent true even in the natural sciences, mathematics, too, physics, and increasingly in the social sciences. When you come to the humanities, it's just self-deception to try to pretend that common sense isn't one of the pillars of communication, that is, the pillars that we stand upon when we communicate, especially by means of speech, because there are so many other ways of communicating: by music; by design, that is, painting and drawing; by "artifacture," as I call it. everything from sculpture and architecture down to making pins and needles; then on the other hand, of dance in human movement, from combat to lovemaking. The attempt to put into these tapes, then, a memory of past times with an accent on the development of a man who eventually came around to calling himself a musicologist, although he resisted it for most of his life, is a legitimate one, but I think, as I read the transcript, it seems to me that I didn't do too good a job there. I brought in too much, as I say, too much trivial detail, although, perhaps, someone who would read this, if they ever do, fifty or sixty years from now or one-hundred years from now, might say that it revealed more than I think it did. One more thing I'd like to say before Ann asks her first question is that subsequent study-- that is, subsequent to my twenty-sixth year--revealed to me that I fell myself into a classification that I had never heard of before. In fact, I never heard of it until comparatively recently It's the philosophy of Mo Ti, the contemporary of Confucius who opposed him. Where Confucius held out for the wise, controlled, internal man, and the princely appearance outside. Mo Ti said nonsense. The only thing that human beings do is to try to get along in life, protecting themselves as well as they can, and if they're wise, they realize that the wisdom that Confucius praises so highly is unattainable, and the princely outer appearance is for the most part rather laughable. In other words, he was a rank pragmatist, and, some of us might feel, even cynic, in his not wanting to be an outstanding person, not wanting to--let's say, trying to avoid any put on in the way of how he would look, and coming to the conclusion that no matter what he did, he would never amount to anything anyway. He'd just be a living organism that did its best to survive. I haven't read any Mo Ti in the original, or even in translation. All I know about him is references. But the philosophy grew upon me as I modulated, I might say, from the age of twenty-six on to my present age of eighty-three and a half. At twenty-six I was a living image of the emulator of Confucius. I thought I was on the way to becoming as wise as anybody, and I certainly did my best to maintain a princely exterior. But, as I record in one of the early tapes, this image was pretty much shattered by my first six years at Berkeley, so that by the time I was about twenty-one I was reduced to the level of the most abject Moism and literally gave up trying to be anything or to do anything except just merely survive for about ten years. In the course of the decades from twenty on to sixty, as revealed in the seven tapes, I built up a modus vivendi which was still Moistic, but not abject, as it was in the twenties. The twenties, by way of resume, resumed a withdrawal from life. I lived like a hermit--never expected to do anything of any importance, didn't pretend to be anything of any importance, especially in relation to my fellow man, whom I simply gave up as a vast mass of people like myself who were under the illusion that they could amount to anything or do anything except merely exist. This was strengthened by the study of Yoga, which is infused, of course, with that belief, only on the higher level, of a philosophical sort, that all existence was illusion, non-existence also was illusion, and reality was not only that which exists, but that which doesn't exist, and that which neither exists nor doesn't exist. The realization of this philosophical belief in the physical life through the various exercises and disciplines of breathing and concentration of attention and so forth revealed a great deal that led me from the rather more abject Moism into which I'd fallen around 1920 and 1921. The abjectness of Moism was largely due to the psycho-physical breakup, which resulted from the seven-years' struggle in Berkeley, not only with my inner problems but tny problems in relation to the outer life. The awakening that I spoke of in the early thirties took care of many of the problems that had defeated me in the teens. The idea that one could connect music with society had worked beautifully through the thirties and the forties and up into the fifties, when I realized that I'd done all that I could to connect music and culture and society: first, through the making of music for the labor movement in the thirties; second, and also from 1935 to 1940, in the emergency agencies of the United States government under the Roosevelt New Deal; and then in the forties and early fifties, upon the international level. The death of my wife Ruth in 1953, leaving me with four young children to take care of and retirement from a paying job, presented a new situation which fortunately resolved itself by marriage to my old childhood sweetheart--I don't know what to call her--Margaret Dickinson, as I knew her. (But she'd been married twice and had five children.) But the marriage was no sooner entered upon than it began to break up. And I was living comfortably enough knowing that the marriage had its limits, and that I just had to, what shall I say?--not "endure," that's not fair, because it was rather nice while it lasted--but to see it gradually break up was a little sad during the period of 1955 to 1960. About the middle of that period, in 1952, I received a copy of a--I've forgotten whether this is repeating or not, but it won't do any harm to repeat it--I'd been to a meeting of the International Musicological Society at Utrecht and read a paper. And that happened to me at the time, or just shortly after the time that Mantle Hood had been there. I met [Jaap] Kunst and he introduced me to a charming young woman who was one of those who played in the gamelan that Hood had been also active in. (I'll put in her name later, the office has it.) Shortly after that--I didn't hear of Hood at that time, or if I did, it didn't make any impression on me-- Kunst showed me over the beautiful Javanese section of the museum, and we had a number of long talks. But very shortly after that, in Santa Barbara--I think it was 1957-- I received a book by Mantle Hood on patet in Javanese music. I was struck by its being on a higher level than anything I had seen in the way of musicological writing about a music. The [Erich M. von] Hornbostel work was mostly the work of a man in an armchair who worked with the discs, very poor acoustic discs, of anthropologists [The Tropen Museum in Amsterdam where Kunst keeps his collection. "The Nuclear Theme as a Determinant of Patet in Javanese Music (Groningen, 195)], and folklorists in the field. I knew the Musik des Orient , that beautiful album put out in Germany, and the old Demonstration Sammlung of the Phonogramm-Archivs in Berlin. I knew Curt Sachs somewhat and met a number of ethnomusicologists who seemed to be on a broader track than those of the strictly armchair variety. I had known Herzog for a long time. He, too, was an armchair type, although he did some collecting himself. I feel that I must put in the story of Herzog going off on a collecting tour, just put it on for the record. I don't know if it's told anyvihere else. Herzog went out to collect from some Indian tribe and got off the train at the station where he was met by the proper people, and the mode of transportation was horse. So Herzog mounted the horse with some difficulty and was promptly thrown. As he picked himself up and dusted himself off, he remarked rather ruefully, "You know, that's funny. It's the first time I ever got on a horse." And his guide said, "Yes. The horse knew it." But the general type of study done--as far as I could find out, my reading wasn't as extensive as it should have been at the time, but it's been more or less confirmed by my reading since, and talk with people--was by comparative musicologists and ethnomusicologists, as they began to be called, who looked at music from the outside as speakers using one art, language, to deal with another, music. And Mantle Hood's book was the first one that I had run across, even an article, the first article, I would say, too, that knew the music as a musician. This fell in line with my old philosophy that I had developed in Berkeley in 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, that the speech approach to music was only one-half of the business. The other half of the business, of the comparative musicologist or ethnomusicologist, was the knowledge of music in its own terms, and the only way you could know music in its own terras is by making it. Listening to it was still something that had to be reported in terras of language, and if you were going to write about making it, you still had to present it in terms of language, but the presentation was entirely different because it was a different kind of knowledge. It wasn't music as you heard it, but music as you made it. And I had been emphasizing that for years, and have since, and it struck me that this book was quite remarkable. Well, I didn't know where Mantle Hood was. I wrote him an enthusiastic letter of appreciation and presently I had a telephone call or letter frora Mantle Hood, who turned out to be at the University of California, Los Angeles. And he came up to see me. By that time I had my Model A Melograph functioning, and we had a wonderful session. Later on he and I got together with Kunst. Kunst I never quite connected with. We always seemed very much like two trains passing on two different tracks. We knew that each one was passing, but we didn't really make a person-to-person connection. He came up to Santa Barbara and visited me there. I remember going out for a walk with him up the foothill up to where the steep hills began. He was a wonderful person, and I enjoyed being with him tremendously. But there was a feeling that we never would understand each other until we'd spent quite a lot of time together, and, of course, we didn't have that chance. My terminology was entirely different from his. My method of conversation was entirely different. And Hood and I could almost communicate without talk a good deal of the time, because our talk ran along such similar verbiage and such similar methods of arranging the verbiage. But Kunst had a different vocabulary and an entirely different way of using it. It was a generation older than Hood's, and while he was a younger man than I, he was a generation or two back of me from the point of view of his approach to music. This clearly shows in his definition of ethnomusicology, that it's the music of the world excepting the fine art of European music. He did include European folk music. I've forgotten whether he ever mentioned popular music. Did he? I don't remember.

BRIEGLEB

I think he did.

SEEGER

I think he did. But in talking with him, it was not a factor. That was in advance of the average ethnomusicologist, who really was not very much interested in folk music. Bartok was still then--in spite of the fact that he and Hornbostel were devoted friends--was still not regarded seriously, as I could see, by ethnomusicologists. When we founded the American Society for Comparative Musicology in 1932 or 1933--I'vve forgotten which--I don't remember there being any mention of Bartok. I didn't know he was a folklorist at that time. I didn't know him as an ethnomusicologist . When his book came out on Hungarian folk music, I think it was--I don't remember the date--but I didn't get hold of it until long after I think it was published in English. It made a great impression on me, but the appreciation of Bartok really came when it came to the Serbo-Croatian folk songs. And, of course, now he's considered one of the great ethnomusicologists. But he ran along parallel to the Hornbostel school, if I can call it a school--yes, it really was--more or less parallel. I suppose they influenced each other. But Bartok was a man who went off and lived with the people. I wouldn't be surprised that if the occasion had ever come up he could have joined in with the singing and maybe with the playing. I don't know. I must find out sometime whether he ever became expert on any of the Balkan instruments. That would be an interesting thing to know. His son would know, I'm sure.

BRIEGLEB

His transcriptions certainly show that he was involved.

SEEGER

I think he was involved in the making of music, which Hornbostel never was, and [George] Herzog never was. They would have considered it a loss of objectivity. And it might be, because Bartok was very sensitive to that loss of objectivity. Well, take the simple question of folk song. He doesn't speak of the technique of the gusla. And yet the gusla was accompanying much of the music he's interested in. I don't know whether it ever accompanied the women's song, but certainly they accompanied many of the others. And also there are other instruments, of course. Well, now, this leads us up to my meeting with Mantle Hood. At the same time, I had known Wayland [D.] Hand in the Folklore and Mythology Center for a number of yearsj and as I remember, my first connection with UCLA was being invited to serve as research associate, I think it was, of the Center of Mythology and Folklore, which I accepted gratefully. It was a purely honorary position without any job or remuneration. I've forgotten how many times I saw Mantle Hood between--oh, I think it was 1957 or so, maybe 1958.

BRIEGLEB

He went to Indonesia in 1957.

SEEGER

Well, I saw him before then and afterwards. And as my marriage in Santa Barbara gradually showed signs of finally breaking up, the date of January 1, 1960 became important. I went East to see my children and my sister, and we drove West--oh, I think it was along in December 1959--and arrived here about early January, 1960, when my appointment came through as research musicologist in the newly founded Institute of Ethnomusicology. I had a nice office on the ground floor in the basement. Room 426, is it?

BRIEGLEB

Yes.

SEEGER

And I had a desk and bookcase and file cabinet and so forth and a lot of space. But things were crowded, and besides the Melograph we had to have some play-offs, and there were some recording instruments recording in the two instrumental rooms that the windows abutted into. So I started to come in every morning and do my writing at the desk and to build up my bookshelves with the special books that I needed and didn't want to go chasing off to the library for every other minute. I think I filled the present bookcases with my books and materials and was beginning to overflow onto other places, needing a table and so forth and so on. But the electronic equipment began to increase also. And the traffic in and out of the room began to Increase, and finally I had to do my work with a steady barrage of excitement and talk going on with recording and testing and all kinds of things, so that I found myself doing more and more work at home and coming in for fewer and fewer hours. To make a long matter short, the room finally became so chock-full of electronic equipment and such hectic activity that I was squeezed off into a chair, hardly able to keep a pen on paper without it getting jiggled. So I went to Mantle and suggested that I couldn't work there anymore. [laughter] But I'd keep a desk for appointments and conferences with students and so forth, and we could actually clear out the room and hold a seminar there for a few students. Well, to make a long matter short, as I said, I finally just got out of the room, and the desk eventually went to give place to the equipment. When the Model B [Melograph] came along. Model A had practically given out, and we returned it to San Diego with the idea that if anybody wanted to take it over and paid a small amount--I think it was $350 to rebuild it-- I'd be glad to give it to them. When it came to giving away the additional filter I had, there were complaints that it was turning out to be useful in the laboratory, so I just sent the main Model A and its little recorder back to be kept in San Diego until somebody came along. Recently some people did from Wesleyan [University] and I understand they paid to have it rebuilt and it was sent to them. I haven't been able to find out what they've done with it. I think Bob Brown was the man who was active in that. At any rate, they got about $1,000 equipment for $350 repairs or remodeling, so that was that. Model B worked very well. It was much easier to work with than Model A, but still something of a flirt, I would say, a kind of an electronic musicological flirt. You couldn't tell when it was going to go sour on you. But it did some very nice work and results were published, two papers of mine and I think one or two of Dr. Hood's. I don't know anybody else that used it. But it did very nice work. And I have almost always felt it could have been more used than it was for publication. The work of the institute became more and more absorbing. Mantle Hood's seminar in ethnomusicology became--I don't mind saying at my suggestion, because I think he never would have done such a thing himself, and I should probably take the weight of responsibility off his shoulders--became an institute-wide seminar that everybody was supposed to take for credit the first year and attend thereafter up to the time where they might have to be excused because they had too many other commitments. The result is that it's become, as far as I can see, more or less the hub of the activity in the institute, where the new ideas are presented and where a lot of the thinking is done and where the students are encouraged to get together as a whole and not merely as members of certain courses and seminars. From my point of view, it's worked beautifully. The best years were when the participating members of the staff were largest: Leon Knopoff, Bill [William R.] Hutchinson and Klaus Wachsmann. Occasional others who came in were Bill [William 0.] Bright, the linguist. Those were the most exciting years. Unfortunately, besides myself, most of the others have become involved in too much outside work and haven't been coming in regularly. New members of the staff have, however, come in, but not as many as in those two or three years--I've forgotten what they were--along in 1966, '67; and they began to take off in 1968. When did Wachsmaxin leave?

BRIEGLEB

I think, in 1968.

SEEGER

He must have left in the fall of 1968? Yes. Well, one of the most rewarding experiences was the year that Mantle Hood was on a sabbatical, which was 1966 and 1967, when Klaus Wachsmann took over the seminar and conducted it in an entirely different way, of course, because he's an entirely different kind of person. He was in ill health and from about November on making up his mind to make the change from UCLA to Northwestern. And it practically led him to a breakdown, psychologically and physically, along around the middle of the spring term, so that he begged me to take over as much of the seminar as I felt like doing. And I, for my own part, often felt it necessary to intrude, even though I hadn't done anything special to say, simply because he was exhausted. He was a very conscientious man, and he felt that he had to occupy the full three hours. After an hour he was sometimes near the verge of collapsing, just physically. You could see it. His voice trembled, perspiration on his forehead, his hands trembled, and he kept trying to find what to say after considerable pauses. It was really tragic. So that I did quite a lot of the talking, and he would chirp up after I'd been going ten or fifteen or twenty minutes. then he'd carry on until he wore himself out again. It was my custom to always go home with him afterwards to his little house on [11356] Albata Street for a drink and a resume of the events of the afternoon. I don't know which was more exciting, the events of the afternoon or the resume, because by the time he got a gin and tonic and had me settled with a gin and tonic and some hors d'oeuvres that his wife Eva would produce, he was himself again. And he could last that way for a long time. I think sometimes if that gin and tonic appeared at the seminar, he would have been less dependent upon me. But he'd sit back in the chair and say, "Oh, Charles, how I thank you for taking over the way you did. I don't think I could have gone on another minute." On the whole I felt encouraged to chip in, and some of the afternoons I took over a good half of the work, and two or three, when he was laid up and the doctor told him not to get up out of bed, I had to take over the whole seminar. And it was great fun. I had never liked to conduct the whole thing myself, but taking on pieces was great fun. One of the most interesting episodes of that year was a visit by Alan Merriam, and this ought to go in because it won't be recorded anywhere else, I feel. Alan [P.] Merriam, who had just written the Anthropology of Music , was invited down to talk at some kind of a meeting at UCLA and the members of the seminar got wind of it; so they invited him to come around and give a talk under the auspices, I think, of the chapter of the Society of Ethnomusicology, which then was more active than it is now. (It's gone to sleep this year and last year.) He came and gave his talk, and then they invited him out to dinner. Were you present at the dinner?

BRIEGLEB

No .

SEEGER

And Klaus and I were cordially invited. But we both said with one voice, "Oh, no, you have Alan all to yourselves. We'll keep out. That would cramp matters." They got together with Alan, as I understand it, and in the course of either his lecture here or that evening, he intimated that his approach to musicology, of course, was very different from ours, and that our approach was through performance, that ethnomusicology was a kind of a footnote to the performance program at UCLA. Well, Fred Lieberman had provided himself with the reading list for the spring semester that Klaus Wachsmann and I had made up and we put the volumes on reserve on the shelves in the archive, and he presented it to Alan and asked if this looked like a basing of ethnomusicology on playing the guitar and the big gong. It so happened there were only one or two books [laughter] on musicology. One of the books was Alan's Anthropology of Music , and some of the others were on the psychology of music, or philosophy of music, or things of that sort. But others were Bertrand Russell ' s Mysticism and Logic . Did [George V.] Plekhanov's Materialist Conception of History get in?

BRIEGLEB

I don't think so.

SEEGER

Oh, it should have. Gosh, I'm backsliding. That was required reading in my first course in musicology in Berkeley in 1917 and 1918. It was required of everybody, with a few others as distant from ordinary musicology as that. Well, of course, the students were delighted, and I understand they pitched into Merriam pretty hard, but I'm sure it made no impression whatever. It was rolled off his back like water off a duck's. Alan's a good man, but he definitely looks at music from the outside and can't conceive that looking at it from the inside can see anything. Now, let's see, what are we coming to? The plan for Model C. This was drawn up, and talking with such people as we could find to talk about it with, it seemed as if we'd better entrust it to the same people that made Model A and Model B in San Diego.

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO
JUNE 19, 1970

BRIEGLEB

Who made models A and B?

SEEGER

The Research Manufacturing Corporation. It was a little hut formally organized cooperation of a number of electronic technicians who worked in governmental and non-governmental laboratories in San Diego, led by Victor C. Anderson. I had met Anderson, as I think I've said in an earlier tape, in Cambridge, when I spent the winter there after the death of my wife, Ruth. It's an interesting instance of serendipity--I had attended a meeting of the American Musicological Society in Ann Arbor and on the way back to Boston, with a number of others, was unable to get sleeping accommodations. So we sat up all night in the coach, and in the course of the conversations that I had that night there was one with a man, Charles Spackford, who had just taken his Ph.D. at Harvard in an acoustic musical subject. And when I told him about--now, this is 1953, you mind--when I told him my dream of a music writing machine, he said, "Why, that's perfectly feasible, and the man who might make it for you" (I'd never been able to find anybody who'd even design it for less than--well, it came down from a million, a couple of million, down to thirty-eight hundred, which I still couldn't afford) "a man who might make it for you is a man who's considered one of the outstanding sound specialists in the country." He worked in the super-secret laboratory for the Navy in San Diego. And that was Victor C. Anderson. I met Anderson, liked him, and we made an arrangement--oh, he was a visiting professor at Harvard at the time--that on his way back to San Diego with his family he'd stop in Santa Barbara and we'd sign a little agreement for him to make the Model A Melograph. He stopped and we drew up a contract, and the work began. I might say that this Research Manufacturing Corporation was simply a little cover for these electronic sound experts in San Diego, to amuse themselves on weekends. There were two or three of them, and not being able to get all their enthusiasm spent from Monday to Friday, they would get together on Saturdays and Sundays and make special apparatus, sometimes I think for the government, because the government either couldn't be fitted into the government schedule or didn't have the tools or the things couldn't be made fast enough or something of that sort. I saw various sound-recording devices there, deep-sea and ventilating and some other things of that sort; and the little Model A was built largely on the floor of one of the technicians' garages, out of components that could be bought in almost any radio store, and just put together in odd moments. It cost me $1,000, but the actual writing device, the same one that a doctor uses for a cardiogram, cost, I think, quite a large part of that. I remember once the machine didn't work up in Santa Barbara. I took it back to San Diego and Anderson worked on it for a morning and finally found a tin can out in the backyard that was emptied of its food. He took it to a sink and washed it off and cut it and inserted it as a--what do they call them, to keep infections [laughter] from one electronic unit to another--a shield. And it worked. And it was still in when I finally gave up working with ito But I found that the filter was quite inadequate, and I bought the extra filter for about $300, so the actual cost of the Model A began to mount. The first thing I experienced in Santa Barbara was trouble with the graph. It had a way of waltzing up and down for no reason that I could see. It certainly wasn't on the input, and the machine could hardly be said to have been guilty of it. So I made some tests with a fixed tone at half-hour intervals throughout a day. How did I produce that fixed tone? I really don't know. I didn't have an oscilloscope.

BRIEGLEB

You didn't do it with just a tuning fork?

SEEGER

I might have used a tuning fork. I don't know. But that probably wouldn't have lasted long enough. At any rate, I got a good single sound. Oh, yes, I had a phonograph record for testing turntables, which had an A 440 in it; so I concluded it must be the electric current. And I took it down to the electric company in Santa Barbara, and he looked at it and said, "Well, what is this?" I said, "It's my recording of an A 440 at half-hour intervals during a day." He said, "Well, how do you make it?" I said, "I have a machine that makes it." "Well," he said, "you'll have to show me." So he came up. And he said, "Now, we're going to see what we can do for you." I said, "I've got to have the most stable current I can get." The lineman came up. The result was they put in a new transformer up on the street, which was about 100 yards away, a new line into the house, and we connected it with a switch in the new switchbox, which led underground only to the outlet that I'd plugged the Model A into and the tape recorder. The improvement was miraculous. But it still fluctuated more than I liked, so I got a voltage control. And with the voltage control and my additional filter, which was highly recommended and is really a very good one--I'm still using it here--we made some nice records. Well, now, when it came to Model B, it cost about $3,000, I guess, in all. I don't have to say too much about it. It worked very nicely and so promisingly that we began to dream of Model C. And Mantle Hood got enough money to get a feasibility study made, which cost as much as the Model B. Anderson came up with a corps of specialists, and we went over the thing down at the Admiralty Club down at the airport. The result was that we had a feasibility plan for Model C that was pretty satisfactory all the way around. The problem was $85,000, plus $15,000 for a black box to put it on the computer, plus a few other things. Well, Mantle and I decided we'd go out and try to find $85,000, and since I had known more or less well Jerome [B.] Wiesner, who was chairman of the president's National Science Foundation in Washington, I wrote for an appointment and Mantle and I went on. The interesting thing about this adventure was that my son Charles was on the Department of Astronomy at Stanford at the time, a specialist in radio astronomy. And they had a feasibility plan for a $25 million radio telescope for which they needed a first prototype unit costing $1,500,000. So my son Charles Seeger and this Charles Seeger both appeared in Washington at about the same time to get money from the National Science Foundation. Needless to say, we had a very cordial reception, approval of our plans, but an explanation that this sort of thing just didn't fall into the scope of the National Science Foundation. Wiesner said, "Perhaps the anthropology section might help you, and then there's another section that might help you. They're for equipment and that sort of thing." We went around to see the anthropologist, a very nice man. We showed him the thing and he said, "Oh, this is very interesting. It might be also useful in linguistics." He saw it, I think, himself. We didn't have to tell him. But he said, "My yearly budget's only $85,000." So he called up the equipment man and said, "I've got something very good here. Could you come around?" So he came around and looked at it and said, "Well, I don't know anything about things like this, but I can give you a car. [laughter] I can even give you some rooms in Washington." My son got his $1,500,000, and I might say, by way of footnote, that after they spent the $1,500,000 the government decided to give up the telescope. Oh, dear, [laughter] So we came back pretty much defeated. I don't know whether Dr. Hood will ever tell the story, but I'd like to know it more in detail, myself. But presently I had a word from him that as of June 30 of some year--I've forgotten what year it was, 1962, 1963--there were some unexpected funds in the budget that would revert to the general fund if it weren't spent for something, [laughter] Mantle lassoed it for the Model C. How a musicologist could keep his eye out for something like that, I can't see. You really have to look for a needle in a haystack in a thing like UCLA to find $85,000 loose all of a sudden. When you think that there are probably a couple hundred men who might also have found it, and some of them before us. But none of them did, fortunately, for us. So the contract was signed and everything went along very well. But there were too many cooks in this broth. And there were some changes made in Model C. One from a device that would give us a line for a melody. Instead of giving us a line, it was decided, because it would be so much better from a computer viewpoint, we got a lot of dots, 250 a second. Well, I objected, but it was too late. Somebody had already decided to go into dots, and I didn't have a very strong case because the computer would make a better line than a camera would. So I weakly gave in, and we got our dots. But the trouble with the dots is that half the dots of those 25O are very likely to be off the graph. The machine is so precise that it will throw a 0.004 of a second where it belongs, and it's very often off the graph, where it should be. But from the point of view of visibility, it reduces us to a second about two inches long on our best prints, with only a hundred points, and it doesn't give you a line. We weren't very happy with the tapes we took down to have graphs made in San Diego. On the one hand, there was a reduction of the film from 35mm to 16. Why? Because it was cheaper. Well, we innocently enough said, "That's fine with us, we don't want it to be too expensive." But they didn't tell us that prints were ten times more expensive, and you couldn't find people who'd make prints very easily. Well, we went down and the results were just no good. Meanwhile, we'd given them the $85,000 and the machine was not working. Well, we made any number of trips down there and there was no improvement. Finally it was discovered that the concrete realization of the engineering design didn't work in one of the filter mechanisms, and they were honest enough to admit it. I think Anderson is a very fine man, and not many people would have done it. But they put their own $30,000 into rebuilding this whole filter system, so the machine has actually cost much more than $85,000. It nearly bankrupted the firm, but then it began to appear that we'd get some kind of a display, that it was somewhat like what we wanted. Well, this meant that we'd gone through year after year not being satisfied with the machine. It was just standing down there in their laboratory not being used, and they said they couldn't do any more with it. We finally said, "We might as well have it up here and see if we can't do better up here with the input than they could with it." We got it up here and from my viewpoint it was a dismal failure, just a washout.

BRIEGLEB

That was when, 1968?

SEEGER

I think it was the fall of 1968, just before the SEM meeting. When we got it here and Michael Moore hitched it up to the input, we began to get an entirely different class of material. Also we had better prints. The prints that we got from San Diego didn't amount to a pin. But the prints we were getting here, although they were frightfully costly, were within the range of acceptability. One thing after another went wrong with this machine. Anderson would be coming up or one of his technicians would be coming up every week or so to correct faults. Gradually the bugs got out of the machine, and while they still occasionally flit in, Michael has learned to make the repairs himself and I would say that the machine is not as bad as I feared it would be, but not as good as I hoped it would be. We're using it, however, only to half its efficiency. We only get out of the Model C, as of this date, June 19, 1970, the tonal display. It gives us a rather poor pitch and excellent dynamics, which goes off the chart every now and then and nobody seems to see how it can be kept on the chart, and quite a surprising spectrum. I might say about the spectrum here: that it was supposed to be in the contract from two to five times better than conventional visible speech on a sonograph. But it isn't as good; that's the trouble. At least, it doesn't seem to be so clear, although we're learning to read it so that perhaps when we get around to making a comparison between the latest sonograph and the latest work that we've done with Model C we might be able to find out which is the better. Well, here we are able to make a stab at the pitch line and get a pretty good loudness line and a better-than-we-expected spectrum line, but nothing about rhythm. And as any musicologist ought to know, but most of them don't, music is just as much a matter of rhythm as it is tone. They're all so daffy about tone that they get down to measuring 0.001 of a tone and they don't bother about even 0.1 of a second of rhythm. In fact, they don't even know what the factors of rhythm are. You could practically go to any musicologist in this building and ask him, "What are the necessary factors of musical rhythm?" They couldn't tell you. Now, it's essential to us at this juncture to get Model C into a computer. My plan for Model D will be hamstrung until we can do that or else I've got to go ahead on a plan for Model D simply saying, "I think that Model C can do this but I don't know," and they say, "Well, why don't you know?" I say, "Because we don't have $15,000 and I don't know where we're going to get $15,000 and neither does Mantle." There is a general retraction of funds for universities, not only from the government, but from private foundations. And unless some angel comes along here and gives us it, I don't see any chance of going anywhere and saying anything else. My plan for Model D--if we can't get the results from Model C, though we seem to be able to, and even if we can, I want probably better results than we get from it--is to get in touch with my five or six principal contacts in Europe, at Norway, Sweden, Paris, Bratislava, Israel, and a possible one in Berlin, and suggest that if they would join me on an international commission for the designing of a Model D, I think that I could go to an American foundation and get enough money to bring us all together at some convenient and least expensive spot. We would meet there and lay down our specifications as of 1970, in the company of such electronic experts as we could wangle the presence of from the United States and from Europe, the best we can find. I have an idea that a Model D, with its own computer built into it so that you wouldn't have to pay the tax for going to the big computer, could be built at perhaps half the size of our present Model C. The cost might be $400,000 or $500,000. I don't know. It might be less. I can't tell. I'm sure we could get the blessing of international musicological societies and national ones. I'm sure they would give us letters of approval, and I think we could get the backing of the American Council of Learned Societies, and it wouldn't be a very great amount. It would simply be travel and per diem for a dozen people, or what I would hope, about sixteen. And we could probably find a place to meet where we wouldn't have to pay for the actual use of the rooms. It might be Paris. It might be someplace in Germany--to bring people up from Israel and Sweden, you see, and over from Bratislava and from the United States. It wouldn't come to a very great amount. Most expensive would be the people from the United States. That would be the first step. The task of this first meeting would be to draw up a feasibility study with the help of the electronic engineers that could then be submitted to a foundation for a larger sum to actually build the thing. And I'd build two, at least--one for Europe and one for America. The thing could be placed in Europe where they would agree to place it. They could even pack it up and move It from one place to another, if they wanted, or they could make more than one. Once you make the first of these machines, the second and third copies are not only much less expensive, but perhaps even better, because you've taken some of the bugs out of the first ones. But I would build two so that we'd have the "debugging" of both the Europeans' and Americans' [machines]. Well, that's my job for the next few months before Mantle goes off on his sabbatical in January. We must decide just how we're going to handle this proposition. we can't let it simply rest here with this very promising machine next door unable even to do fifty percent of its efficiency. The matter of the rhythm I think is going to be simpler than the pitch, because it's more in the realm of what we know than what we sense. The tonal end of the Melographic technique, if you want to call it that, is in two sections. One is the sensory, which takes care of the tone, and the other is in the cognitive, which takes care of the rhythm. We know rhythm cognitively. We know pitch and loudness and tone quality sensorily. Now, besides the Melograph, my other job is to get my collected papers together for which I have a long-standing contract with the University of California Press. I was supposed to have it finished two years ago, and I rather hope I might do it in the foreseeable future.

BRIEGLEB

What will you call it?

SEEGER

SEEGER; It will be called Systematic Musicology , and it will have two kinds of papers. About the first half will be theoretical papers, and the second half will be applied papers. The applied papers will mostly be in sociological and folklore terms. My first idea was simply to publish the papers as they were originally published, as we published them, streamlining the technical verbiage. As I came to look at them, I felt to myself, "I just can't let them out, most of them. They've got to be something more than streamlined verbiage." Several of them have to be rewritten, and that's what's holding me up. Also there's a question of whether I might have an appendix simply publishing, unaltered, a paper that I wrote in 1923 about the music department in the American university, which I claimed then--and this paper was written in 1919 and 1920, when I was on sabbatical--that the music departments in universities in the United States should be called departments of music and musicology. Meanwhile, remember at that time musicology wasn't accepted as a term. And I also specified in a brief sentence that of course the musics of other parts of the world than Europe should be Included, and I think that's the first time it was ever suggested in the United States that the field of ethnomusicology should be included in academic work under the music department. Waldo Selden Pratt had written only a few years before, in 1915, in the first number, in fact, the lead article of the Musical Quarterly, that talk of music and ethnology was nonsense. So in this volume of collected papers, the first twelve or so are mostly being rewritten. The last twelve are mostly being left as is. I'll get it done some time. But delay on it only puts me off writing the volume that I planned in 1916-I7, Principia Musicologlca , which would serve for musicology as Newton's Principia served for physics and Russell's and Whitehead's for philosophy and mathematics. And that's something I must get to work on pretty soon. Now, is there anything else you can think of that I've left off about the institute?

BRIEGLEB

I don't think so. You came in 196O, then.

SEEGER

Yes. The quality of the work done, the capabilities of the students that are attracted has risen by hundreds of percent year after year.

BRIEGLEB

Do you feel that the practical approach is over-powering the theoretical approach?

SEEGER

I feel that the theoretical approach without the practical is misleading. We've done too much damn studying of music as something you listen to. Music is primarily something you make. Now, if you listen to it, that's fine. I'm all for listening. That's very nice. But it's the making of it that's the important thing. And we're just getting around now to techniques by which we can study making. Over in the brain research laboratory there, they're putting electrodes on the people who are listening to music. I want to have them come around here and put them on people who are playing music. I'd be willing to bet that they'd discover some musicologically astonishing things if they would put twelve electrodes on the four members of our little gamelan--Mantle Hood, Gertrude Robinson, Hardja Susillo, and Max Harrell. I think if we could make four graphs of those people you'd find out more about music than has ever been found out before--that is, from the point of view of what music from the most comprehensive viewpoint means. If anybody thinks that a hearer of music hears what the player makes, they can just go and soak their head. It gets completely transformed by the medium of the instrument, the air, and the listener's ear. I sometimes wonder whether people hear what music the music maker's making. I think they'd find out some astonishing things, epic-making. I divide the history of ethnomusicology in two main epochs. One is from the earliest gestures of [Charles Russell] Day and--oh, I'm so bad at remembering names, that man who wrote the book on Japan?--F. T. Piggott, [J. A.] Van Aalst and some of the others, up to the time when the institute was founded. And I think a second epoch begins with the study of musics of the world by people who not only are trained to talk about them, but to make them. Now, we don't suppose for one minute that any person who acquires some competence in a tradition of music that he wasn't brought up with--from the time he was a few hours old and hits sometime around when he's six, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, on up to his twenties, thirties, or fortles--we don't pretend anybody who learns a second music ever learns it the way he learned his first music. But around this place they've gotten so good that makers of other musics than our own will accept them into a group performance with a certain amount of sangfroid. It's going to be very interesting to see how Gertrude comes out when she goes back to Java. She's so good on the gender, and for all I know, on some of the other Javanese instruments, I wouldn't be surprised they'd give her some commendation. Of course, they'd give it to Mantle Hood. He's got that documented. And we have at least the say-so. I don't know whether they've been put into print, from some Javanese, that our performing groups do better than some Javanese performing groups, not the very good ones, of course, but at least the rank and file, which is all that I would need to bolster up my claim that ethnomusicology is entering a second epoch. I wouldn't expect a man making his second music the way he could make his first music. I'm not asking for that. Maybe they can. I don't know. I've never seen it. There is a man in south India who's singing around a good deal now--Jon Higgins, an American, who sings to Indians in their ovm music. And they say he's good. Experts say, of course, "We see the difference. He doesn't get everything." But he got so much that it's really quite miraculous. New, that can undoubtedly be done. We have Japanese musicians who've done pretty well with Western music. We've got Africans who do pretty wello We've got Turks who do pretty well. I could probably think of more [who have done well] with Western music. We all know that they're not up to the best. Westerners playing Western music, and it would look, except in cases of a miracle or fantastic genius, that we won't have performers of second musics equal to performance of first musics. But they can come so damn near that most of us couldn't tell the difference. But the main thing is to attain a rank-and-file level. That's all I would ask of a musicologist. I wouldn't ask an American or European musicologist to be a Heifetz or a Caruso. That's silly. All we want is to have the Western musicologist be a decent rank-and-file performer in his own art, both as a performer and composer. I'd expect any person who is going to win his spurs in Western musicology would be able to sit down and write a respectable composition in some style.

BRIEGLEB

I'm afraid it's not true, however.

SEEGER

I'm afraid it's not true. I'm afraid they're turning out a lot of musicologists here who couldn't write a hymn tune. They could harmonize one that's given to them. Oh, yes, they might even be able to write it down at dictation, all four parts, but whether they could sit down and write a respectable hymn tune, that's a different matter. But I'd expect them to be able to do it, and I'd expect any non-Westerner who's going to study the ethnomusicology of European music to be able to sit down and write a good hymn tune or a good gospel tune, or respectable ballad tune, as well as sing it reasonably well, that is, not too far off pitch, because we have to remember that we never sing in pitch ourselves so we can't expect them to sing in pitch--in tune, I mean. Well, that more or less sums up my feelings about the institute. I wouldn't have missed these ten years for anything, and it has "been something--which I might say here--of a bonus on life for me, to have started off my career in a university, made myself unacceptable to any other university except for occasional visiting professorships and that sort of thing, and then wind up with a respectable academic position in my last ten years of professional employment.

BRIEGLEB

You go the full circle.

SEEGER

It's rather nice. When I was elected president of the American Musicological Society, one of the old standbys said to another--and this was reported to me on very good authority--"Well, Lord knows what's going to happen to the society now, with Seeger." They were really, some of them, trembling in their boots. They didn't know what I was going to do to the poor thing, in spite of the fact that I got it started for them. Ye Gods, they wouldn't have started for another five years if I hadn't sort of made an issue of it. As a matter of fact, in 1935, it began to look as if the New York Musicological Society might become the national society. And I don't know but what [Harold] Spivacke, when he went around and did the actual spadework forming the AMS, might have threatened them with that. And he said, "You know, the New York Musicological Society is interested in systematic musicology, and it thinks that historical musicology should take a second place." And he said, "If you don't get in on this thing right away, Seeger may put you in a very bad situation." There were not many music historians then. There was only one in the university, I think. No. Dickinson was in, but he wasn't put here as a musicologist. In 1935 I don't think there were--I'll have to look it up sometime and see if there were any other people in universities employed as musicologists except [Otto] Kinkeldey. They were doing musicological work but they weren't employed as musicologists. In fact, in the first organizational meeting of AMS they didn't want to call it the Musicological Society. They wanted to call it the American Society for Musical Research. But they put me on the constitution committee, and I happened to be the secretary, and I just managed to make it the American Musicological Society. Everybody let it go at that. That's the way you do things.

BRIEGLEB

I think the tape is almost run out.

SEEGER

Well then, this runs out, and I make profound apologies to anybody who reads this for the first seven tapes, which had some good stuff in them, but a lot of nonsense and a lot of stuff that I would contradict if I were redoing it.

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE
JUNE 18, 1971

BRIEGLEB

Dr. Seeger, you had some rather strong reactions to the Seattle, Society for Ethnomusicology ' s annual meeting in the fall of last year, 1970. How do you feel about this meeting now?

SEEGER

As I remember my strong reactions mostly concerned the naivete, childishness, and ignorance of the people who were officers of the society for putting a man who was not a member of the society on a committee having to do with the new directions for the society, and then having him chair a session of the general meeting with nobody informed that he wasn't a member of the society. Well, it's very nice to have somebody from outside tell you what's what but not if everybody thinks he's inside. As a matter of fact, [Ken] Mclntyre is the man from Wesleyan, and I think he's a delightful chap. We got along beautifully, but the proceedings were impossibly irregular and childish. The New Directions Committee never should have been voted on by the executive board as a matter of the Council, but nobody had read the constitution seriously enough to find out that fact. It's the Council that's in charge of deciding what the old directions were, what the present directions are, and what any new directions will be. And if it wants to appoint a special committee to report on a study of new directions, it's the Council's business to appoint it, and it's the business of that committee to report to the Council, not to the executive board which is nothing but the executive committee of the Council, and much less to the general meeting. A great many people were very much disturbed with the thing. They weren't concerned with it, and they really wondered whether the society was a bunch of lunatics or what it was. I've forgotten whether I referred to the fact that when I finally made a substitute motion to a motion that was on the floor, and my substitute motion passed, they all began to reconsider the main motion. When I objected that the passing of a substitute motion obliterated the original motion, they spent their time looking through Robert's Rules of Order without knowing where to look. The whole business was just simply childish. The people didn't know what they're doing. Well, that was one thing. Another thing I didn't like was making the students who were going to read papers either be present or not have their papers read. That's a perfectly good rule for professional members who have regular positions, but it's too much to ask students to do that. I wasn't a member of the Council that year (we all go off every few years) and so I didn't have time to intercede. I didn't know about it, in fact. But I'm going to make a motion at the next meeting of the Council in Chapel Hill that we just strike out that requirement and allow a student's paper to be read by another student, preferably another student rather than a teacher. I have on former occasions read papers by absent members, and I don't care much for the procedure because discussion is not possible. It's possible, yes, but people don't seem to want to unlimber themselves. I read a paper of Manfred [F.] Bukofzer once at some meeting--I' ve forgotten what it was--and nobody wanted to comment on it. If the comments had been favorable it wouldn't have amounted perhaps to much of anything, but if they had been unfavorable it would have been, I think, very unethical to make. . . (He was ill, and that's why he couldn't come.) So it's a ticklish point, and I would rather stand by the regulation that members must be present and read their papers and be ready for discussion, whereas I think it's too much to ask students.

BRIEGLEB

There apparently had been no precedent before, because, as I understand, a chairman of that particular session just made an arbitrary decision that a student paper could not be read by another person. There had been no precedent, nothing to go on. It was only the decision of the moment.

SEEGER

Who was chairman of that meeting?

BRIEGLEB

McAllester, David McAllester.

SEEGER

McAllester. God bless David, he loves everybody; and rules and regulations are nothing to him. Most of the members of the society are bored to death with the organizational side of the society, but it's a necessary thing. It falls in with my old schoolboy dictum that I've never retracted, that government is a necessary good but it's an unavoidable evil. And you have to take it or leave it and make the best you can out of those two-- the Scylla and Charybdis--if you can steer between them you're fortunate. But the society's well organized now and at each meeting the papers are better, and there are more intelligent discussion and things do go better in spite of this inability to organize things properly from the point of view of procedure. The thing that I remember about the meeting was the rather nondescript first session on music in universal perspectives. As far as the content one went, it wasn't much but it engendered a very nice feeling I thought. And from my viewpoint and a number of other people that I spoke to, it was a good beginning. It made everybody feel happy, and they were going to have a good time. Well, the other thing that I remember was the trip down the bay in the ferryboat sitting out in the cold with about four or five others. And Nick England had fortunately brought a bottle of Scotch and a pail of ice cubes and swiped some blankets from the hotel. I don't remember whether I told this on the preceding tape. Did I? And as it got colder and colder we all huddled up next to each other with the blankets all around us and the conviviality was something I'll never forget. I suppose it could happen at any kind of a meeting, but it's very prone to happen at music meetings when people get over the formalities. I find that the association of the people outside of the meetings is the most valuable thing. I remember going to Utrecht to the International Musicological Society in 1952, and [Albert] Smijers was handling everything in a very rigid organizational way, and there was a nasty rebellion in the general business meeting when they had to unseat Jeppesen. You weren't there were you, Ann? Oh, it was a nasty business. Jeppesen had just held on all through the war and those years afterwards, and the Americans finally revolted. And Bukofzer and [Paul Henry] Lang and one other German-American joined in, and they made a frontal attack. It was brutal. The whole thing was rigid and tense, but when they got together in a good restaurant with a little something to drink and good food, everything just went perfectly beautifully. So that, I think, is one of the things we should cultivate more and more at the meetings of the society. The meetings down in the bar were absolutely hectic. We were cramped in so tight there that we could hardly raise a cup or a glass to our lips. And I don't know how the waiters ever got paid for what they served. I happened to remember my waiter and told him what I'd ordered. He didn't really know; so I just paid for what I'd ordered. I spent a whole hour trying to make out what one man was saying and it just didn't make any sense at all. But when I saw him dance that evening with a girl-- I think I told this story.

BRIEGLEB

BRIEGLEB : No .

SEEGER

Well, this young man--I think he's from Puerto Rico--he couldn't put his thoughts into words at all. His thoughts could have been musically and certainly were choreographic but didn't make any sense. But he and the girl danced a pas de deux , well, a flirtation dance, where the man is aggressive for a while and the woman recedes and then the woman would turn the table and he would recede. And they did perfectly beautifully. I went up to him afterwards and put my arm around him and said, "You know I didn't understand a word that you said last night, but I understand very well what you dance." And he was delighted; so we parted on good terms. I was disappointed that Klaus Wachsmann wasn't feeling very well and had to sort of shut himself up, but a number of people had very good sessions with him and I did too.

BRIEGLEB

I think it's important that these informal sessions not be planned as part of a program. They have to have an almost spontaneous thing.

SEEGER

No, we should cultivate them, and I don't know but what in some of the words that I will have to say at the Council meeting on Chapel Hill on this very subject that [I should] urge the councils to get out and corral people of sympathetic mind and have a good time. Petran was up there, but he's not a member of the society. He didn't come to the meeting. Oh, is he a member of the society? Perhaps he is, but at any rate he didn't come to the meetings, but he was in the corridor and saw people. No, he wouldn't go to the meetings. He said he got what he wanted out of the meeting which was in the corridors. A funny man. Yes, there should be more of that. I don't know about Chapel Hill. It's going to be very crowded, and there isn't much room to go out and have a good time unless you walk to a neighboring town. That might be difficult, but perhaps they'll have some facilities.

BRIEGLEB

You know that for the first time a woman is running for office of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

SEEGER

For president?

BRIEGLEB

Right , for president.

SEEGER

That's a very good thing. I got a letter from Barbara Krader and she said that she considered Nick [England] a "shoo-in," But she was very glad to be the person who was standing up for the women. And Barbara can be president. She'd make a perfectly good president, perhaps better than some others. [laughter] She has some sense of order and organization.

BRIEGLEB

She's very organized as a matter of fact, and she's had a lot of experience not only with the SEM but with the IFMC.

SEEGER

And she might even get out some of the foreign guests to be present the way some of our presidents have not done, ask them to speak, and if they can't speak clearly enough in English, she can translate.

BRIEGLEB

Sure. Well, would you like to say something about your children? I noticed in listening to the tapes that had been done before that you really didn't speak too much about how your life and your association with folk music and ethnomusicology had influenced them. And maybe this has been a reverse influence as well. Perhaps what they have done in some way has influenced you. And now that you're moving to the East Coast you will be in closer contact with more of them. Are you going to ride Pete's boat up and down the Hudson to clear up the pollution?

SEEGER

I'm looking forward to a trip up or down the Hudson in the sloop. I was one of those fathers that took a good deal of care of my children. My two oldest boys, John and Charles, the radio astronomer and the school principal, I didn't see too much of because I was involved in the University of California at Berkeley at the time, and we had a nurse for the children and their mother and I played a good many concerts together, so that I didn't see them when they were very little. Pete was born at the end of my sabbatical year in the East. The two older boys heard music all the time. We didn't play records in the house in those days because we didn' t have phonographs in the house, and there was no radio. But Peter was born towards the end of my sabbatical, and I had retired then with the three children and my wife to my father's house up in Putnam County, New York, and so I immediately began to spend as much time with the children or more than their mother did. And Peter, from the time he came back from the hospital--births were always handled two weeks in the hospital in those days--and from the time Pete came back I took at least as much care of him as his mother did for several years. And that meant that we had that kind of relationship that's very close between a father and a son who were acquainted from such an early age on the part of the son. I sang a good deal to him, told him stories with singing in it, and, of course, he too was brought up with the music going on all the time. The professional father and the professional mother, however, couldn't handle three boys at that time so that they all had to be put in boarding school fairly early. Pete went to his first boarding school at half past four, and fortunately they were pretty good schools so they did well by him. Vacations I spent with them, and that meant four months every summer with the three boys. So from the time the older children were seven and eight and the time Peter was two weeks I took them over for summers and practically took charge of them. I cooked for them and tended them when they were sick and dressed them up in white trousers and sailor suits to go up and have dinner with my mother and father at stated times. The rest of the time we went around pretty much as people do today, in disreputable old clothes and as few as possible. In fact, we lived down in the barns which I had fixed up for living quarters for myself and the boys. And the barns were arranged in a beautiful quadrangle. It had formerly been just a mud yard, but it had been converted into a lovely lawn. We used to go out there and knock a ball up against the wall with tennis rackets--and guests would too--without any clothes. And after we got well heated up we'd douse each other with pails of cold water. So we had very good relationships with the boys. They all sang. John sang in the Harvard glee club and Charles has always sung more or less on and off. Peter showed up one day with a ukulele and drove us all to distraction when he was about eleven singing the latest songs from Broadway. When he came down to Washington with a four-string banjo I asked him what he was playing that wretched instrument for, and he said, "Well, what else is there?" And I told him, "There's a five-string banjo, " and if he wanted he could go down-- didn't I tell this before--he could go down to Asheville with me the next day and hear some of the best banjo players in the country. So he did and fell in love with the instrument and thumbed his way around the country cottoning up to anybody he saw carrying a banjo or a guitar and if necessary, going home and living with them a couple of weeks while he learned their technique. The younger children I saw much more of. I made a point of being with them more than I had been able to vth the older boys, and it's interesting that the three that I had most to do with in their early days are the three of my seven children who've become musicians. They were all offered the piano. None of them took it except Peggy. They were all offered the violin. None of them took it. Oh no, only the three older boys were offered the violin. They heard, the last four--Michael, Peggy, Barbara and Penelope--heard folk music going on practically all day long in the house that they were in. Their mother was transcribing records from the Library of Congress. She must have done a couple of thousand, and her method of transcription was meticulous. She would listen to things over and over again. When she was hungry, when she'd just had her dinner, when she'd had a cup of coffee, when she needed a cup of coffee, when she was distracted, when she was peaceful minded, when it was late at night, and when it was early in the morning-- [she did all these] to see if the transcriptions were the same. I would come home in the evening, and I had to look over every transcription she made and express my opinion on it. And sometimes I would say, "You've written that in the minor and I hear it in the major." She said, "Yes, I heard it in the major when I started, but the longer I listen to it, the more I think it's in the minor." Well, I listened to it some more and I began to think it was in the minor too, and so we got down to studying the actual intonations a little bit more. By that time I was quite deaf and so my judgment was not very trustworthy. But she had a very good ear and while it wasn't as good an ear as some of the people around the institute here, she could decide whether a step was near a major or minor if she listened to it long enough, and under these different conditions of freshness and tiredness and so forth. Then one night I came home and she had to show me something that was quite fantastic, she said. At the end of one of George Pullen Jackson's recordings, or was it a [John A.] Lomax recording? No, I guess it was a Lomax recording. Well, I don't know, I think the transcription comes in a Jackson book. At any rate, whatever it was, there was a slide. And well, of course, when she came to a slide she worked with it as hard as she could up to tempo and came to what seemed to be the best way of notating it, and then she'd slow it down. She said when she slowed it down she had a major scale. "Oh," I said, "impossible! " She played the scale, and it just sounded like a glissando from note up to the octave. She says, "Well, now listen to it." And by gosh, it sounded to me like a scale, but you know perfectly well that not even the most agile coloratura soprano could have sung a major scale at that speed, so there are some very tricky things about this slowing down business. We found a number of others, and I drafted a paper at one time warning ethnomusicologists about notating slow down. And that's one of the reasons why I have been very anxious to get some Melographic reports on Bartok's transcriptions of the Milman-Perry recordings from Serbo-Croatia. Because, frankly, to my very bad ear Bartok's wrong, but I trust Bartok any day over against my ear. Michael and I were looking at one of these graphs that the Model C made, and the looks of Bartok were pretty good. [laughter] But then our trouble here is being able to tell when these damn spots, that Model C makes for the pitch line, indicate the beginning of what we hear as a note. And Michael is quite confident that he knows when a note begins at that series of spots. But with all due respects to Michael, it's hard for me to believe that you can say: "We've been judging by the loudness line, and when the loudness line went up with a straightedge it's a spot. We conclude: that spot has something to do with the pitch line. Well, sometimes it's way off and there's not another anywhere near it so we disregard it. But if there's some others near it, and perhaps nearer the pitch line, well then, we "begin to suspect a slide and we try to listen for it because one of the nice things about the Melograph is that it teaches you to listen for things that the Melograph shows and you haven't noticed. But when you watch the graph and listen to the input at the same time you can persuade yourself that the graph's right. Now I'm not so sure how much self-deception there is on that, and that fairly rapidly gets psychologists in. But I do believe that we could put this Model C into a computer. We could get the beginning of a note pretty faultlessly. We can ask the computer to do a whole lot of things that we cannot ask the Model C itself to do, for instance, such a thing as drawing lines between dots. And it means that we're using this Model C to about twenty-five percent efficiency-- fifty percent for pitch improvement which means twenty-five percent overall and a hundred percent for rhythm because rhythm is almost impossible to get off this Model C. It doesn't tell you anything about accent; it doesn't tell anything about what we call a note. You can puzzle it out--Michael can; I can't--with great difficulty. I won't say how many hours I spent on working out the rhythm of the Aunt Molly Jackson transcription that I made with Sam Chianis' help for the article in the Selected Reports (No. 1). [tape turned off] We were talking about the interesting fact that the three children that I had most to do with the bringing up with from the time they were very little--two weeks was about the time they all came back from the hospital after they were born--are the ones that had gone into music. Peggy turned out to be a very good pianist and could have gone on and made her profession of it. She went through freshman and sophomore years at Radcliffe in harmony and counterpoint and got pretty much disgusted with it. But owing to the fact that all three of them had heard so much folk music they went in for folk music. Peggy heard other things than folk music but not quantitatively. The folk music drowned everything out so that as soon as they got to the point where they could make music themselves they were beginning to build a repertory. Peggy had, oh, a half a dozen ballads with all the stsinzas by the time she was three. When she was six I made a record for Domingo Santa Cruz of Chile with Peggy singing twenty-nine children' s songs, American children's songs, for a Christmas present for him. She just sang the first stanzas to show him what the songs were like, but she could go on and sing as many stanzas as you want. And all three of them have fantastic memories. I don't know what their repertories are, but they're in the thousands probably for each of them. But it was the incessant hearing of it at home, and then from the time they were three or four, joining in and singing. The four younger ones sang a great deal together, but Peggy and Michael sang together publicly by the time they were nine or ten. I remember going to pick them up at a house where there was a party going on, and when I approached the door--it was in summertime--I could hear, "My father is a drunkard,/ My mother she is dead." [singing and laughter] And so I walked in the door to the vast amusement of the audience. The thing about children and music is that they're pretty much set musically by the time they go to school at six. They've got a lot of music in them in the United States today. In the old days in the Appalachians they'd have nothing but singsong around the house and perhaps a relative of the family was a fiddler and perhaps somebody played a guitar, but that would be all the music they knew. By the time they were six or seven they could join in, if not sooner, and if they were a little exceptionally interested then they would begin to sing and pick up the guitar themselves. They'd even make a guitar or a banjo themselves so that they could accompany themselves. But in America today there are comparatively few children who don't have a pretty complicated and full musical education by the time they get to be six, just over the radio and the TV, regardless of what the rest of the family may do. And that's where music education just misses the bus, unless they fall right in with that kind of music activity, which is mostly a listening activity and not a making activity, and teach the children to make the music they have been listening to. Unless they do that, they're engaged in a remedial task of monumental proportions, trying to persuade the children who are convinced that this is the real music, that the music that the teacher wants them to make is the real music. And half the time it breeds trouble, I told the story about going into the union school down in Florence, North Carolina, and having the WPA music teacher show off her work for the whole school with me. I told that, I think, in another place so I won't retell it here. But that's a good indication of what's going on in our schools all over the place, and the children just snap their fingers at this-- that is, a great number of them do. The actual people who go into the advanced music work in high school are about fifteen percent. And that is neglecting the eighty-five percent who get nothing except more of the same that they had from the television and the radio and the phonograph. The musicality of a culture is not just listening. I think its true register is in the making of it. But of course it's too early to have a carefully measured and described comparison of, let's say, five thousand people who only listened and five thousand people who listened and made music. I think we'd find there are some astonishing differences just in the actual personality. A very interesting point came up just now. DickReuss, a professor at Wayne [State] University, is reading a paper on the life covered by this oral history , and among other things, he has run into a case where his subject was active under an assumed name. And I thought it might be appropriate to put in here just the mere fact that this paper by Professor Richard Reuss will be published eventually and anyone who listens to this record, can find reference to it. It will probably be in theJournal of American Folklore , but I can't be sure that it would be. But it would be either in some folklore journal or in a sociological journal because he's a professor of anthropology, not muslcology, God forbid. Musicologists wouldn't write about me. It might get into a musicological paper. I don't know. If possible, I'll have put in at the end of this oral history just a little note that this paper of Reuss' has been published. At any rate, my concern with the place of music in American society began back with the old IWW days when I was in Berkeley, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918. I had given a lecture at Harvard--and I have referred to it in this oral history--in which I had raised the question of what was the relation of music to society and posed it as a matter of the critique of music. How can I justify a life as a composer in what I call the fine art of music when it might be that everything I compose would just be heard by a very small coterie of dilettantes and connoisseurs and when I died would go on to a library shelf and become subject for a Ph.D. dissertation? How can I justify that in the acceptance of the necessary funds for living when the necessary funds for living represented the difference for a hundred and twenty-eight people between nonsubsistence and a bare subsistence level of life in a slum in the United States? Well, I've been concerned about this matter of the relationship of music to society, not only factually but primarily valually." So I was looking, when I was in Berkeley, for a way in which I could make music in such a way that it would have some perceptible relationship to American society. One of the reasons why I had my more or less general psychological crackup in those days was that I just couldn't find my way out. I didn't know of the work that was going on in Europe, Hanns Eisler and [Stefan] Wolpe and my goodness knows how many others who were writing music for the socialist movement. I didn't even know the existence of the great socialist choruses in Germany which were singing Bach's B Minor Mass and the St. Matthew Passion so beautifully that it defied the efforts of the professionals to surpass them. I didn't even know of thato So I weathered the doldrums of the twenties, which were for me simply retirement from the world, because I didn't know what to do, and I didn't have enough wit to see what could be done except in the IWW kind of way--a pie in the sky and that sort of thing which didn't need my ministrations. Well about the middle of the winter of 1931 and 1932 Henry Cowell asked me if I would come around and address a composers' collective, a group of people who were interested in writing music for the labor movement, for protest marches and union gatherings and that sort of thing. "Oh," I said, "I've been waiting for that all my life." And I was just discovering George Pullen Jackson at the time, and Tom Benton, the painter, was showing me commercial records of Doc Boggs and Pete Steele and some of the others. So I was primed for that, and I went around and gave them a lecture. I knew it was Communist sponsored. Well, I didn't care whether it was Communist sponsored or Democrat sponsored. I would have been rather doubtful if it was Republican sponsored, because I'm anywhere from liberal to left to extreme left according to who will make use of music in the political, economic, social or any other activities. I went around knowing that it was Communist sponsored, although I was assured that most of the members were not Communist. It didn't make much difference to me because I was in the Lunarcharski idealistic state. I don't know if you know anyone who is listening to this tape but in the twenties there was a minister of education in the U.S.S.R. named [Anatoli Vasilievich] Lunarcharski who was all out for progressive education, the latest thing in what they called modern music and painting and sculpture and architecture and everything else. They were just going to go out and show those capitalist countries how behind the times they were. They were going to beat us all to avant-gardism. And so we were in more or less that state of mind. I knew Bertrand Russell's disappointment when he went to Russia, but I was very much taken with [Eugene] Debs' enthusiastic support and belief in what was happening in Russia. And with Lunarcharski's philosophy and his doings in my mind, I would have been very glad to cross swords with a Communist any place with the idea that after a little formality we'd decide we really didn't want to fight. We were going to shake hands. And I thought that Russia was going to be the future salvation of mankind. But I didn't take Marx, and I never have, without considerable grains of salt. I gave my paper on the dictatorship of the linguistic, pointing out how language and how you used it underlay any philosophy or any theory that you could think up and express in language. Therefore, Marx should be revised to meet the criticisms not only of his own dialectic but of Hegel's and of the whole proposition that you could devise a scheme for governing man on the basis of language. I said, "You can devise all the schemes you wantj but they'll every one of them defeat themselves sooner or later." I didn't say, "Now this beautiful picture that Russia gives us. . ." You see, this was 1931 and 1932, and they were all still believing in Lunarcharski. It was paradise for us in those days who were liberal or left-liberal. They would have to go back and look at Marx from the viewpoints that had accumulated in a hundred years and shown that it wasn't a bible; it wasn't the gospel; and it was a mistake to make a religion out of Communism. But they went right ahead and made a religion out of Communism as everybody knows. And Bertrand Russell said--I've forgotten when, but I think it was in the twenties--he pointed out that Communism was really a religion. I went on and said it was simply another branch of the Protestant Christian church. It couldn't have happened except in the tradition of Christianity. And the slogan that religion was the opiate of the people meant that other brands of Christianity other than mine are the opiate of the people, but mine is the word of God. I told this all to the blessed assembly, and they received it very, very nicely. The man who I knew was a member of the Communist party, and he was the man who was sort of managing this little collective--he doesn't live in this country any more--said, "Of course that's not what the Communist party believes." And I said, "Well, don't tell me. I know that, and that's one of the reasons why I speak the way I do." Now I've given that lecture. It's never been written out, but the nearest thing to it was published in that Music Vanguard. I don't know whether you've seen it. It was the prolegomenon to all future linguistic treatment of music, some title like that. I've given that lecture several times to Communist groups. The last time was just three or four years ago in London, a very smart group there that's run by Ewan McColl. Let me see, there must be about twelve in it, and they are all very proficient singers of the British ballad. The group meets weekly and discusses the relation between music and Maoist Communism, and then they go home to their various parts of London, which is spread all around where they're draftsmen in an architect' s office, an engineer, a secretary, a teacher--I don't know, all different people. They all have their own center, and they all take the criticism of music and the critical use of music with the Marxist accent back to their circle and from that these circles branch out.

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO
JUNE 18, 1971

SEEGER

The point is that although I had given this talk-- I can think of now three different occasions of giving just about the same talk to the same kind of a group--there has never been any comeback. They don't know what to do about just the flat statement that the way you talk about anything has a great deal to do with what you actually mean, and that to try to run the whole of society in terms of just one of the means of communication among men, disregarding music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, everything else, is bound to collapse after a while because it's a philosophy, and no philosopher has ever been able to make his system stand against the criticisms of his successors, or even sometimes of his contemporaries. We've known this now increasingly for three-thousand years, and we're still trying to do it. So I throw down the gauntlet and nobody picks it up. Well, at this time, the early thirties--as anybody who's taken the trouble to read through this oral history this far would remember--I was active at this time in the New York Musico logical Society of which I was chairman and secretary and according to Harold Spivacke, the only member on one evening who attended a session--which is not true. There were three. And I was president of the American Society for Comparative Musicology, which was the forerunner of the Society for Ethnomusicology. And what was the other one? Oh yes, the American Library of Musicology in which we are publishing Joseph Yasser's book on A Theory of Evolving Tonality and Helen Roberts' book on Form in Primitive Music . So I didn't want that activity to get mixed up with this composing activity. We picked right up, and I pitched right into the collective. I remember one of the nights that made me resolve that I'd devote a meeting every week to the collective. We met every week. My wife, Ruth, and I went out one miserable evening to a little Russian restaurant on Fourteenth Street--we lived in Greenwich Village then-- where we thought we could get something about two o'clock or four o'clock in the morning--I' ve forgotten what it was--and it was blizzardy and sleety and miserable, and we were having a nice shashlik inside. And in blew about seven almost frozen musicians who had been down in front of city hall trying to keep a picket line or a protest line going there. And I said, "My God, if those people will do that I can at least try to do something." So we got involved in this collective and it grew. I think I told the story of the May Day song, which was one by Aaron Copland. He was not a member of the collective, but he was a friend.

BRIEGLEB

You didn't tell it.

SEEGER

Didn't I tell the story? Are you sure? Well, it's such a good story that I'll have to tell it presently. We gathered a group of pretty good musicians, all practicing musicians in the town who were trying to write music for these purposes. The most successful at the moment was Marc Blitzstein whose Cradle Will Rock was put on by the WPA Theatre Project and literally rocked New York theater. I think I must have told the story of Molly Jackson coming in one time, Molly Jackson, the wife of a Kentucky coal miner, who was told to go to the borders in Harlan County and get out and stay out. She wanted to remain alive. She came out, and she came around to the collective. She was introduced, I think, by Alan Lomax. He was not a member of the collective, but he used to drop in occasionally. Well, she sat right around the piano where we were all playing the latest contributions the first day. Then the next day she sat off at a distance. The third day she sat way off in the corner. By that time--it was after the collective had been going a couple of years--I had discovered what was wrong, so I went up to her and said, "Aunt Molly, you must think that vre're all crazy nuts here, and we are. I've discovered it. You're on the right track." It was Aunt Molly who was putting labor union words to old British ballad tunes. She had one lovely one about "Join the CIO, join the CIO. . ." [singing] which were simply other words for "Oh lay the lily low, lay the lily low." She was a good ballad singer too. She never appeared again, but by that time I'd found out what was wrong. I think it was in 1934 that we had a competition for a May Day song. And the words were selected by a committee and published in the New Masses , and then the composers were supposed to go to work and compose for those words. And their works had been gone over by another committee, and the prize was awarded to Aaron Copland. I think it began "Into the streets May first." Aaron came around, and there were twenty-four of us sitting around the table. We had all contributed, and we went right through the criticisms. I was chairman; so I had the privilege of speaking last. And everybody praised Aaron's song. They agreed it was the best song. When it came my turn I said, "I have to agree with everybody else that your song, Aaron, is the best here, but upon how many occasions do you suppose this song will be sung on a picket line at fifteen degrees above zero, when it's sleeting and snowing in front of city hall about three o'clock in the morning, or at a union gathering, or a march down Fifth Avenue?" He said, "I don't suppose very often." I said, "How do the rest of you feel about it." They all felt the same way. It had skips of a seventh in it. It had modulations all over the place. It required for anybody but a pretty good musician, just to keep his pitch, a piano accompaniment, which was beautiful. So I said, "Well, enough of that. Now I have something to say about my own contribution. I think it's the worst of the lot, and I gladly admit that it is or may be, but given a second hearing, couldn't just about any goddamn fool in this country sing, 'Join in the Chorus'?" And there was agreement that it could. What I'd done was to throw together something like a kind of a mixture of a gospel song and the work song and a few other things and a football song. It came fairly near to a college football song. And it was the easiest thing in the world to remember. Well, that was the end of the collective for me. I don't think I went around to any more meetings, but it kept on for a couple of years and became more dogmatic and more extreme. By that time I'd discovered something that was much better in the way of using music socially than the collective ever dreamed of being, and that was by being invited to put three-hundred musicians in three-hundred settlement communities by the Roosevelt administration. And I've told all about that. Now meanwhile, to make the collective work, I had to work like the devil just to keep people interested and contributing and to see that we got in more members and made interesting enough meetings to have people come around to this old--they rented a loft for us down in the limbo of New York. I've forgotten vrhere, on Twelfth Street or Thirteenth Street near Third Avenue or something like that, and we had a rickety old piano. And I wrote for the Daily Worker-- criticisms of music. I was tremendously hit by the Depression, both personally and emotionally. And to see people going up and down in Rolls-Royces while there were people starving and sleeping all night covered with snow on doorsteps. I think I told the story of that too. I was pretty far out, so I wrote under the name of Carl Sands and I've never admitted the soft impeachment until my authorization to Dick Reuss that he could mention Carl Sands for the Folklore Society [meeting], and on this tape now. I made that in a couple of other tapes, but I have restrictions on t hem. But I think it ought to go in on this tape. Washington, November 1971. My friends, the musicologists, never knew anything about this activity. Some of them, if they did, didn't mention it. The people who knew Carl Sands knew Charles Seeger. The point that Reuss brought up was that he was a bit shocked at the tenor of some of these articles of mine in the Daily Worker . And I said, "Well, I've always claimed for years that you can't talk without there being an element of propaganda in it. All of science is propaganda; all of science is propaganda." He said, "For what?" I said, "For the belief that unlimited pursuit of knowledge of fact is worthwhile." And I said, "That's a religious belief. It has no scientific basis whatever, and it's led us to the point of where it's the unlimited pursuit of knowledge of fact that has not only endangered the survival of mankind by atom bombs, fission bombs, but by pollution of the air and soil and the water and overpopulation and a few other things. And it's all traceable right straight back to the sacrosanct rooms in the universities where the unlimited pursuit of knowledge of fact is pursued and takes place." He was very much shocked, as I say. But I got a letter from him a couple of days ago saying that he'd come around to my point, and he was less hard on me than he was, but he still thought I went a little bit far out in some of my remarks about bourgeois composers and the idle rich. And I said, "Well I did it definitely as an exercise in propaganda. It had its use at the time, and although I knew I was stretching the truth beyond where it could possibly be true, still it was the only way of getting certain things done. And I'm glad I did it." So we're on good terms with each other, and he said he would soft-pedal on this in his paper on me. And I wrote back and said, "Don't soft-pedal." I said, "Say just whatever you want. Make whatever criticisms you want. I wouldn't for a moment want you to blunt them." So that episode should go on. Well, meanwhile I got into writing music for "Oh joy upon this earth to live and see the day, when Rockefeller senior shall up to me and say, 'Comrade can you spare a dime?' Oh joy upon this earth. . ." [singing] It ' s a round, you see. I wrote about sixteen of those rounds and some other things, and I took off Chiang Kai-shek. I wrote the Chiang Kaishek one in a five-part round in five phrases for each part in the pentatonic scale. I made another round that went all through the twelve keys. I didn't expect them ever to be sung except by musicians for a joke, but most of them were simple things like the one I just sang. There were some other rounds written by some other composers, and some of them were damn good. My wife Ruth wrote a beautiful one to those same words. I wish I could sing it. The last line was "Comrade, comrade, comrade, comrade, comrade, can you spare a dime." [singing and laughing] Some of them were really immortal. Elie Siegmeister's was I think the best of the lot musically, about the three brothers named Du Pont. "There were three brothers named Du Pont. Patriots are they. They make their money from munitions in an honest way. They love their country right or wrong, but when yen or lira come along, they always very joyfully to anyone will sell shells that will all armor pierce, and armor that will stop each shell. There were three brothers named Du Pont." [singing and laughing] Musically that was the triumph, but I had one on William Randolph Hearst. I had several on Henry Ford. The one on Henry Ford was a double round like "Sumer is icumen in," and the two-part round at the bottom was just explosive noises with a voice. [noise imitations] So the main things of the collective were hilarious and full of humor.

BRIEGLEB

These were written down?

SEEGER

Oh yes, I have the book. I'm sending Reuss a Xerox of it if it comes out. They were great fun. There was another one on Gloria Vanderbilt who was just then being fought over by her relatives because she had $3 million, and the round wound up, "For she has three million bucks." [singing and laughing] This whole little episode in my life is an important one for showing the extents I will go to try to make music useful socially. I've spoken in previous chapters of this history about my efforts to do this in the Resettlement Administration and finally in WPA and then internationally between the twenty-one American republics. The place we really got going though was in the Resettlement, The others we hardly got beyond first base before we were stopped. Well now, that brings us to the next question you have to ask.

BRIEGLEB

I was going to ask you how your visit was with Mantle and Hazel Hood In Hawaii last month. You flew over to Hawaii to visit with them, and also maybe you'd like to say something about your impressions of Mantle's new book The Ethnomusicologist which seems to have now found its way into print.

SEEGER

It's been so long since I've leafed over the book that I have really nothing to say about it except that I'm awaiting with interest the reactions that it's going to be met with. I got a tremendous kick out of the two sets of seminars I've given--one at the University of Texas and the other at the University of Hawaii--using my latest papers as a base and having them read over ahead of time by the students so that we don't have to do any reading or lecturing. We can have questions and comment and attacks if necessary. It's a very nice bunch out there, live as anything. Mantle came around to all three of my sessions, and it was very nice to see him again. He has a beautiful house and lovely children, a lovely wife and of course a beautiful place to live. What's going to happen to the institute. Lord only knows. I think the proper thing is, something has got to come from above, I'm afraid, in the university. And that is a complete reassessment of the whole performing arts end of things. And by performing arts I mean speech, theater, music and dance. Linguistics, physics, psychology, esthetics, anthropology, sociology and the others would be hanging around on the outside just as they are today, but these four should be grouped in a separate school or college by themselves. They're thinking now of doing away with the Department of Speech here for a very good reason. It's off in a little cubbyhole by itself and not connected where it ought to be connected. You can't get up in the theater without using just what a discipline in the art of the speech can only provide. You can't get up in the halls of Congress or the House of Representatives or any other legislative or business group without an element of theater. And speech and theater go together there. And believe it or not, the gestures and the stance and very often the movement of the speaker before a podium, which is definitely a matter of dance, has a lot to do with what he puts over. A man who stays absolutely still, doesn't move a hand or a flick or anything else except an eyelash and his lips, can make a tremendous impression. But it's much easier for the average person to do something else but that, because that's almost impossible to do except for a few people who have just disciplined themselves to do it. It's a kind of dance, just as much as John Cage's 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds is a discipline in the art of music. It's going to go down in history as a great accomplishment. So that standing up and just delivering an address without moving anything but winking an eye and having to take a breath, or not even giving too much of an intimation of that, is something that can be done; but, as I say, not one person in a million can do it. It's a tour de force . Most people who lecture, who talk or give a speech or do anything--making music, too--there's a certain amount of dance in it. And they'll do it better if they've studied dance. I've already told what a ridiculous thing my music education was at Harvard. What I learned in those four years I learned by myself and from my friends and from people outside. I didn't learn much of anything from the teachers there. They had us all writing songs, and they never told us one single thing about speech. And as I look back over the songs, I find I'm giving high notes to syllables that you can't sing high notes comfortably on. Somebody could have told me. I was interested in the accompaniment. Sometimes I'd write the whole accompaniment and put the melody in afterwards. I think that's one of the things that's going to have to happen here. And if it doesn't happen here it will happen somewhere else, and they'll run away with the best students. I think it might be a school of forensics. I don't know what you call "forensic." I must look it up in the dictionary. But the whole four of them--speech, theater, dance and music--are inextricably mixed up together all through the world, and deliberately so in a large part of the East and in Africa. One of the remarks that I made up at the Seattle meeting was that I regretted that so many members of the audience came in while a drum band was going and sat down and didn't move. And then my friend Mclntyre, who is a nonmember of the society and was a member of an important committee, spoke up and said, "Mr. Seeger, why did you stay still?" I said, "Because I've been taught to for eighty-years, and I can't do anything else. If I try to do anything else it's a fake." Of course, this is perfectly true. Oh, I can get out and pretend to dance, but I'd be ashamed of myself at doing it and everybody would say, "My God, what an awful mess!" No. I think that's one of the important things, and that's one of the things that Mantle Hood made a gesture towards already in his thought about the future of the institute. I don't know whether he mentions it in his book or not, I've forgotten.

BRIEGLEB

He alludes to it, but he doesn't state it specifically.

SEEGER

But it's one of the things that's going to be on the boards for the next ten years. I did write an article on music in American universities that was published in 1923 in the Educational Review, and that said that all departments of music should be renamed departments of music and musicology. And musicology was a speech discipline, so I got speech in that far. And I also said in it that all departments of music and musicology should treat the other musics in the world as well as European. And that was pretty good for 1919 when I wrote it. Now, next question.

BRIEGLEB

I wonder if you'd like to give your opinion on what you think the future of the Society for Ethnomusicology will be.

SEEGER

The tendency nowadays in these societies is to break up. I see less tendency to amalgamate. When we formed the Society for Ethnomusicology I wrote the constitution, and I patterned it as closely as I possibly could after the constitution of the American Musicological Society with the hope that they would be able to come together sometime. But musically pushed ethnomusicology away when we were forming the Society of Ethnomusicology, and within five years it was trying to woo it. It was wooing it to come together. By that time the ethnomusicologists had felt their oats, and they rightly refused to amalgamate. I still hope that we can get the whole of music studied under the term "musicology" because the word "ethnomusicology" is valid for an approach to music, but it's not valid for the name of an independent study. You can't study music only in its culture. You've got to study it in itself to know what you're talking about in its culture. And the thing is illogical and absurd, but I see no chance of amalgamating yet. It still might happen. You never can tell. But there is perhaps more of a chance that it might split up, and it might split up into just such a group as was making the trouble in Seattle about wanting the Society for Ethnomusicology to go into a whole lot of politiking and protest marching and that sort of thing, which is not the business of a learned society. How we weather the next ten years will depend very largely on the presidents. If we have presidents who have some sense of organization and can preside over the Council in such a way as to make the Council function as the constitution is designed to make it function, and to handle the executive hoard as simply the executive committee of the Council, which is all it is in the present situation, and see that things are handled in an organizational way, we can weather the storms perfectly well. But if we get in some of these people who are just so easy going that they let anything happen, it could perfectly well split up and make things still worse than they are. You see, we have one advantage in musicology. If you will forget that we are split into musicology and ethnomusicology (but they both really are musicology), what we try to do in these two studies--I don't call them disciplines because I don't think they are yet, but they're studies--what we try to do in these two studies of musicology and ethnomusicology is what the students of language do in the dozen different disciplines that are still breaking up into another two dozen disciplines. There are physicists that can't talk to other physicists. There are psychologists who can't talk to other psychologists because they don't know the lingo, and sociologists are getting to be the same way. And that's one of the things I hope we won't have to face in music. Because whereas the study of the use of speech to deal with man is handled in the vast number of activities in the university from physics to religion--and there are at least a dozen and maybe eighteen departments (I don't know, I haven't stopped to count them) --in music we try to handle all to do with music in these two studies. And I hope we can keep them in these two and eventually get them all into one, because the more you let language split music up, the farther you're pushing music away from knowing it. You don't know music by knowing the music of any tribe in this earth down to the last yelp. You don't know music if you know everything that Bach ever wrote and can play it backwards. If the word "music" means anything it means all the music that man makes, and you'll find that it's quite difficult to handle all the music that man makes unless you run into its relation with speech, because it's in speech that you're saying all this. It's speech that makes you say a lot of the things you say, not music that makes you say it. You have to talk the way speech makes people talk or lets them talk. You can't talk the way a musician would talk if he could really talk musically, because what the musicians know can't be put into speech as we know it. There are no words for it. It's ineffable. You try to say what is communicated by the simplest piece of music. Well, you can talk all your life, and you can't finish saying the things about it that you can say, and then you don't know much of anything about the music itself. That is, you don't know the music itself. You know all the speech words about it, but you don't know the music itself. We could describe some music that we know nowadays which is then obliterated and nobody after the obliteration of the actual making of that music would ever be able to put it together again, as if all the records were destroyed. We know a tremendous lot about how Palestrina was performed, but I'm sure that if Palestrina heard some of our performances he'd run out of the room with his hands over his ears, saying, "For God's sake, if you're going to perform my music have it performed by musicians! " You say, "What's the matter? They're not singing in tune! They're not singing in time! They're phrasing it all wrong!" We don't know. God knows how they are playing that music in the sixteenth century accompanied with some of the instruments that they had. Now maybe on those instruments the players were able to modify the pitch more than we think they can so as to match the singing. But I'm not convinced of it. You can do just so much with fingers on the holes of instruments and the embouchure and just so much with fingers in different places on the string. There are limits. So I ' d like to see the study of music kept in one overall study and make it a discipline, not something you just waltz around in, taking a little smattering here and a little smattering there without any sound theory, or else going off on a theoretical binge without any knowledge of any particulars. Well, when it comes to the Seattle meeting, my paper and the paper of McAllester and Wachsmann, which will come out in the September number of Ethnomusicology (1971), will be a little bit more coherent and meaningful.

BRIEGLEB

It goes without saying that we're all going to miss not having you at UCLA; just seeing you in the hallway and having you in the seminar, of course, has been a really unique experience for all of us. So now that you are moving to Connecticut, to the East Coast, I can't help but ask what plans for the future you have for your own research and for what you'll do with your time after you leave Los Angeles.

SEEGER

I have found that a drastic move is a very good thing for me. All the moves I've made that put me in a moving van from one part of the country to another have heen fortunate. I think I've spent my time here. Originally it was planned to be just five years, but Mantle and I have added one year and one year and one year until finally it's gotten to be ten, and I think enough is enough. If I can only get that volume of collected papers out of the way before too long I can start in a new life in the East where I will be nearer my children and nearer a whole lot of other people that I want to see more of. It's not that I can't get more out of the institute here and that it doesn't make me sad to leave the people who are here, but I'm ready for a move. Let me see, I spent six years in Berkeley and twelve years in New York and eighteen years in Washington, and I've been in California for fifteen years . I think it's time for me to move on. I shall have seminars in various universities, of the type that I just referred to, once a month or so, and keep in touch with the young people, because it's interesting that the reception of my work has been very distant by my colleagues. They just say, "Yes, he's a good man he's a good man, yes." But they don't take much note of my papers. The people in my children's generation--Mantle Hood and Wachsmann and the others--they read them, and they give me some very nice comebacks, but they are very gentle and upon occasion, such as Mantle's last suggestion that I put hack into my map of the field of musicology a description of music that would equal the description of speech-- very few of them as hefty as that. But it's from the children, my grandchildren, young people of my grandchildren's level who are about [the age of] the graduate students here that I get the most from. They'll stand right up to me and say, "Mr. Seeger, I think it was unfair of you to say that in the seminar this afternoon." Ah, fine, now we can go at it. "Mr. Seeger, I think you're completely wrong there. Now just listen to this." Then we get somewhere, and it stimulates me enormously. So I shall miss them, but I'll find them in the East probably just as ebullient. Then I'll be nearer my children, my grandchildren that I'd like to see something of, and nearer Europe where I may get around. I don't get to Europe very often from here. I will from the East.

BRIEGLEB

Do you still plan to put together this conference on the Melograph in Europe?

SEEGER

I'm willing to cooperate wlth somebody who will be the sparkplug in that project, but I've got too many other things to do. If there's not enough general interest to do, I think, the only thing that is to be done, and that is to get an international group together, then I'll make one last effort to persuade a certain foundation to get the preliminary conversation going. I've put it off the last year or two because of the nature of our discoveries here with the Melograph, but also because I have wind of a conference to which I'll be invited, into which I could Introduce this topic very fortunately. That's supposed to take place in about a year. So I think I'll try to make one effort there, but it's a matter of writing a lot of letters and talking to a lot of people, and I've got too many other things to do. The other thing I have to do is to take the stuff of the papers that I've written so far and to reorganize it in the form of the book I've planned all my life, the Principia Musicologica. I'm going to start in with it in the fall. I have to write that mostly out of my own head, and I have the Yale library only an hour and a quarter away. I have New York City only an hour and a half away. Brown is just across the state, and Wesleyan is too. So I won't be in the sticks. I'm going to see Sam Chianis up at Binghamton and Lois Anderson out in Wisconsin. They might even have me back here sometime.