AS a long‐time member of Columbia University's Music Department and, because of my retirement in 1970, not involved in the vote on Mr. Wuorinen's tenure, perhaps I may be permitted to reflect on his sweeping charges directed at this great university. Mr. Wuorinen prefaces his article with a disclaimer: it is not his individual case that rankles; he cites it only as a typical illustration of the inhumanity of a “large bureaucratized educational organ,” hostile to and callous about the arts. Yet this is an individual case indeed.

During my 37 years at Columbia, the department lived in peace except for the occasional brief spats that occur in every family. In the entire 75‐year history of the department there were only two instances when a quarrel reached such proportions that it neces sitated administrative intervention. In terestingly, both of these concerned gifted but highly temperamental com posers, unable to adjust to the disci pline, both educational and personal, required by a university. Edward Mac Dowell was at the end of a distin guished career; Charles Wuorinen is at the beginning of a more than promising one.

The same group which Mr. Wuorinen brands as anti‐artistic because they did not approve his permanent appointment unanimously elected Jack Beeson as chairman of the department; Mr. Beeson has proved to be an admirably adroit and impartial executive officer. And Mr. Beeson is a composer who cherishes his vocation as much as does his younger, headstrong colleague. But, unlike Mr. Wuorinen, he is a composer who is fully aware of the educational and organizational needs and principles of the university. The department sup ports musical composition as it does musical scholarship, and the two wings of the staff have gotten along very well indeed, the composers rising to professorships as regularly as the scholars. (It might be noted, however, that in no academic department is a first teaching post reasonably expected to lead to tenure.) If anything, Mr. Wuorinen and his group received more support than anyone else—from founda tions, from the university itself, from sympathetic deans. Surely, Jacques Bar zun cannot be accused of hostility toward composition in general and the avant‐garde in particular.

*

When Mr. Wuorinen's arrogance, ruthlessness, and contempt for anything outside his bailiwick increasingly irri tated his colleagues, it was Mr. Beeson who repeatedly asked the rest of us for forbearance; apparently during the past year the situation became intoler able, and Mr. Wuorinen was advised to seek an environment more suitable both for his unquestioned talents and for his unquestionable inability to get along with others. Mr. Wuorinen states that a composer “above all needs col leagues” it was not as a composer but precisely as a colleague that he failed at Columbia.

On August 8, The Sunday Times printed an article by Charles Wuorinen, Pulitzer Prize composer who recently resigned from the Music Department at Columbia University. In it, Mr. Wuorinen contended that he had been unjustly denied tenure at the university and expressed the fear that, due largely to economic cut‐backs and the resurfacing of negative attitudes toward artistic activity on the campus, the future of the arts at Columbia and other private Eastern universities is in grave question. In the article here, and in the letters that follow, The Times presents the reactions of readers, as well as a reply by Mr. Wuorinen.



The accusations made in his article are so outré that I am surprised that The Times published this outburst without verifying the facts. This vio lent attack on the university can issue only from a bad conscience of indebted ness. A young generation usually rebels against its elders if their thinking is considerably apart, but Mr. Wuorinen and his like‐minded confreres (a minor ity even among the younger staff) cannot accept the fact that they are only part of a cultural scene that has a weighty artistic inheritance, and in their envy and hostility see an enemy in everyone who is not of their per suasion. But when Mr. Wuorinen descends to the old saw that an “artist. is not a scholar: he makes, not regurgitates,” he betrays not only a juvenile conception of the nature and function of scholarship in the university, but insults the memory of his father, a distinguished scholar, who for 40 years was a member of the History Depart ment at Columbia University.

I want to single out just a few of the immature statements made in that Sunday piece. It is not true that “music at Columbia has always meant con temporary music.” How could it? A university is concerned with the entire spectrum of arts and letters. And who has ever seen at Columbia “contempt for individual accomplishment”? His statement that the “ruling circle” that decided his fate represents only about “one‐fifth” of the staff reminds me of the statistics released by the pro‐ Eisenhower faction when the president of Columbia ran for President of the United States: upon closer examination, that “academic majority” turned out to include the office staffs, the kitchen help, and the grounds crew.

Mr. Wuorinen says that a composer should not be required to “disguise himself as a teacher; the composer composes, that is his role.” No ques tion, this is undoubtedly his first duty, but if it is his only role, then why is he in the university? Who is going to do the teaching—the despised regurgi tators? Columbia, like any other uni versity, has on its faculty many excellent poets, philosophers, writers, architects, who are active as creative artists but who are also competent and dedicated teachers. What would happen to the university—and to the students— if all these men would throw away their “disguise,” just draw their salaries, and go their own way? It is absurd to state that “a high level administration deci sion has been made to eliminate the arts from the campus,” nor is it true that the university embraced the arts “only a few years ago” both the fine arts and the music departments were established at the end of the last century, and the latter has given high place to composers from the beginning.

Mr. Wuorinen's manifesto was a sorry display of spleen and vindictive ness. apparently the expression of an artistic Oedipus complex. Mr. Wuorinen seems to feel that he can ascend to eminence only if he succeeds in doing away with his predecessors. The uni versity inust be thought of as a living stream, a tradition, an active process that constantly rejuvenates itself. But it always deals with arts, letters, and sciences in their entirety, the past as well as the present. What makes this young man think that musical composi tion at Columbia will “disintegrate” with his departure? I am sure that music at Columbia will endure, even without Charles Wuorinen.