Columbia-Princeton Center (1959)
Ideas
1959. The Cold War is fought not only in space, but in sound. The Rockefeller Foundation pours a massive $175,000 into a lab designed to outdo the European avant-garde. Housed in a former milk factory, CPEMC became America's first electronic Mecca, uniting musical visionaries from four continents.
Full text
By the late 1950s, Americans were frankly losing the musical arms race. While state-funded radio studios thrived in Paris and Cologne, US pioneers huddled wherever they could. The early tape experiments of Ussachevsky and Luening took place in ordinary apartments and even in the New York basement of legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini, hauling the equipment at night on bicycles. The turning point came in 1956 when the composers traveled to Europe to personally study the advanced facilities in Paris and Cologne. Returning home, they realized that to compete on a global level, scattered American enthusiasts needed a powerful, unified center.
Everything changed thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation. Noticing that composers from both universities (Luening, Ussachevsky, and Babbitt) were already collaborating on the RCA synthesizer in Princeton, the Foundation's representatives recommended they create a joint center and awarded them a massive grant. The new joint studio took over Prentis Hall in Manhattan, a former milk bottling plant.
Amidst the industrial tiles and echoing pipes, a unique cultural melting pot emerged. CPEMC acted as a magnet, drawing visionaries from across the globe—from Argentine Mario Davidovsky and Egyptian Halim El-Dabh to Turkish innovator Bülent Arel. Hundreds of composers passed through the Center to take a closer look at the machines of the future. According to Milton Babbitt's recollections, the tension here was so palpable that when the great Igor Stravinsky visited, he became so overwhelmed by the new sonic possibilities that he "had a heart attack there, he got so excited."
While the "Columbia camp" spent days cutting tape with razor blades to preserve human breath in electronics, the "Princeton camp," guided by mathematician Milton Babbitt, sought absolute control and sterility. Babbitt would soon cement this uncompromising stance in his scandalous manifesto "Who Cares if You Listen?". Out of this chaos of arguments and miles of magnetic tape, electronic music evolved into a fully-fledged academic art form.
Sources
- Gluck, Robert J. (2007). The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers — Computer Music Journal
- Patterson, Nick (2011). The Archives of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center — Notes
- Hartsock, Ralph (2006). Precursors to the Formation of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center — ICMC
- Hinkle-Turner, Elizabeth (2006). Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line — Ashgate, Aldershot