Last month, I had a post on Charles Wuorinen, the late American composer. The month before that, I had a post on Robert L. Marshall, the American musicologist, who has just published a book about Bach and Mozart (jointly).
Wuorinen and Marshall were undergraduates at Columbia University at the same time. Professor Marshall has sent me a note about Wuorinen and related matters, and it includes a story that is one of the most smile-making I’ve heard in a long time. I tell it here, with the professor’s blessing.
Before moving to Brandeis, Marshall taught at the University of Chicago, where he was chairman of the music department. “At one point,” he says, “we acquired a state-of-the-art electronic-music studio with the help of some donors.” Composers on the faculty insisted that Chicago had to have such a studio, in order to be au courant. They did not want to use it themselves, mind you. But they thought it would help in recruiting top grad students.
One day, Professor Marshall found himself at the urinal next to Edward H. Levi—the president of the university, and a giant in academia, especially the law. (Oddly enough, I was just writing about Levi, about whom Robert Bork told me some stories.) Levi had been dean of the law school and provost of the university. Now he was president of the university and would soon by U.S. attorney general, under Ford.
There in the men’s room, Marshall said to Levi, “I have to tell you: The music department has just acquired its electronic-music studio and can compose computer music.”
Levi—famous for a dry wit—responded, “Good. Now you have to get a computer to listen to it.”