Dear Mr. Lipman:
I just read your article in The New Criterion (“Doing New Music, Doing American Music,” November 1987). I now feel sorry for you.

To introduce myself as you did in the article: I teach at the University of California, San Diego. Conduct the orchestra and co-ordinate the new music group and teach various classes in theory, etc. In the summer I have a festival in New Hampshire and have been there since i960. We have a chamber orchestra and a varied program to suit a very conservative audience. I studied with Ernst Krenek and Stefan Wolpe at Black Mountain and have always had an avid interest in new music.

I have read The New Criterion since it came out . . . usually at the library but this fall subscribed. I like the articles and enjoy the sort of nay-saying attitude that often appears. I have read both of your books and actually paid for The House of Music. Therefore I am not a Lipman hater.

I feel sorry for your education . . . it seems bizarre that one could go to Juilliard and seem not to have played the Webern Variations and no Ives. And you have kept it up with a little pride. I sympathize with your problems with the Elliott Carter piano concerto, and with many of your views of new music in your articles. But when I read what you had been pushing at the Waterloo Music Festival