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The earliest memory I have of Milton Babbitt is of a performance at the Princeton Graduate School by Bethany Beardslee and JacquesLouis Monod of The Widow's Lament in Springtime, the words by William Carlos Williams. It must, I think, have taken place soon after I came to Princeton, and would therefore have been some time in 1945 or 1946. Hearing this performance was an extraordinary experience. I knew then very little of contemporary music: I even remember that listening only a short time before to a playing of Bart6k's Fifth String Quartet had fascinated me but made me slightly ill-queasy with the effort of trying to understand and with the frustration of misplaced expectation. The Widow's Lament moved me literally to tears. Part of the effect and the effectiveness of this early song of Milton's comes from its delicate transparency, already characteristic of his writing. This transparency has, indeed, a physical seduction, and it is not simply achieved by a dry spareness: it depends on the inter-acting sonority of the independent lines. At this point in Milton's work, the different layers of sound are still conceived traditionally, as separate contrapuntal strands; but more than any other composer of that time Milton insisted on the vertical control of the series as well as on the horizontal. The series of The Widow's Lament is so constituted that it contains a rising major triad-minor in the inverted descent. (I have tried to check my recollection of this beautiful song by a reference to the score, but the music library at Berkeley (where I am now writing this) has, astonishingly and sadly, no copy.) One remembers Berg's refusal to give up the contrast of major and minor because of their possibilities of dramatic contrast. But Milton does not invoke this contrast or even refer to it musically in the song; nor does he seek out the latent possi

WE ARE ALL Of US to blame for the present state of music: composers, performers, musicologists, and public alike. Nor is it interesting to apportion the guilt equitably: we can all see the motes in each other's eye clearly enough while the beams in our own should make us weep with vexation. The trouble is, we are indeed so conscious of the universal responsibility that we are all waiting for the others to show a change of heart and start their good works. Meanwhile the isolation continues: performance, composition, and the history of music have little or nothing to do with each other. Performers, for the most part, refuse to play contemporary works until materially encouraged by the foundations. Composers, knowing that a work of any difficulty will be seldom, if ever, performed, have made the works even more difficult, both for the public and the performer, and are now turning to the electronic field, from which certainly the performer, and probably the public will be banished for good. The musicologists continue to teach the history of music without any concern for the relevance it can have for the music being written today. We can all blame the public, if we like, and they have their share of the heavy irresponsibility-but, after all, why should they buy tickets to hear works of contemporary music when the performances are as bad as they generally are. They do not, of course, buy tickets to the good performances, either, but how are they to know which ones are good when even the critics are mostly not able to tell them?