The Columbia—Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers

Abstract

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) in New York City was established in 1959 by founding director Vladimir Ussachevsky, along with Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Roger Sessions, as the first educational and creative institution of its kind in the United States. Its central role in training composers hailing from outside the United States is not widely known. Home countries of composers include Turkey, Japan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Spain, Iran, Ghana, and several in Latin America. Using interviews (conducted almost entirely by the author) and documentary sources (largely from the CPEMC archives), this article explores the personal narratives of these composers and their impact on the culture of the CPEMC and on their own future work, both musically and institutionally. Studio logs (see Figure 1) from the archives proved invaluable resources. Quotations without citation are drawn from interviews conducted by the author, detailed in Appendix A.