ABSTRACT
At the end of World War II enrollment in higher education increased significantly: the University of California doubled to more than 25,000. In 1945 the United Nations was born in San Francisco. Antonio Borgese wrote a suggested world constitution. During the 1940s and 1950s several prominent composers taught or lived in California: Schoenberg taught at USC and UCLA, Milhaud at Mills College, Bloch lived in Oregon and taught summer school at Berkeley, Stravinsky lived in Los Angeles, and Krenek moved there in 1947. Sessions, who had taught at the summer school at Berkeley in the summers of 1935, 1936, and 1941, was to join them on the West Coast. When Sessions arrived in Berkeley in 1945, Milhaud lived only ten miles away, and the two saw each other frequently. Sessions described the move:
I was [in Princeton] virtually through the war—the German war ended before I left. In the fall of 1945 I was offered a job in Berkeley. I had spent three other summers in Berkeley in the meantime and I wanted very much to go to the west. I didn’t like the Princeton climate too much and my wife hated it. But mainly I had a feeling of adventure. I wanted to move to another part of the country. There were other elements in it, too. One was that it was made very clear—and I’m not blaming anyone for this at all, it just was the [Princeton] university policy—that the composer did interest them in California. That was probably the decisive thing. It wasn’t that I had suffered any particular hardship at Princeton—but—there were no concessions made. I couldn’t ask for anything on the ground that I needed time for my own work. One consequence was that my own work didn’t flourish at all. I wrote one big work more or less by the skin of my teeth all the time that I was in Princeton [the First Quartet, 1936]. I wrote little pieces, and I wrote my Duo for Violin and Piano in 1942. I got started on a big symphony [No. 2]. But the minute I got to Berkeley, I began producing. I finished the symphony, which was very much of a turning point in my career. I wrote a piano sonata [No. 2] immediately. I wrote an opera immediately, which was produced there. Actually, there were three years when I didn’t produce again. I wrote a book instead, which I regret although the book is quite successful. 1 It wasn’t only for this reason that I did it. It was also a period when I needed to take stock. 2
