Chapter Eight
RK and Music
at JE (1983)
My connection with Jonathan Edwards College [JE]^1 began in January 1936.
John McCullough had organized my fi rst recital in Sprague Hall and had
arranged to put me up in the guest suite of the college. This fi rst recital on
January 24, 1936, in which I played Bach’s Italian Concerto, Chromatic Fantasy
and Fugue, and the Goldberg Variations, was reviewed for the Yale Daily News by
Beekman Cannon. It was during my stay in New Haven that I fi rst met Robert
and Margaret French and played Bach on the clavichord for the Fellows. This
kind of performance in the as-yet-uncarpeted Fellows Common Room for
a maximum number of not more than twenty or thirty persons was to be
repeated at various intervals in subsequent years. In 1940, at the same time
as Paul Hindemith, I joined the faculty of the Yale School of Music; in 1941,
I became a resident Fellow of the College. Until 1954, although my principal
residence was in New York, one or the other of the Fellows suites (769, 765,
or 760) offered me the opportunity to make contact with undergraduates
who at that time were not as much younger than I as they are now. I write
the following without resorting to my fi le of concert programs. Much of it
will need verifi cation. It may have been in the fall of 1942 that Alexander
Schneider and I played previews of the two programs of Bach and Mozart
with which we made our fi rst public appearance at Harvard in October 1942,
and with which we subsequently toured the entire United States. In February
of 1942, I had joined Paul Hindemith in Sprague Hall for a performance of
the biblical sonatas of Heinrich Biber for violin with scordatura and contin-
uo.^2 Part of this program was given a preview at JE, which by now had estab-
- Jonathan Edwards is a residential college at Yale University.
- This is likely a reference to Biber’s Rosary Sonatas (also known as the Mystery
Sonatas).
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