Here is how Winthrop Sargeant, the former music critic of The New Yorker, wrote about a Hunter College concert of works by Ralph Shapey, Charles Dodge, Richard Wernick, and others, in March of 1968: "Two or three times a season, conceiving it to be my duty, I drop in on an avant-garde concert to see whether anything in the area is getting anywhere. Nothing ever is, but at least I have the satisfaction of feeling that I have kept in touch.... It seems to me that this sort of activity has become a campus fad analogous to the goldfish-swallowing of a generation or so ago.... The foundations that irresponsibly hand out grants for this kind of thing are tax-exempt, and as a citizen and tax-payer I object to paying my share of what they do not." Harumph!
