In his 2002 Reflections of an American Composer, Arthur Berger recalls that during the 1920s and 1930s, the musical landscape in New York appeared desolate for American art composers who found themselves “truly underground.” Among such bleak conditions, Berger identifies one bright oasis, isolated from New York’s mainstream concert scene: a place where one could not only hear and discuss the music of important American modernist composers, but also meet them.1 Berger’s oasis was the New School for Social Research, a small private educational institution tucked away in the bohemian community of Greenwich Village.