My connection with Jonathan Edwards College [JE] began in January 1936. John McCullough had organized my first recital in Sprague Hall and had arranged to put me up in the guest suite of the college. This first 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 first 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 file of concert programs. Much of it will need verification. 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 first 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 continuo. Part of this program was given a preview at JE, which by now had established its reputation among the Yale colleges as the one most intimately and constantly concerned with music.

In what must have been the season of 1942–43, I organized, in the not-yetdivided Common Room on an almost nonexistent budget, a series of concerts which still dazzles me when I think of it.