| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton
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6. Music; Tovey
Aitken missed the March meeting of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, being that evening leader of the EU Musical Society’s orchestra. In the perpetual vying of music and mathematics for his attention, music this time prevailed. At the end of term he mused:
I have learned much, but do not quite know where I am in mathematics; algebraist more than analyst perhaps 43
and the vagueness of his judgment reflects the variety of areas in which he had worked: ‘topics in algebra, geometry and number theory, which were not quite typical of his mathematical style’.44
In the vacation Winifred and Alec visited London: to Kew, ‘where each morning W- did botany’,45 to see an opera and a film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, ‘bizarre and disquieting … based on hallucinations of insanity. It seems exact, documented and experienced, not merely imagined’, and generally exploring. They returned to Edinburgh early when Winifred showed signs of influenza.
Alec approached Donald Tovey, Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh, for his opinion on a piano sonata he had composed. His account of the meeting, brief as it is, is perhaps the most endearing passage in the Memoir.
This was in George Square Gardens, where he was engaged in kicking a football with John, his adopted son, aged about 5, it would seem. D.F.T. read 3 pages, and the last page of the first movement. John interrupts, begging “Play, Donald, play!” D.F.T. says “some imagination”, but tells me to “write songs”, and to take his course in composition, if possible, in October. So farewell.46
In the final days of the vacation Alec and Winifred took day trips to Granton, Queensferry and Roslin, and made their first forays into the Pentland Hills, ‘in the footsteps of Scott and Stevenson’47.
Though the lease on Denhamgreen Place was extended, it was too expensive and in late September the Aitkens moved again, to the picturesque but weirdly unsuitable Westfield House at Cramond,:
a very ancient place about five miles out of Edinburgh, but connected with the town by a frequent train service, which lands you into Princes St in about a quarter of an hour. Our landlord is very proud of the old house we occupy (rambling, one storied, built of stone, dating from 1800) ... Altogether we live close to surroundings of typical old-time rusticity.48
| 43 | Memoir, 75. |
| 44 | W. Lederman, Obituary, Ed Math Soc., 163. |
| 45 | Memoir, 76. |
| 46 | Memoir, 77. |
| 47 | ACA to Pearl, 11 June 1924. |
| 48 | Aitken to Pearl, 26 October 1924. |
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