'A Slight Oversimplification': An Interview with Arnold Whittall

Abstract

1995 sees the sixtieth birthday of Arnold Whittall, and 1996 his retirement from King's College London. Contrary to what many have assumed over the years, I never studied with him, but became his junior colleague when I was appointed Lecturer at KCL in 1979, where I worked for six exciting years. I have long ago lost count of the number of projects he and I have worked on together, and indeed the number of my own projects about which I have sought his advice. The Editor of Music Analysis invited me to contribute a celebration to this issue and gave me carte-blanche on the form it should take. It hardly required prolonged or even deep thought for me to realise what it would be best to do. Rather than constructing some sort of biographical or simply historical tribute to celebrate his work, I thought it would be most appropriate to let Arnold speak for himself. It was reassuring when he readily agreed to this, seizing the chance perhaps of a mechanism guaranteed to prevent me from writing at my customary length. What follows is the result of a single interview conducted in July 1995. It is virtually unedited, shorn here and there (in the interests of good taste) of Whittall's cutting humour and Dunsby's sarcasm, but certainly not in any sense sanitised as will be indicated, if not exactly proved, by the frank moments below where some intended deceptions were, on reflection, not carried out. I have introduced a minimum of punctuation, and unfortunately it is unrealistic to try to record emphasis (but there is plenty of it on the tapes). My approach was simple enough to make a record of what the interviewee had to say, to some extent about himself, which will be of greatest interest to his hundreds of friends and former students (there is a lot of overlap in these categories!), but also about current issues in theory and analysis, which will, I am in no doubt, be of interest to the thousands who read this journal.