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Abstract

PAUL LANSKY RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Before you were involved with the magazine, what was your relationship with it, and what did you think about it? PAUL LANSKY: Well, it started publishing in 1962; I was 18 and in college at the time. I thought it was really exciting. It was the first thing of its kind. You have to realize that that was a special period in American music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer, and the buzz was that everyone thought that this was the wave of the future (Aaron Copland even tried his hand at it), that this way of thinking about music was revolutionary, path-breaking, and Perspectives was at the cutting edge. (It’s appropriate that the Stravinsky logo is on the cover.) So I subscribed from the very beginning. It got me interested in going to Princeton. I read the early issues from cover to cover. (At the time I was also a faithful reader of Ben Boretz’s columns in The Nation.) VANDAGRIFF: How did your relation to PNM evolve? 176 History of Perspectives LANSKY: I was an associate editor from the issue after the Fromm departure (Vol. 11/1, 1972) until the Red Issue (Vol. 17/2, 1979) after which a bunch of us got lumped together in an editorial group. I continued working on the magazine but on a lower burner. It was exciting, and I enjoyed doing it. I did a lot of the grunt work. In those postFromm days we had to do everything by ourselves. I took care of getting some of the PMTs done (photo-mechanical transfers), farmed out some music copying tasks. I solicited articles. I collected the Roger Sessions tribute (PNM 1978). I worked on the Babbitt issue (PNM 1976). I have memories of sitting in Elaine Barkin’s kitchen in Manhattan, doing something with scissors and scotch tape while her sons circled around waiting for dinner. Working hand in glove with Elaine and Ben was exhilarating. I don’t remember ever having a casual conversation with either of them about anything having to do with the magazine. PNM was the center of my intellectual–musical universe until the late seventies , when I got heavily involved in computer music. We all thought of it as a composer’s magazine, for a particular breed of composer. VANDAGRIFF: You mentioned a “particular breed of composer. . . .” Does that have anything to do with the language people wanted to use to talk about music? Or that some wanted to converse about music, others didn’t? LANSKY: Language about music was the heart of the enterprise. A lot of the writing in PNM was about finding new ways to talk about music. On one side, there are Babbitt’s writings and, on another, things like Jane Coppock’s Schoenberg essay (1975). In this context Jim Randall’s “Compose Yourself” (1972–1974) came as no surprise to me. (This coincided with Fromm’s withdrawal of support but there was apparently more involved.) “Compose Yourself” was originally going to run in the issue that became the Stravinsky memorial issue. Fromm, though he had already told PNM that his Foundation would cease sponsoring the journal after that issue, staunchly objected to Randall’s piece appearing in the issue devoted to the memory of the great Igor Stravinsky. Around that time there were a complicated tangle of events. Fromm had run out of patience with the cost of producing Perspectives. It was costing so much in large part because of what Princeton University Press charged. Additionally, Fromm had also long been displeased by the great amount of “science in music,” as he put it, that appeared in the magazine, and he had never been interested in publishing such technical articles that he saw, I believe, as only being of Paul Lansky 177 interest to a very specialized readership. Fromm wanted to sponsor a magazine about contemporary music that one could find on a coffee table, pick it up, and peruse it. He wanted a magazine that was akin to Show or Commentary. Despite intervening to set it “aright” multiple times, Fromm lost patience and told Boretz that the Fromm Music Foundation would cease funding at...