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Abstract

ELEANOR CORY ELEANOR CORY: This is a lovely occasion. Many names are coming to mind as I have been thinking about Perspectives. I wish we could all see each other. RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Yes, I can imagine. It has been fun and interesting talking to everyone, and then corresponding about our conversations afterward. So many people keep thinking of things; people or articles pop into their minds after our conversations. . . . It has also been nice to hear that the actual conversing about PNM has brought out new thoughts and ideas about the journal for some people. CORY: I have been jotting down people and ideas that I had not thought about in a long time. VANDAGRIFF: Would you be willing to share with me when and how you first encountered Perspectives of New Music? 148 History of Perspectives CORY: Sure. It started in graduate school in the early 70s. I was in the Columbia DMA program where Charles Wuorinen was my composition teacher, and Ben Boretz was one of my teachers for theory and analysis. Both were writing articles in Perspectives. My fellow students and I looked forward to new issues of Perspectives which connected with what we were learning in class. I felt like we were part of a very serious conversation about music. At New England Conservatory I had studied Schenker analysis with Ernst Oster, Schoenberg String Quartets with Rudolf Kolisch, and taken an in-depth course on Stravinsky taught by John Heiss, all of which had made me very excited about analyzing music. I read Perspectives articles, went to class, and studied scores. I was interested in how music theory was elucidating atonal music, and how that process was changing a larger musical climate. The work was completely new to me and very interesting. Perspectives was also very important for my own music. As I searched for a compositional language, I began to write some articles. In Perspectives I wrote an analysis of a Martin Boykan String Quartet. There were two views of the piece; the other was by John Harbison (Harbison and Cory 1973). In the Musical Quarterly I wrote analyses of string quartets by Martin Boykan and Elaine Barkin and a record review of solo piano music including pieces by Wuorinen, Wolpe, Wyner, Perle, Moss, and others (These articles appeared respectively in vol. 61, no.2 (1975) and vol. 62, no.4 (1976)). I also wrote a book review of George Perle’s Twelve-Tone Tonality in Theory and Practice (vol. 4, no. 1 (1979): 30–36). The common motivation was my fascination with compositional processes. I also assumed I was going to graduate and get a teaching job. Articles were part of what composers were ‘supposed to do’ in order to get and keep jobs. They also helped me think through ideas for my own music. I went to Music Theory conferences and became part of the academic music world. VANDAGRIFF: It sounds like something happened next, or you ended up not staying a part of that world. . . . CORY: Yes, it was interesting. Perspectives went in other directions, and I went in other directions. One of the directions I went was totally personal: I got married (to another composer, Joel Gressel) and eventually had two children. After teaching full-time at Baruch College, CUNY, and Yale (a non-tenure track) for ten years, I taught part-time at Manhattan School of Music, Sarah Lawrence, Hofstra, Brooklyn College , and the New School (not all at the same time). I didn’t have time to do anything but write music, teach, and raise my children. VANDAGRIFF: And you probably did not have time to do all of that! Eleanor Cory 149 CORY: Yes, and I did not have time to do all of that! That was sort of a startling chapter in my life, actually. . . . I did not read or write articles. Also, at around that time, it seemed to me, Perspectives was going in a more experimental direction, and I did not subscribe after a while. Sometimes I would see individual articles. Later there was Open Space. I read some of the articles and listened to the CDs while following the scores, some of which were...