I<span class="small-caps">nterview</span>

Abstract

MARTIN BOYKAN RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Were there any specific articles or debates that ran in Perspectives of New Music that made a big impact on you or hold a particular place in your mind? MARTIN BOYKAN: Well, from the beginning, Perspectives was a very serious magazine with important technical articles on music theory. I wouldn’t presume to rate those articles, and to be honest, time hasn’t always permitted me to read a whole issue, but for personal reasons, there was one article that did make a very large impression on me. I am referring to an essay by Joe Dubiel on Milton Babbitt—so far as I am aware, the first attempt to explore his music from the point of view of a listener, performer, or composer. For once the issue was neither novelty nor set theory, but rather the musical events that define the experience of a particular piece. Shortly afterwards I had the opportunity to read other essays of Dubiel (some still unpublished), and it was this experience that stimulated me to write what became, in fact, Martin Boykan 131 my first book on music (Silence and Slow Time: Studies in Musical Narrative, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow; Oxford: Oxford Publicity Partnership , 2003). All of this seems rather appropriate because Milton was very much behind Perspectives when it first came out; I would say that he was the guiding light in its early years. VANDAGRIFF: You said the article made a very deep impression on you. Could you say more about what or how or why it was so important to you at that time? Was it the approach? Or . . . BOYKAN: To be specific I would have to re-read that article and reread my own writing from that time, and I have to admit that I haven’t done my homework. But in retrospect I find it interesting that in writing as he did, Dubiel was not very far from Milton’s own thinking (in spite of those dense articles on set theory). Milton could be very interested in music of different styles, music that didn’t follow his own path. He was genuinely connected with Stravinsky, for example, and I mean the neo-Classic Stravinsky, not just the later, serial Stravinsky. Dubiel showed how one could look at Milton’s music without worrying about the future of music, without arguing for a new kind of structure that would be generally valid or proposing systematic constraints for non-tonal music. It was a rather new approach, no longer focused exclusively on basic principles of set composition. VANDAGRIFF: Around what time are you talking about? BOYKAN: The Dubiel article? There were several articles on Milton by Dubiel, and I’m afraid I can’t remember the dates. VANDAGRIFF: You said that Babbitt was really the force behind Perspectives. BOYKAN: Yes! VANDAGRIFF: Could you say more about that? BOYKAN: Perhaps I should have said “a force”. Perspectives was founded by Ben Boretz, as you know. I first met him when I came to Brandeis in my twenties, and there is no question that Arthur Berger, at that time a member of the Brandeis music faculty, exerted an important influence on Ben’s thinking. Arthur, after all, had had a great deal 132 History of Perspectives of experience writing about music. But soon Ben was struck by the power of Milton’s music as well as by his contribution to music theory. And so the spirit of Milton seems to hover over the early issues of Perspectives. And that was actually a good thing. For unlike many composers of the time, Milton, as I have said, was not solely interested in pushing his own ideas; he was genuinely interested in all kinds of music. From the beginning Perspectives had a rather wide frame of reference, something that was essential for its survival across the years. Things inevitably changed as time passed, and in the end Ben developed his own way of thinking about music. But never again did we have to endure a senseless conflict of competing “styles.” VANDAGRIFF: That is really interesting. That is great to hear. When you were with Ben at Brandeis he was already thinking of a...