Interview

Abstract

WILLIAM BROOKS RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember when you were first exposed to Perspectives? What was that experience like? WILLIAM BROOKS: At Wesleyan University, where I was an undergrad, the library was dispersed in some ways. There was a music reading room in some little building, I cannot remember where. There was a rack of current periodicals—ten or twenty. I remember encountering Perspectives then, but I don’t have any memory of what I thought or what I read. I picked it up and looked at it, along with various other things I picked up and looked at from time to time. So I didn’t really have a view of it. VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember when you started to read it? Are there any articles that hold a particular place in your memory? BROOKS: First of all, the thing to say is that, until I went to graduate school in Illinois I had always been very musical, and I had always been William Brooks 137 interested in music, but I came into Wesleyan as a science and math guy. I double majored in math and music, but I didn’t decide to stay on and go to graduate school in music until I was halfway through my junior year. So I was not very responsible about studying stuff until I went to graduate school. Then I went to graduate school in Illinois because at Wesleyan the big presence while I was there was John Cage. Not that Cage was in residence—that was the year before I came—but Cage was back several times during the time I was there. His thinking and his aesthetic and all of that was present. Peter Yates came through several times—at least twice, I should say —and gave lectures on various things. This was only a few years after he had coined the phrase the “American Experimental Tradition” (he first started publicly pronouncing it in 1959), but before his book on twentieth-century music, which came out in 1967. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1965. So the aesthetic that I was coming from, when I went to Illinois, was this experimental music aesthetic. It was very much because of Yates, and because of the way he defined it (though I did not realize this until much, much later); it was very much a kind of “outsider” aesthetic . Cage was an outsider at that point—this was the sixties. He was not the grand old man of American music, or experimental music. He was still a pretty wide-eyed, wacky guy who was doing strange performances , who was the subject of controversy, and people were accusing him of being a charlatan, and all of that stuff. So I was very invested— and for other reasons, too. Already, before I went to Wesleyan, even in high school, I had come to know and like, but not really love, Charles Ives’s music. At Wesleyan I became a really devotee of Ives. I became very, very interested in Ives by my sophomore year, when I took an art song class in which we did some Ives songs. Then I was just amazed, and I got my own copy of the 114, songs and I was stuck into Ives from then on. Because of Cage I knew about Cowell. . . . So I was very into this notion that American music was an outsider art. I went to Illinois for several reasons, but probably the principal reason was that it matched this notion I had of experimental music. The second reason (but I didn’t make the connection at the time) was that I had come to know Ben Johnston’s music through Bert Turetsky, a double-bass player. Ben was at Illinois, and even there, I had the sense that he wasn’t Roger Sessions. He wasn’t an “in the mainstream” kind of guy. Illinois had also been doing all of the Festivals of Contemporary Music, which were wild! One thing that happened when I went to Illinois was that I almost immediately started singing with Kenneth Gaburo. Now Kenneth was wild, and weird, and wonderful, and to me he was an outsider, because 138...