Interview

Abstract

ANDREW MEAD RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Tell me about how you first knew of PNM and what it meant to you to have a journal like that in existence as you were coming into the musical–intellectual world? ANDREW MEAD: Well, when Perspectives started I was ten years old, so that was a bit early for me. (Laughter.) But when I got into college I started encountering it and . . . Well, what I think I first encountered were the anthologies of articles that Ben Boretz and Ed Cone put together from the early issues. I was reading those in college. That got me on to the journal itself, which I read in college and also in graduate school. And it was just like, “Oh Boy! Here are people talking about stuff that I am really, really interested in.” And it hasn’t stopped being that. . . . I was an undergraduate at Yale. VANDAGRIFF: And then you went to Princeton? Andrew Mead 113 MEAD: Yes. VANDAGRIFF: Has your relationship with PNM changed over time, or your idea about what the magazine is? MEAD: Obviously I think one’s relationship will have changed over time, because I have been sort of aware of PNM for . . . Gosh, I would say I have been reading it for forty of its fifty years. After reading it for some time, I started publishing in it, then I was an associate editor, and after that I became part of the group of five that edited it for some issues. I think I am still on the editorial board. I still publish there. The people who are the editors now are good friends of mine. VANDAGRIFF: Are there any particular PNM articles that had a great impact on you or hold a particular place in your memory, either ones you have written and it was important for you to have a forum, or articles you read that really . . . still have or had a hold on you for quite a while. MEAD: Well, let me not talk about my own articles, although I will say this: Perspectives allowed me to publish a whole bunch of different things, and I have always been grateful for that. I think my most recent thing in Perspectives is an article that is mostly about Beethoven, which is a screwy sort of thing for Perspectives to do, but it was tied into my thinking about some more recent music, so I was grateful for that (Mead 2009). But in terms of articles that it has published . . . Oh, I would go back to David Lewin’s article on the Schoenberg Violin Concerto (1967), Babbitt’s incredible article on rhythm and the electronic medium (1962). These were articles that were foundations for everything I have thought about since, pretty much. Well, maybe not everything, but an awful lot. And then there have been loads of other articles since. I remember in graduate school, getting out volumes of Perspectives from the library and reading them from cover to cover, and there were so many things that were interesting, by so many people who meant an awful lot to me in my musical life. VANDAGRIFF: It sounds like one of the things you really value in the magazine—which I associate with Ben Boretz, though I believe this is probably true of everyone that has worked for the magazine, and please correct me if I am wrong—is that it is very inclusionary. By that I mean that you can read a lot of different things, from a lot of different perspectives, in Perspectives. 114 History of Perspectives MEAD: Yes. I was remarking to my younger son yesterday, that if human beings do it, it is probably going to be interesting. That seems to be an attitude that the journal, whether it has been under Ben or anybody else, has pretty much stayed with. VANDAGRIFF: How did that influence you when you were associate editor? What specifically did you do as associate editor, and how did your belief in that aspect of the magazine affect your job? MEAD: I think that made all five of us open to different perspectives . . . . Ah there you go! That word again! VANDAGRIFF: Yes, it is hard...