Interviewer's Reflections

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RACHEL S. VANDAGRIFF IKE MOST of the people I interviewed for this project, I first came across Perspectives of New Music as an undergraduate student. I read a few PNM articles during those years when they were assigned to me, but I now do not recall which ones, nor which professors led me to them. I became acquainted with a number of the “classic” texts from the early years of PNM through work I did in graduate school. But a deeper relationship to the journal began when I commenced primary source research for my dissertation, provisionally titled “The History and Impact of the Fromm Music Foundation, 1952–1983.” Persuaded in part by Milton Babbitt, Paul Fromm pledged support for the journal in 1961, believing the venture would help fulfill his Foundation ’s goal to further communication among composers, performers, theorists, and listeners. Fromm, who had promised to “remain in the background,” did often involve himself in the journal’s operations. Yet as Ben and others I interviewed for this project discuss, Ben had the idea for Perspectives of New Music long before he met Paul Fromm. L Rachel S. Vandagriff 245 Fromm wanted to popularize contemporary American music. His definition of what kind of contemporary music he wanted his Foundation to promote was informed by his German background. He wanted to support what he took to be new music of the highest quality and prestige . The American compositional practices that he championed early were those most clearly related to and informed by the contemporary music to which he was first attracted: that of the Second Viennese School. Later, his desire for public recognition, together with shifting trends in contemporary music, led him to abandon his loyalty to the American composers in the Schoenberg tradition in favor of composers such as Earle Brown, John Adams, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Morton Subotnik, Lee Hyla, Steve Mackey, Bernard Rands, David Finko, Barbara Kolb, Stephen Paulus, Sheila Silver, and Ramon Zupko, and to support compositional approaches that became more prominent during the 1970s. Ironically, when the Fromm Music Foundation, Princeton University Press, and Perspectives parted ways in 1972, those involved with the journal felt more free to expand their horizons, too. The Fromm Music Foundation supported the first ten years of the journal’s operation during which PNM published seminal articles by Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Ben Boretz, Herbert Brün, Ernst Krenek, Lukas Foss, Billy Jim Layton, J. K. Randall, Seymour Shifrin, Claudio Spies, and Peter Westergaard; debates between David Lewin and Edward T. Cone, between Babbitt, David Lewin, and George Perle, and between Charles Rosen and Joseph Kerman, among others; and the “Some Younger American Composers” series. Many of these early articles continue to evoke discussions and disagreements, particularly about the practicality or perceptibility of novel compositional systems. As someone studying PNM in relation to its founder (and in the larger context of American private foundational patronage), I was struck by the fact that some of the aspects of the journal Fromm resisted in its earliest years are still controversial. He did not think it was appropriate for composers to write about their own music: he thought that was merely “self-promotion.” Fromm opposed what he saw as the narrowness of the journal’s scope and the high degree of “science in music.” He opposed PNM becoming a “scholarly journal” in which many articles would be inaccessible to someone unacquainted with a highly technical branch of American music theory. Fromm was uneasy about specialization, a tendency that he felt ran counter to the goals of his Foundation. In the interviews that I conducted, many of the people involved in PNM noted that the journal has long been a space hospitable to all kinds of musical practitioners: composers, theorists, performers, and critics. 246 History of Perspectives (In fact, it very much began as a vehicle for the writing of composertheorists .) At the same time, PNM has sometimes been viewed from the outside as a closed shop. On this matter the interviewees will express their varying opinions. The letters I found in the Fromm Music Foundation archive provided a great deal of information about the beginnings of the journal, but the story...