Perspectives at 50

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PERSPECTIVES AT 50 STEPHEN PELES OU ASK ABOUT MY INVOLVEMENT with Perspectives, the role the journal has played in my professional life, and my reflections on its history. My official association with PNM is easily told: my first publication appeared in the Fall-Winter 1983/Spring-Summer 1984 issue; I was made an associate editor in 1992; I became a member of the editorial board in 1995, and still serve in that capacity; I served as co-editor from 1995–2001. The rest is more complicated. My sense of Perspectives’ place in the world goes back to my first encounters with it in the early seventies, when I was an undergraduate composer at Rutgers, about twenty minutes from Princeton. In those days the Princeton University bookstore stocked not only copies of PNM (Princeton University Press was still producing it at the time, I believe) but also scores of some of Babbitt’s pieces (I still have the AMP miniature scores of his Woodwind Quartet and String Quartet No. 2, which I bought there) as well as recordings from companies like Y Perspectives at 50 119 CRI, so it was a small but important resource for those of us in the area who were involved with new music. When I first encountered it, then, PNM had already been around for a few years, and surprisingly there still wasn’t anything else quite like it. It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the simple oddity of this. If you think of the common practice era as having ended around 1910, it’s actually quite remarkable that we waited more than half a century for the establishment of a serious English-language journal charged with examining the syntactic bases of the various musics of the uncommon practice era which followed it; the disruptive effect of two world wars on what otherwise would have been normal channels of communication can’t be overestimated, of course, and I have briefly traced some of the relevant history in my contribution to the Cambridge History of American Music. But whatever that history and whatever the reasons, by comparison an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century student composer-in-training would have had a broad choice of Kompositionslehre. We had Perspectives. But the importance of the journal for my generation can’t be wholly, or even mostly, explained by the fact that it was the only game in town. No, Perspectives was also expressing in print the intellectual sophistication and seriousness of purpose to which my generation of young composers and intellectuals aspired (having come of age during the final years of the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, ours was nothing if not a serious generation, having been forced to grow up early, if sometimes inadequately). And more than even that: to us the journal seemed also to be uniquely bearing witness to a period of great intellectual and artistic ferment, capturing the energy and excitement of the time, and conveying to the world our own belief in the importance of the new music and our sense of being involved in a collective enterprise of historical significance. In our minds Perspectives was part of a package which included the Group for Contemporary Music, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the League/ISCM, the American Composers Alliance, and all the other people and groups associated with the vibrant New York new music renaissance of the nineteenseventies . No doubt we read into Perspectives much that went beyond the journal’s original remit as understood by its founders, and in retrospect what seemed at the time to be the dawning of a new era of shared purpose can now be seen as something quite different. Indeed, whatever its original mission, someone today encountering Perspectives for the first time is apt to be struck by the bewildering diversity of the half century of musical practice now recorded in its pages (but surely not foreseeable in 1962)—and by the diversity, too, of those doing the recording. There’s enough of that last sort of diversity evident in hindsight, even in 120 History of Perspectives the very first issue, to make talk of “founders” and “purposes” perhaps seem vaguely quixotic if not...