Very Precise Relationships: Two Interviews with Ben Johnston

Abstract

In 1981, 1 interviewed my father, Ben Johnston, for Century 2, the student journal I then edited. It was a little daunting since I'm not a musician. So I consulted him about how to frame the most fundamental questions that it would be possible to ask on the subject. We wanted to talk about the nature and meaning of music itself and his music in particular. Until now that interview, published under the title A Sacred Cow Should Be Trounced at Least Once a Day, never made it past the pages of that limited-circulation journal.1 In 2006 American Music asked to reprint the interview along with a new version, in which I would repeat the questions I posed to my father twenty-five years ago. As one might expect, his responses were somewhat different this time around, beginning with his objections to the original interview's title (which referred to the controversy over Knocking Piece, explained below). My father has never been very interested in following prescribed or predictable routes and during much of this second interview he didn't in fact, he mostly didn't allow me to ask questions. Rather, he anticipated them, responding to the explanatory statements that I made as I prepared to ask them. He also suggested that I read two essays from the recently published book of his essays, Maximum Clarity,1 so that he could comment a bit on those. After we finished, as a sort of postscript, he responded briefly to most of the original questions. In