LARRY POLANSKY RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Could you tell me about your relationship to Perspectives? What has the magazine meant to you? LARRY POLANSKY: I do not remember what the first thing I did with PNM was, but it must have been in the eighties when we were working on HMSL and real-time music language ideas. I did some guest teaching for a week or so up at the University of Washington at around that time, and got to know John Rahn pretty well. We decided to publish the “definition” article of HMSL in PNM (Polansky, Burk, and Rosenboom 1990). It was really a good experience to work with them on that, and it began my relationship to the journal. I was from a different musical community. I think those kinds of communities are now less defined than they used to be. There was a real difference between the experimental, DIY, hardware hacker type in the seventies, and the kind of academic, post-serialist, theorist community . It seemed to me that one should be able to converse articulately Larry Polansky 197 in both worlds and gain the benefits of lack of distinction between the two. One nice opportunity for us—by us I mean the Mills/San Francisco crowd—one thing that that we could do was to engage in really meaningful communication, and benefit from some of the most serious editing power, and the kind of historical stance that PNM had. There were beautiful things about institutions like PNM, and people like John and Ben and others, who were perhaps being somewhat overlooked by people with maybe a more rigid aesthetic definition of their community. I liked that John was interested in much the same thing. But we were coming from different aesthetics, world views, communities, friendships. I stayed in Seattle that first time with my friend David Mahler who probably had almost nothing to do with the university or its culture, but was (and is), to me, one of the most important American composers. There were those kinds of very real separations. There was a real feeling of “uptown/downtown”-ish kind of stuff, which of course, when it comes to real ideas, and not just fashion, makes no sense. I thought it important and healthy to obviate those artificial restrictions. So that is why I think we went with PNM, and working with John, for this definitional statement of HMSL. Then, just a few years later, when [James] Tenney had become quite ill, we decided to do a special issue on him, which I think ended up being quite important. Important for PNM, because a whole community entered into conversation with the journal that had not previously felt comfortable, had not felt invited, that PNM barely knew about! It was a nice way for bridges to be built. It was great working with John on it, a real eye-opener about keeping one’s ears and mind open. I was the editor; David Rosenboom was the co-editor. And it was a major recognition of a theorist (Tenney) who worked independently of the main academic strain of theory. I think that issue broke down some barriers toward later projects like the Gaburo issue and other projects (PNM 1995). After that, whenever I have had something that I thought was theoretically appropriate, or come across things by friends and students, PNM has been the place I have gone to and recommended. I have had several things in there over the years. I don’t write a lot of articles, but generally, rather steadily, work on one large idea at a time. But I have also encouraged my students to consider PNM because it does a careful , unusually intelligent job of editing. They take things very, very seriously, and that attitude seems absolutely necessary and healthy for the world of ideas, which, in general, is a world that is ailing more and more, in my opinion. I was involved with the Gaburo issue and some other things. . . . I forget all of the things I have done with them over 198 History of Perspectives the years, but there has always been a sense—especially, I think, through John as the editor...