Interview

SCOTT GLEASON RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Could you tell me about your relationship with PNM? How did you first hear of Perspectives? What do you see it as a resource for? What has touched you intellectually? SCOTT GLEASON: The first thing to say is that my interaction with PNM is largely through Ben. I know about it through undergrad, but Ben’s really my way in, as it were. He’s my link. Although I know and/or have studied with other members of the editorial board/ editors/people associated with PNM, he’s the one responsible for introducing me to it all and so I owe him everything. I first learned about it . . . It is funny, I was in undergrad, and I was in the library, just perusing back issues of old journals, and I happened upon Perspectives of New Music. This would have been in the late nineties. I remember being overwhelmed and thinking, “I’ll never be able to understand any of this,” and I just put it back on the shelf and forgot about it. It was not until I went to graduate school, and I Scott Gleason 161 started studying with people who studied at Princeton. I slowly started to understand that I could come to understand this stuff. I still can’t understand the math, but I am pretty good with the logical formalism. You know, it is interesting, because old Princeton theory, in the sixties, had very little math. It was mostly logic. So it is actually something I am fine with. But then a little later I was in Saratoga Springs, NY, at a used bookstore and came across a ton of back issues. I still wonder who sold those PNM issues to the bookstore, presumably a disgruntled professor at Skidmore. Anyway, I couldn’t afford all of them, but I bought the Stravinsky memorial issue and read it and understood what I could. Then it wasn’t until grad school at Madison and studying with Lee Blasius and Steve Dembski that I really became aware of PNM and what it meant and what it could mean. And then further meeting Ben, and then studying with Joe Dubiel and Jonathan Kramer at Columbia, and others. Two things—I knew Ben and then became an editor for Open Space. Then I realized Ben’s 70th birthday was coming up, so I said, “Oh, we should do a Festschrift in Perspectives,” so then I co-edited that, and then they made me an associate editor. So it was kind of a gradual process. VANDAGRIFF: How did you get to know Ben? GLEASON: Leslie Blasius is at Madison, where I did a Masters degree in music theory. Lee did a seminar on “Princeton theory,” and invited Ben to give a talk. So I met him then. You know, Ben makes friends with a lot of people. Then I moved to New York to go to Columbia, and then Ben would come down and hang out, and we would go to shows. Not so frequently these days, but there was a time. So that is kind of a bit of the social, or personal history, I guess. I should say that I am not a composer, and I think there is a whole kind of thing to be written about that. . . . Okay, so, the journal was founded by and for composers, but they haven’t really published much compositional theory in years. That is because that is just not a discourse that people are in anymore. There is no such thing as compositional theory anymore. In other words, they will still publish stuff by composers, but it will be about other composers’ work, not their own. So I will often talk to graduate students who are finishing their dissertations , and say, “Oh, you know, you should publish something about your own work in Perspectives.” Half of the time they will be interested , and the other half of the time they won’t care. And I think they 162 History of Perspectives won’t care because there isn’t the same kind of cultural capital anymore , in being a composer–theorist. VANDAGRIFF: Where do you think that the cultural...