Telling it SLANT or In Search of the Early Years or "A-Sitting on a Gate"

TELLING IT SLANT or IN SEARCH OF THE EARLY YEARS or ‘A-SITTING ON A GATE’ ELAINE R. BARKIN N 1962, MY DEAR FRIEND Ben Boretz (who was only 28 and also music critic for The Nation, a boon for me as it turned out) drafted, recruited me into helping out with, still under wraps, as yet unborn, Perspectives of New Music. Drafted but willingly, for I had been out of touch with music and music-thought for several years: nr. 1 son Victor born in 1958, nr. 2 son Jesse in 1961; nr. 3 son Gabriel arrived on Halloween in 1963, and I was a stay-at-home mom, reading tons of 19th & 20th century American, English–Irish, European, Russian novels, mysteries, and plays; in 1964 we moved from the Lower East I Telling it SLANT 19 Side to the Upper West Side, closer to the Perspectives home office; Ben also rented a nice office near Carnegie Hall, “name on the door, rug on the floor”. And thus, with much trepidation and eagerness, was my music-intellectual re-education reinitiated, reanimated, regenerated, pre- and post-doc graduate school! New linguistic modes, some of which I wanted and learned to speak, others of which were never my thing. University Without Walls. For starters I sent out galley proofs that had already been copyedited by Harriet Anderson, later Eve Hanle, of Princeton University Press, asking contributors to read through their galleys carefully, me trying to find a way to get them to limit changes, look for typos, write a short contributor’s note, etcetera. Them were big-name, post–WW II composers—American and European—and a younger productive generation of all stripes, scholars, and techies; insuperable bulwarks yet to arise. “How did you come into this line of work?” one irate contributor wrote on his galley proofs, you being me, he totally miffed that any of his original wording had been trifled with. Having heard George Crumb’s music but never having seen a score I agonized about what might be an indelible coffee mug stain on a music example of his Night Music! And what about those “iffs”, I wondered, were they ALL typos or, if not, what were they about? And when an eminent middlegeneration composer asked me to send him the Bauer-Mengleberg/ Ferentz offprint that listed all “Eleven-Interval Twelve-Tone Rows”, I wondered and still do, where did he put those rows? The summer of 1963, with Ben in Europe, I worked with Arthur Berger (he had a brief tenure as a PNM editor, Ben and I had studied with him at Brandeis, later on he was key chair of my PhD committee), who gossiped and kvetched with and at every polysyllable. But Arthur and I put the issue to bed to everyone’s satisfaction. In 1964, I met with Milton Babbitt at Columbia’s Electronic Music Center and he effortlessly talked to me about time-point sets, invariants, aggregates, Southern hospitality, and Chinese food restaurants. Now, as I take down and open Vol. 1 No. 1, Fall 1962—with a memoriam to Irving Fine who died way too young and also with whom Ben and I had studied at Brandeis—I am taken back, and aback, when I notice a short article by my longtime friend and colleague Paul Des Marais who died last year. That issue was the cat’s meow! (The cat’s pajamas might have been the magazine Source, music of the avant garde, which made its first appearance in 1967, supported by UC Davis, its glossy focus on scores and photos a world apart from PNM then, but Source ceased in 1973.) Also appearing in this first issue is my translation of Stockhausen’s “Die Einheit der musikalischen Zeit”; the 20 History of Perspectives chutzpah it took to do that staggers me now. (In the summer of 1957, after a year in Berlin studying with Boris Blacher, I enrolled in the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, sat in on lectures by Stockhausen and the rest of that post–WW II gang, went to loads of concerts, and absorbed what I could. Far out, another galaxy.) An invaluable resource for me, as I research my...