Interview

JOHN RAHN RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Before you were involved with the journal, or maybe even before you were at Princeton, do you remember your relationship to Perspectives? When did you first read it? What stood out to you? JOHN RAHN: In 1966, I picked up a paperback of Problems of Modern Music from a drugstore rack in Claremont, CA. I read it all, but I was terrifically impressed by Babbitt’s “Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants.”1 The next year, when I was at Juilliard, I read Die Reihe (all of it) and a lot of European stuff. I went to a lot of trouble to get a copy of Xenakis’s Musiques Formelles, which was in French and not available in the USA at that time, so I could read Xenakis. PNM had just recently started, and I did not see a copy until later. I believe the first articles I read in Perspectives before I went to Princeton were some articles by J. K. Randall—articles having to do with computer music.2 One of the reasons I went to Princeton, interestingly 34 History of Perspectives enough, was computer music. Which, in 1970, was pretty primitive.3 But they were one of the very few places in the world who were doing it at all. I heard some pieces that Randall did, using the computer—the computer and violin piece with Paul Zukofsky, and “Mudgett, the Mass Murderer”—which I thought sounded like music. I wanted to find out how he was doing that. VANDAGRIFF: Did you end up studying with Randall and Babbitt? RAHN: I had private lessons with Babbitt during my first year there. That was fun. Milton’s classes were also a lot of fun. I remember sitting in the back of his serial theory class the first term, next to new faculty member Claudio Spies, trying to keep from laughing out loud in appreciation and entertainment. Milton had that act down. But it wasn’t the act, so much as the concepts, that I appreciated. I never studied composition with Jim Randall. I took lots of classes from him, more or less formally. I worked with Peter Westergaard one term. Peter and I are good friends now, I think. He was friendly to work with. I don’t take direction well, as a composer (laughter). None of these lessons were what you might imagine a composition lesson might be like. It was more just talking about things, in general, rather than going over note by note what I had composed. VANDAGRIFF: I don’t know the story of how you got involved with PNM in the first place. Maybe you could tell me about that? RAHN: Sure, I will tell you the story of how I got involved. It was Ben. (Laughter.) I was at Princeton from 1970 to 1973. He was there from 1971 to 1973 at least. I went there mainly to study with Milton. Milton was one of those people you could say anything to and he would always be able to understand it, which is not always the case. Milton was really interesting and interested and very open-minded. He didn’t care what I was interested in. He just wanted to help out. Ben was different. Ben was always eager to engage in conversation and debate on any issue, but he usually thought he had a better idea, and naturally, he tried to convince his interlocutor. He really valued (and values) diversity of opinion but, unlike Milton, he did push his own. He had just published, or was in the process of publishing, “MetaVariations ” in Perspectives. That is a difficult piece to read. We started having sessions in which we would discuss and argue about stuff in “Meta-Variations.” I’d challenge him to show me that some part meant something, and we’d do a close reading. John Rahn 35 Actually, it was the formal bits in “Meta-Variations” that first caught my interest, because I hadn’t seen symbolic logic—predicate calculus— used in that way before. Ben came from a background with Nelson Goodman, and Goodman’s work was a phenomenological reconstruction of the traditions of...