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CHRIS STOVER RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember your first experience with Perspectives, or when you first heard about the journal? What were your first impressions? CHRIS STOVER: I first heard about the journal when I was an undergrad at Central Washington University. This was in the preinternet days. I was starting to get interested in other kinds of music and starting to explore and experiment more, which meant a lot of time haunting the music library. One of the main things I was interested in was “new music,” very broadly defined, and here I stumbled across this journal called Perspectives of New Music! So I was pulling books off the shelf and reading them and finding some things that were utterly fascinating and others that I thought were pretty much the strangest things I had ever read. I remember very distinctly reading some of Ben’s articles and some of Randall’s articles and just sitting there, scratching my head in the library, trying to figure out what on Chris Stover 229 earth they were talking about. But it was intriguing, and I kept coming back to it. I don’t think it is too hyperbolic to say that that was one of the things that really got me interested in music theory. A few years later I went to Eastman and I ended up working with Bob Morris. Bob was actually my thesis advisor for a minute, but by the time it came around to write my thesis he was on leave, so I went in a different direction. But I took several classes with him, as well as some composition lessons . So that was my early history. I left the scholarly world for several years while I was touring and involved with a lot of other music activities , and then I went back to school, at the University of Washington, and ended up working closely with John. So I had a direct teacherstudent relationship with both Bob and John. I still hadn’t met Ben at that point, but I met him at a conference a few years later when he was talking—along with John and a few other folks—at a session that ended up being published as the Deleuze special issue, which I edited. VANDAGRIFF: How did you come to have the job of managing editor? STOVER: John asked me—I don’t remember anything further than that. I was around and knew everybody who was involved with it, but I hadn’t previously been directly involved with the making of the journal . When Jason Yust left suddenly for the University of Alabama, John called me up and asked me if I could take over. VANDAGRIFF: How long did you do that job? STOVER: About two years, three issues and toward a fourth—then I left to begin my current position at the New School. VANDAGRIFF: Is there anything you remember in particular about that job? Or how it changed your relationship with the journal? Do you remember the experience of working with any authors in particular? Do you feel any connection to any of the articles you helped publish? STOVER: One highlight was working on that Deleuze special issue. It was a great group of authors—John, Ben, Martin Scherzinger, and Michael Gallope—a fascinating quartet of articles, and they were all good people to work with. Ben’s article was particularly fun. Its opening gambit is wonderful—it begins with a sentence that goes on for one long paragraph and requires multiple layers of unpacking, but then when you finally do unpack it, you realize what the implications 230 History of Perspectives are: some heavy stuff! And it takes off from there in a million intriguing , rhizomatic directions. And then throughout the article, here’s Ben apologizing for crashing the party of the Deleuzians, as if he’s an outsider looking in. But he can spar with the best of them. VANDAGRIFF: No kidding. STOVER: Besides that . . . I got to work on an Andrew Mead article (2009), and he is someone I have always admired. I got to work pretty closely with Godfried Toussaint on more of a math-related article that was...

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