Interview

MARION GUCK RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Tell me about when you first heard of Perspectives , and tell me about what it meant to you to have a journal like Perspectives be out there as a resource and community. MARION GUCK: (Laughs) I am trying to think about when that was. It is possible that it is late in my undergraduate education, because I had a senior thesis to write. It was on a Bartók piece. But no later than the beginning of graduate school [at The University of Michigan]. I took a couple of courses on twentieth-century music, and research brought me to the journal. What did it mean to me at the time? It is so long ago, and there is so much history since then. VANDAGRIFF: Maybe you could tell me about when Perspectives came to be something important to you, and why that was? GUCK: Well, over the years . . . First, because it dealt with twentiethcentury music, which was of interest to me. Then I was doing graduate Marion Guck 97 work in music theory, and one of the things that Perspectives published on was methodology. . . . Ben’s publication of “Meta-Variations” (Boretz 1969–1973), although I read that as the dissertation first. And some other things that dealt with how we think about music became of interest to me, and that may be the thing that has been most important to me about Perspectives. It has been a thread all the way through, and it is about the only place that I can think of that really deals with those issues from a truly musical point of view. I have always had colleagues who are working on methodological questions, too. So it is a part of my community, so to speak. Perspectives has become, over the years, a journal that has a wider range of interests than a lot of music publications. That is another thing that I have appreciated. More different kinds of music are considered, for example. VANDAGRIFF: And maybe considered in different ways, as well? GUCK: Yes, considered in many different ways. In fact, that was another thing that was important to me. When I first read Perspectives, a lot of the articles seemed pretty . . . I don’t like to say “formalist,” because I think that is a cartoon . . . pretty highly technical. The direction that my own research took, by the time I did my dissertation, was . . . more humanistic. I did a dissertation on metaphoric descriptions of music. By the time I was ready to publish, Perspectives had started taking a broader view of what was legitimate discourse about music. That felt, again, like creating a congenial sense of community, and one of the reasons that I have published there has been because it is a place where we have been willing to think about music in lots of different ways. That was certainly true when I was one of a group of people editing it for several years—we definitely wanted that breadth, and we were fitting into the tradition of the journal. We didn’t just want to be a standard academic journal. In fact, I often feel like I am not really such a great scholar. VANDAGRIFF: Why do you feel that way, if I may ask? GUCK: Because of the kinds of interests I have. Sometimes I think that I am not as interested in doing research as I am interested in thinking, and doing analysis. That is another way that I think Perspectives has felt like a congenial environment. It is also the case that I have some close friends who are a part of Perspectives. VANDAGRIFF: I guess I want to ask the chicken and egg question. Were they close friends before you became intertwined with Perspectives, 98 History of Perspectives or did the friendships come from getting further involved with Perspectives? GUCK: Marianne Kielian-Gilbert and I became a part of Perspectives at the same time in the early eighties. We had known each other in graduate school; we were already friends. Andy Mead I met because he had come to Michigan to teach, although I had already left. Joe Dubiel? Yeah, not from Perspectives. We had...