Interview

MARIANNE KIELIAN-GILBERT RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Will you tell me a little bit about how you got into the journal? MARIANNE KIELIAN-GILBERT: Actually I knew Ben, John, and Elaine because they had all taught at Michigan at one time or another. I met Bob Morris a little bit later. My involvement in Perspectives was important for me as a music theorist and performer. VANDAGRIFF: Yes, actually, one of the things that some folks have brought up in these conversations is how Perspectives is a place for music theorists and for composers, but composer–theorists, who made up much of the early Perspectives community, are becoming a rarer breed. Perspectives is still a place for composers, theorists, and music-theorists to publish, and still attracts all kinds of scholars. KIELIAN-GILBERT: I want to stress my gratitude for the journal, its Marianne Kielian-Gilbert 105 communities, and my experiences with them. PNM has been a labor of love for lots of people. With all of the diversity, there was a sense of purpose. At several points there was a conscious effort to think about the mix of perceptions of the journal. But there has always been—a balance of poetic and technical stuff and a balance of composer input. It is interesting in that way. Of course, it takes a lot of care to run a journal. I have been involved with a few journals, so I have some sense of this. It may be easy to criticize , but when you think of the kind of work that is involved and the labor, the integrity that the journal embraces, that counts for something. The pressures on younger scholars to publish are very strong now, and Perspectives remains one of the places that one can approach to get a reading. A long time ago—you know, I was a graduate student for the first part of all of this—and we were quite radical in some ways and “non-establishment,” even the group of five of us that decided to put our bid in for the co-editorship at one point. There were various camps, and you were either in this camp or that camp, and you couldn’t get published in different places if you did Q, Y, R. So Perspectives’ open door policy that I alluded to earlier . . . that was very important. Perspectives can be a kind of venue for people who fall through the cracks or do different kinds of things. In 1995 I was elected co-editor of Perspectives of New Music by the PNM editorial board, with Joe Dubiel (Columbia University), Stephen Peles (University of Alabama), Marion Guck (University of Michigan), and Andrew Mead (then University of Michigan). This extended roughly from 1996–2001, Volumes 34–37/38, and into portions of Volumes 37–39. I worked as associate editor since 1982 and was elected to the PNM editorial board in 1994 (to present). This excerpt from our proposal for co-editorship submitted to the PNM editorial board (February 15, 1995) conveyed some of our ideas and goals for the journal: We therefore stand for: no limit on the seriousness, intensity, or complexity of thought that a contributor can present; encouragement (not mere acceptance) of expression of a contributor’s personal stake in the writing; unconcern with conventionality of form or style as a value in itself; alertness to the possibility that what is new, deep, and strongly felt may not be polished in ways we are accustomed to—may not be able to be. We are sensitive to the difference between standards (banners, rallying points, foci of uniformity , and the like) and criteria of judgment, and are strongly 106 History of Perspectives biased toward the latter. Plainly put, what is worthwhile can often be recognized by its distinctness from what surrounds it, not by its resemblance to a norm; we therefore endorse Perspectives’ longstanding tradition of originality and excellence as well as its traditional recognition of the multitude of guises in which both originality and excellence may appear. Our first concern is to keep Perspectives a forum for urgent musical thought, and to maintain its tradition of expanding the frontiers of such thought. . . . The identity of...