Interview

ORIT HILEWICZ RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Could we start by having you tell me a bit about how you came to know Perspectives of New Music? ORIT HILEWICZ: Sure. I was a student at the University of Washington . I studied [theory] with John Rahn, Jonathan Bernard, and Áine Heneghan. The main focus was new music. Obviously Perspectives was a major source of our reading material. Since the office is also in Seattle, I got to know some of the people working there, and I started to work there myself in December 2009, as a typesetter. The following July, when the managing editor, Chris Stover, got a job at the New School and moved to New York, I took his place. I was there as managing editor for volumes 48/1 and 48/2, then moved to the East Coast to start the Music Theory PhD program at Columbia University. VANDAGRIFF: Did you have a relationship with Perspectives before you were at the University of Washington? 172 History of Perspectives HILEWICZ: Not really. I came to the University of Washington from Israel. When I was in Israel, first I was a computer science student, then I was a student at the Music Academy of Tel Aviv University where I was a double major in orchestral conducting and musicology. I wasn’t aware of the field of music theory, apart from the core theory one learns as an undergrad. When I came to the University of Washington I was a piano student. I finished my undergrad as a piano student . Then I became familiar with music theory and started taking seminars with Jonathan Bernard and John Rahn. And then I got really into it. So that was how I got introduced to Perspectives. I didn’t know about it before. VANDAGRIFF: What does the managing editor do? HILEWICZ: Well, you do everything that needs to be done for the issue to come into being. You get the submissions, you stay in touch with the authors, send the submissions to the editors. After the choices as to which articles to publish have been made, you take care of everything that has to do with typesetting, being in touch with the printing company. The whole process—from once the articles are chosen—taking care of everything that has to be done for the journal to take form. VANDAGRIFF: Could you tell me if there are any particular articles that ran in PNM, at any point in its history, that had a large impact on you personally, and/or in your work? HILEWICZ: Oh yeah! Where do I start? One article by John Rahn—I think it is from 2004—and it is called “The Swerve and the Flow” (Rahn 2004). It is about time. . . . It is about many things, but one of the things I took from it was the question of how does music theory treat time? Eventually this generated one chapter of my masters thesis, and this is also the main thing I think about today, and I will work on it in my dissertation. I think about how music theory can treat musical time, how does it treat time now and what the possibilities are for the future. So that is a very influential article for me. I guess the main thing in Perspectives as a journal, the main important point of it, or in it, for me, is all of the different levels of creativity . So you can not only see scholarly rigor in the articles, but also a creative aspect. When it comes to composers writing about their works, or translating composers’ writings about their works—like Jonathan Bernard’s translation of Ligeti (Ligeti 1993), and there are translations of Stockhausen . . . So [Perspectives includes] not only scholars writing Orit Hilewicz 173 about other composers’ music, but composers writing about their own music for musically knowledgeable readers. There is also this aspect of creativity in doing theory. I am thinking, for example, about Joe Dubiel’s “Three Essays on Milton Babbitt” (1990–1992): the way he thinks about Babbitt’s music, and about finding new ways to think about Babbitt’s music, and being able to explain that, to put that in...