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CHRISTIAN ASPLUND RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: To start, I know that you are an associate editor. I would imagine that you were fairly active during the time you studied at the University of Washington. Maybe you could tell me about that time and what Perspectives means in your life now, as someone involved in the magazine and as a composer/theorist/ thinker. CHRISTIAN ASPLUND: I went to UW partially because John Rahn was there. Perspectives of New Music had great esteem in my undergraduate education. Probably most of the journal articles that I read as an undergraduate were from that journal: anything on composition, twentieth-century theory. That was kind of a big presence. I was looking around for places to go to graduate school, at that time, I guess it was around 1990 . . . No, 1993 . . . I was interested in doctoral programs that were open-minded and had wide interests. It seemed like any place where John Rahn was, and Perspectives of New Music, signaled that it would really be an interesting, open place, that was rigorous but also open to different ideas and different ways of 126 History of Perspectives making music, different ways of analyzing music, and different ways of describing music. VANDAGRIFF: How were you exposed to Perspectives as an undergraduate ? ASPLUND: One of my composition and theory teachers, Michael Hicks, who has published in Perspectives. He introduced me to a bunch of different articles from the journal, including his own (Hicks 1989). VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember any particular articles or debates that you read during that time, or since, that made an impact on you? Or any of the kinds of things that you read that you might not have found elsewhere? ASPLUND: There are a few things that come to mind. At that time there was a pretty radical split between uptown and downtown. Perspectives of New Music seemed to be the only place where nobody seemed to care about that; that you could come together, where you would have articles by and about minimalism, which at that time was a total anathema. It seems weird now, because there is not so much of that antagonism between the two sort of camps, or that there even are those camps anymore, but at that time, it seemed that Perspectives was open to things. I also really liked the shorter things by composers, that weren’t really articles, but were a combination of really interesting texts and little, one-page things, or three-page things, by composers, such as tributes to other composers. There was an issue devoted to James Tenney: that was really important to me. It seemed to bring together who were pretty legit who were in different theoretical places. VANDAGRIFF: I believe that is one thing that Boretz really wanted— that he was proud of—was the fact that Perspectives would publish things that were shorter than things than other publications would likely publish and longer than things than anyone else might publish. Additionally, one of the things that shines when you look over the history of Perspectives, is that, if you take it in over all, they have published voices and positions and points of view from all over the music scene. ASPLUND: Yeah, one of the articles that I published in Perspectives on Messiaen, essentially, is almost a theological article. I thought, “This isn’t going to fly,” because its point of view . . . it is a little bit unusual. I don’t think that anybody else would have published it, but not just Christian Asplund 127 for that reason, but also because it was a very unusual rhetorical stance. I felt like that could go in that direction in Perspectives. I remember one of the reviewers really criticized my approach, but they still published it. John noted that it was unusual, but he said it more as a compliment. Perspectives also published an article of mine on Rzewski from a somewhat radical political point of view, also I think out of the mainstream for academic discourse. I just think that most other academic journals, maybe all of the ones I could think of, and maybe for good reasons, really tamp down the authorial voice...

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