The History of Perspectives

A HISTORY OF PERSPECTIVES on the occasion of our 50th anniversary WITH RACHEL S. VANDAGRIFF INTERVIEWER The publishers of Perspectives of New Music extend their heartfelt thanks to the entire community of board members, editors, producers, and especially readers, past and present, for your many contributions to ffty years of success. We hope you will enjoy this celebration and look forward to the best writing about new music for ffty years to come. THE HISTORY OF PERSPECTIVES IFTY YEARS OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION since 1962. This deserves some celebration, we think. We have never really investigated our own history, so for our 50th anniversary issue, that seems a good way to celebrate. In its fifty years, Perspectives of New Music has meant many things to many people. It has been an important component of many lives. Perspectives brought something new into the world of music when it started, and has continued to bring new things into our world ever since. The common thread, our central identity, has been to remain radically open to new music’s new ideas and people, never flinching at any kind of difficulty. Serendipitously, as we approached doing something about our history , we ran across Rachel Vandagriff. Rachel had been talking with Ben about the early days, for her thesis project on the Fromm Foundation . We asked Rachel if she would be interested in conducting a series of interviews with many different people about their views of the history of Perspectives, and what Perspectives has meant to them. Fortunately , she said yes. Little did we realize then how good she is at doing F 8 History of Perspectives interviews, and how amazingly quickly she works—we began work on this in mid April 2012. Without all her hard work, we could not have realized this project in time for Volume 50. We are happy with the result. This is a collection of personal perspectives on Perspectives from some of the people who have been involved with us over the years. The overall story is perhaps broadly coherent, but various in detail. The different perspectives add up not to one narrative, but a multiple one. —The Editors Benjamin Boretz, Robert Morris, John Rahn ...