Interview

EMMANUEL AMIOT EMMANUEL AMIOT: I must warn you that my involvement with PNM is unconventional, to say the least. To begin with, I am not a regular member of any academic institution, and my access to publications is rather shaky (I ask friends to provide me with copies of specific papers). Hence my knowledge of the main flow of what appears in PNM is flimsy. Living abroad does not help in that respect. However, I did co-author a whole issue on John Rahn’s request [the special issue on musical tiling, Vol 49 no.2]. This came to be because of my knowledge of the specific topic of rhythmic canons (and, probably also because John has a wry humor very similar to mine). The topic was first broached in a momentous series of papers in 1991 or so, and PNM was thus the obvious place for a special issue about the state of the art in this area. I certainly hope that I will have occasion to publish in, or get involved with, PNM again; but since my interests are more about the 122 History of Perspectives mathematics of music, my natural lair is JMM (wherein I think I am the most prolific contributor so far) [The Journal of Mathematics and Music]. . . . So, What would you like to know about me and PNM? RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: You said that Perspectives was the “obvious place” where you would want to publish these articles about tiling. Maybe you could tell me more about that. Why was it the “obvious” place? AMIOT: There is a historical reason, that maybe you will find interesting, and might have bearing in terms of the overall mission of PNM as opposed to JMT [Journal of Music Theory] and other journals like that, and that is the fact that the first publications about theories of rhythmic canons appeared in PNM (Vuza 1991–1993). It was a series of four papers. A huge work. The guy worked something like ten years on this stuff, all alone in Romania. It was in the political state of just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it was really a huge achievement. And PNM did publish this work, which was by a total unknown. . . . Then, much later, John Rahn asked me to co-edit a special issue on this subject, because the first publication about canons was in PNM, so it was like a birthday issue, ten years later. VANDAGRIFF: You said that your exposure to PNM has been difficult, due to your location in Europe, that you hear about articles and ask people to help you obtain them. Maybe you could tell me how you first heard of the journal and any particular things that were published in it that were important to you or your work. AMIOT: I am not sure, but it could be . . . It was quite a few years ago. It could be that the first word I ever heard about PNM was about that very publication, about rhythmic canons. I am not completely sure about that, because it is more than ten years ago. I may have heard about it before, but I am not sure that I read it before. It was a really special occasion for me. I heard, first, about the topic, and I knew that the references were in PNM, so I found a way to read it. It was a really special occasion. I read articles from PNM later, but I really got to it because of this specific subject. . . . One thing that is relevant to me as a researcher is that there are these great American publications that are available in some institutions in Europe, but which are not as well available to individual researchers as they may be in American universities, I would guess. Emmanuel Amiot 123 This kind of . . . I feel that there may be a kind of parochialism in the publications, because, for an American researcher, it is kind of obvious that first they must dip into JMT or PNM or those kind of these. For a European researcher there is some material closer to their home turf to look at first. Then they may have a...