The Zeitgeist of Perspectives, ab origine

THE ZEITGEIST OF PERSPECTIVES, AB ORIGINE BENJAMIN BORETZ (Where we were . . .) OMPOSERS ARE THINKERS. Composing is thinking. The experience, the very being of music is inextricably interdependent with the entire range of a person’s mental interior; the critical individuality of each person requires that each person pursue and evolve and articulate their own personal thinking in and about music, to have it adequately as composer, performer, listener. Music has evolved overt complexities and musical culture has developed acute anxieties which force engaged people to consciously reflect and articulate and work out their issues in extramusical languages. Deconstructing conventions to uncover their cognitive opacities, and the musical consequences of their applications, has become a creative—a moral—imperative as well as a path to an artistic breakthrough; hearing old music as new, imagining new music C 10 History of Perspectives arising “from the shell of the old”, making “music which invents the world from scratch”, by some cognitive–imaginative path determined by one’s own philosophy of personhood, composerhood, history . . . composers, musicians, are driven to reflection and utterance by these musical urgencies and aesthetic visions, and by their habitation in an intellectual and artistic world much wider than that of music alone. Including the self-arrogation of responsibility for not only one’s own work but for one’s entire musical universe—for all the world’s music, and even for the relevant human interactions within the social spaces of music making. It has become indispensable to the work of speakers of nonverbal expressive languages to redefine the deepest-lying substructures of musical awareness and being, as expression, as thought, as ideology, as a conscious fusion of intellectual challenge, cognitive clarity, conceptual depth, existential engagement, social enlightenment. Mindsets like these are what made it seem plausible to a group of young composers to imagine creating a magazine written and edited by people like them, first-order practitioners of the arts they were discussing. And these mindsets, taken all together, are the logic of how the Perspectives magazine groped and stumbled its way through its first 20 years: Perspectives was born into a musical world in which these were plausible premises; and they were, at least implicitly, the premises by which the evolving contents of Perspectives were initially conceptualized by the editors. But the almost instantaneous turnaround from an uminaginably radical collection of mindbending discourses to a model for lookalike writings designed to be published and perished produced an internal cultural–intellectual crisis after the second year of publication (probably the imprimatur of the Princeton University Press, actually the hired gun rather than the lawgiver of this operation, and the very classy distinguished scholarly-journal look of the magazine, were greatly culpable in this development). In response, the editors, reduced to one by that time, concluded that permanent revolution was the only possible editorial policy for a magazine devoted to practitioners of cutting-edge original creative composition; but that such militancy, to be serious, had to be inclusive rather than sectarian: that issue alone explains many of the “projects” and “new directions” visible during that time—and manifestly in the 30 years that have followed as well, but in a much less superheated and psychodramatic register. For, for better or worse, Perspectives for its first 22 years was a “cause” and an “issue”, a sore-thumb phenomenon that didn’t fit any particular niche that pre-existed within the musical world: it was making it up as it went along, and people reacted accordingly. So of The Zeitgeist of Perspectives, ab origine 11 course people attributed all kinds of familiar motives to the choices manifested by the magazine—most of which were in fact serendipitous, and mostly guided by a quest for possibly available adventure, in the spirit of those mindsets. As I wrote (in the magazine) to Ben Johnston, when he complained about the scarcity of writing about John Cage in Perspectives, had we received a text about John Cage of the quality of his letter, it would have been published forthwith (we did, early on, come up with a nifty article on indeterminate notation by David Behrman, and a playful riff on “the changing composer-performer relation” by Lukas...