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NO ONE PERSPECTIVE: A RETROSPECTIVE ELIZABETH HOFFMAN ON THE PNM IN MY LIFE: AM SURE I COULD SPEND the next year, full time on a couch, productively reading all the Perspectives of New Music articles I have not yet read. If multiple timelines were possible in one’s life, I would find a way to do this, since who knows then what new and interesting connections, unbidden, would start to form in my head. No doubt these would be topics of vital importance to me, and this would be a year well spent. A sense of belonging to a club is one I rarely seek out; but from my first encounters with it, PNM has felt like that to me in one positive way: a supportive, if challenging, collectively interested community or think-tank. My impression as I began to read the journal, c. 1990, was of a group of writers organized around common interests, but even more so, around a purpose. PNM’s purpose has sometimes I 162 History of Perspectives been simply to think hard about certain issues. Because so many authors, and the editors, have published in PNM repeatedly and routinely over the years, a regular meeting of minds, volume by volume, has emerged. Regardless of how many contributors have actually met one another, the tone of the journal retains the flavor of a conversation. PNM’s volumes are populated by composers writing insightfully and personally about their musics, sometimes poetically, and sometimes simply, directly, and experientially. Other times, the journal has seemed even vulnerable in its risk-taking inter-disciplinarity. The writing in each volume might be viewed retrospectively as nearly blog-like—long before there were blogs. Along with its utter seriousness, PNM has shown a welcome disregard for sacrosanct assumptions, whether historical, theoretical, socio-political, or aesthetic. The journal’s lack of pretension was, and is, still, rare in academic publication-land. Numerous debates in PNM have been quite different than those in other music theory journals, even when involving identical authors. The first music theory journal debate that I remember retracing while in graduate school is the Brown and Dempster Deductive–Nomological discussion, published in 1989–90 in the Journal of Music Theory. Recall a snippet of what Brown and Dempster wrote, sure as they were that neither Ben’s [Ben Boretz] nor John’s [John Rahn] conceptions of theorizing could serve as personal, inwardly analytic, conceptually rigorous mental hang-gliding prostheses, and simultaneously as tools for communication: “If constrained only by creative impulse or free imagination, the ways one decides to hear or analyze music cannot be corrected by anyone else” (Dempster 1990, 252). Horror of horrors, I want to say. I will venture a hazardous guess that PNM would not have found it productive to publish such a debate. Why? Because what Brown and Dempster saw as indefensible was precisely the alluring first premise that the PNM editors and much of its reader base sought to explore. (But, in fact-checking for this article, I discovered that my guess was, in fact, hazardous. Always open to self-criticism, John Rahn did offer to publish the Brown and Dempster piece, though the authors went for JMT instead.) The uniquely personal theorizing in the journal never seemed to me at odds with its “mathemusical” (Andreatta 2011, 33) footprint expressed throughout PNM’s fifty years—a footprint that rigorously covered important mathemusical discourse including set theory, topology, grammars, transformational theory, networks, and complex algebra, to name a handful. Why this obsession with (what some might call) abstract and abstruse symbols for acoustic phenomena to which we often attach extreme emotional responses? In PNM the mathematical No One Perspective 163 emphasis has always coexisted with a respect for the “acoustemological,” “ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth” (Feld 1996, 97). It is this energetic dovetailing of formality and beyond-formality that is so stunningly evoked even in the journal’s logo, Stravinsky’s graphic representation of his music. On a related tangent: I’ve particularly appreciated the journal’s attention to discussion of in-time and out-of-time models of musical explanation or perceptual phenomena. To the...

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