Introduction

INTRODUCTION CHRIS STOVER HEN SCOTT GLEASON BROUGHT UP THE IDEA of a special issue of PNM dedicated to John Rahn, following similar projects for Ben Boretz (2005–06) and Bob Morris (2014), of course I enthusiastically agreed to participate. Thinking through the various areas of interest/ knowledge that we each brought, we knew that we needed a third party to address the many mathematically-oriented contributions we would certainly receive, and we asked Jason Yust, another former student of John’s, to join. This is the first obvious thing that I’ll say about John’s impact on the field: that it took three of us to ensure that his vast range of interests and contributions were properly engaged! John’s incisively original music-theoretical, analytical, and creative work covers a lot of ground. As evidence I might simply list the seminars I took with him at the University of Washington: Music and Mathematics, Ancient Greek Music Theory, Critical Theory (twice: one course devoted largely to Deleuze and Guattari, another that covered a wide array of thinkers from Hegel to Foucault and Kristeva to Boretz and Randall), Twelve-Tone and Serial Music, Schenker (including a close, critical reading of Schenker’s book-length Eroica analysis and hermeneutic attention to the mystical registers of Schenker’s work), and an analysis course where students were encouraged to present alternatives to papers as their final projects W 8 Perspectives of New Music —“you might dance your analysis . . . .” Sadly, no one took him up on this quite serious invitation. John also wrote a piece for me, for two trombones, which takes advantage of the instrument’s ability to modulate through different tuning orientations from the diatonic through enharmonic genera (from John’s performance notes: “There are many different tuning sets for this genus; I’d prefer Archytos, but even quarter-tones would do since most performers and listeners now aren’t trained to hear those distinctions.”). A performance of Greek Bones (which I recorded in New York with Jen Baker) appears on the CD that accompanies Open Space volume 19–20. As the various contributors to this volume will attest, my experience represents only a slice of John’s extraordinarily broad and deep range of interests. His contributions to mathematically oriented music theory range from his seminal early work in logic and axiomatic set theory through his discipline-bending engagement with semi-groups, wreaths, tiles, and other “cool tools,”1 and of course the ways he proselytized— in words and action—for mathematical and formal modes of thinking about and modeling music were instrumental in shaping the discipline of music theory as it was growing into its own (not least through establishing PNM as a main locus of that activity). The contributions by Guerino Mazzola, Larry Polansky and David Kant, John Roeder, Luigi Verdi, and Jason Yust in this volume are all deeply inspired by John’s pioneering work. His work on critical theory helped bring many important (especially French) thinkers into the consciousness of North American music scholars. Our decision to include Patrick Nickleson’s translation of Jacques Rancière’s “Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative”—one of the few texts in which Rancière directly engages music—in this volume is a kind of testament to John’s work in this area.2 These two themes, mathematics and critical theory, mediated by loving attention to writing that is at once robustly rigorous— viz. the fastidious precision of axiomatic definitions in “Logic, Set Theory, Music Theory”—and evocatively playful3—e.g., in that same essay, a shift of meta-analytic attention described as a “return from the voyeuristic contemplation of the larger orgy to the closer pursuit of the particular nymph at hand”—in conjunction form a conduit to Princeton and arguably three of John’s closest intellectual forebears: Babbitt, Randall, and Boretz. Scott Gleason’s contribution to this volume draws out this connection, as does mine in a way. John is, of course, a keen, thoughtful, and wholly original music analyst, especially when it comes to music of the Schoenberg–Webern continuum.4 Central to John’s analytic pedagogy is a commitment to help us hear our way through “atonal” musical...