Interviews with American Composers

This collection of interviews, published for the first time, advances our knowledge of musical thought, technique, education, life, and work in American composition in and around 1972. That year the composer Barney Childs began to conduct a series of interviews (or “conversations,” as he called them) with a diverse set of American new music composers who were then around thirty-forty years old. The composers determined the topics and content of the conversations, resulting in honest assessments of their concerns at the time of the interview, delivered with personal observations, humor, and passion. Childs was unable to interest publishers in his book, as the composers were young and just established, so he put them away. After intensive restoration, the surviving twenty-three conversations and fragments (Childs mentioned twenty-five completed interviews of a planned thirty-two) include many composers who have influenced the course of American concert music in the years since. Their styles are varied and include minimalism and imminent postminimalism, serialism, electronics, opera, pop and jazz crossovers, multimedia, and other areas of musical activity. Their conversations, enhanced and contextualized for present-day readers in essays by experts on the life and music of each composer, offer a unique glimpse into the state of being American in musical life in 1972, and a perspective on how American music became what it is today.