From The Editor

By Michael Hicks

All of ben Johnston's students at the university of Illinois remember two things about him. one is that everyone called him ben. No "Mr. Johnston" or "Professor Johnston." Not even "Ben Johnston." Just "Ben." The other thing is the ritual that began most lessons. The student knocked on ben's office door. ben called out, "Just a minute." The student heard a swooshing noise and the slam of a drawer. ben opened the door, genial, slightly flushed, smiling that mischievous smile, like Puck aroused from some midsummer day's dream.

Sometimes during a lesson ben would need to retrieve something from his top desk drawer. When he slid it open the student would see a hastily thrown together pile of playing cards. And it dawned on the student that, between lessons, ben was playing solitaire.

Whatever calming or diverting effect the game may have had for ben, one couldn't escape its metaphorical power: as an artist, now past eighty years old, he has always been playing solitaire. That is a game, of course, you play alone—or, more precisely, your opponent is the deck. The cards have been shuffled and your task is to restore order. Just so, ben has held to his personal quest to restore musical intervals to their true order. In a musical world tuned to the jangle of equal temperament, Ben has insisted on writing for pure ratios of pitch. The pleasure and restorative power of just major thirds (5:4 ratios), for example, he considers God's gift to the ear. It seems to ben both ungracious and unwise to snub the gift.

That aspect of Ben's musical life is well documented (especially since the recent publication of his "Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music). But certain moves in his inner game of solitaire remain guarded. The humanistic breadth of his thinking only occasionally makes it to print. And that is a shame for those of us interested in American music. His genteel southern upbringing, his religious devotion, his love-hate relationship with modernism and technology, and his sheer nerve—in the pioneering sense—all make ben embody what many think utterly "American" in our character.

Last year I asked Ben's daughter Sibyl to do two things. First, to permit American Music to republish a little-known interview she did with her father for a student journal in 1981. Second, to interview her father again, twenty-five years later, asking him the same questions. she and he complied (well, mostly). The result is a set of intellectual and emotional snapshots taken at quarter-century intervals. Why this should matter has now become evident: ben's influence widens year after year and definitive recordings of ben's music are not only appearing but making it onto Top Ten classical lists. Microtonality as a discipline attracts more and more disciples. ben's game of solitaire has become a tournament event.

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The rest of this issue dwells on a constant canard in American studies: status. Social status, artistic status, financial status—all the markers of the spencerian struggle that we in the united states conduct so zealously. In the first article, Ken Marcus unfolds how Jack Benny and Danny Kaye— both vernacular entertainers, hardly "artists" in the hifalutin' sense—used their comedic gifts to raise money for the preservation and elevation of classical music in the united states. In the last article, marion Jacobson surveys the "rise and fall (and rise)" of the once-pervasive accordion, cherished for decades as the crucible of both high and low cultures in the U.S.A. Did the rise of rock 'n' roll doom the instrument in American culture or did it ensure the accordion's survival? (Hint: the answer is "yes.") between these two articles, Catherine Polk o'meara provocatively analyzes—in high academic style—a relatively little-known No Wave recording, "Too many Creeps," which, she argues, embodies in sound the experience of walking the streets of New York City's lower east side. In this recording one can feel the order and design of the cityscape serve as the real cantus firmus.