Hi Kevin,

I enjoyed the post you did on BCC about your publications. Since
Century 2 came up in the list and the discussion, I thought I’d mention that
one article from that journal is being republished in a national
journal (American Music, the one I currently edit).

Sibyl Johnston was the editor in 1981 when she published an interview
with her father, Ben Johnston, one of the great
microtonal/experimentalist composers of this country. He had just visited BYU (right after I
graduated from BYU and went to U of Illinois, where he taught). It’s a
great, wide-ranging interview and unlike any others that he had done,
largely due to the interviewer being his daughter. The piece appeared
in Century 2 and thereafter disappeared, never to be read by, well,
anyone in the larger musical community but myself, I guess. So last year,
with the appearance of a book of Ben’s collected writings (on U of
Illinois Press), I got permission from BYU to publish the interview in
American Music–with a twist. I hunted Sibyl down (ah, Google) and asked
if she’d reinterview her father twenty-five years after the previous one
she’d done for Century 2, asking him the same questions and seeing what
he’d say now. She did and we’re publishing both interviews in tandem
in the next issue.

The fate of Century 2, I discovered, is a sad one. BYU doesn’t even
own a complete set, so far as I can tell. And there are no “Century 2
Papers” to be found in the library archives (not easily, at least–they
might be buried in some English Department boxes in the larger
University Archives). You used to be able to find miscellaneous issues easily
at Deseret Industries in Provo. But almost never these days. And, of
course, no history of the journal (or similar journals at BYU). All
this is sad to those of us who thought the journal the most gratifying
outlet for student arts in those halcyon days of BYU under Dallin Oaks and
Jeff Holland–those days before being set apart as a General Authority
came after a person had been tested as a university president, not
after.

There are, as you say, some gems in issues of that journal–a faculty
panel discussion on arts in the church that I recall vividly, for
instance; an article on the history of the condemnation of fiction writing in
the church; even Mack Wilberg’s first published composition was in
Century 2. Not to mention Kevin Barney’s first published article. Time
for a better eulogy (and anthology?) for that journal, named for the
optimism that attended the completion of BYU’s first century and the call
for excellence made by Spencer Kimball for the second century.

All best,
Michael

Thanks for putting this list together. Some of them I’ve already read–I’ll have to get to the others. I’m always interested in your perspective.

This was probably the only way I would manage to get something published in the Ensign, especially now days when preference is given to GAs.

Funny story about this. As an author, you have no say in the graphics; the Ensign staff puts those together. They did a really terrific collage of Hebrew texts; I was very impressed. But I started to look at one Dead Sea Scroll fragment, and it didn’t look right; as I looked more closely, I realized that they had put the picture of the manuscript in upside down!

I started writing the article, and got to more than 100 pages. But it just wasn’t working. I eventually realized that my thesis was wrong; the JST parallels in some cases matched the original text, but more often they matched nonoriginal variants, and they seemed to arise for the same kinds of reasons that these nonoriginal variants did. So I reconceptualized my thesis and wrote the article.

I originally wrote it with footnotes, but after I submitted the manuscript Dialogue changed their editorial style to the social sciences parenthetical name and year referring to a bibliography. (I prefer footnotes myself.) Lavina Fielding Anderson worked hard to transform the manuscript to fit the new style so they could publish it.