It is not an everyday occurrence when a person appears on the scene who is both a scholar and a virtuoso in more or less equal parts. Nora Post is such an individual; she shows as much flair and imagination with the pen as with her oboe She is a person of boundless energy and enthusiasm. When she proposed this series of interviews, all to be done in a rather limited period of time, I could only wish her "bonne chance" and privately wonder about her success with complicated schedules and busy "interviewees."
Nora Post has already been published in Interface -- Journal of New Music Research; Perspectives of New Music; the Galpin Society Journal; and the Darmstadter Beiträge zur Neue Musik. And of course she is well known to readers of this Journal. She received the B.A. degree from the University of California, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University. She made her New York debut in Town Hall in 1974 and has premiered works by Xenakis, Hiller, Wuorinen, Feldman, Cage, and Babbitt. She has recorded for Erato (EMI), Orion, Arabesque, and CRI.
She has been invited to redesign the oboe at IRCAM (Pierre Boulez, director) and she teaches the oboe master class in the summers at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. Most recently she has received a research grant from the American Philosophical Society to work in Versailles during the summer of 1983 on her project: "The Oboe at Versailles: The Age of the Sun King." Continuing her interest in new music, she has asked Edwin Roxburgh, Robert Moran, and Brian Ferneyhough for amplified multi-track oboe pieces with a special emphasis on the bass oboe.
It is a pleasure to introduce this "special" issue. I am happy to be the first to express gratitude and admiration to Nora Post for her wonderful accomplishment.