Welcome to (the New) Musicology Now
A note from Executive Editor, Andrea F. Bohlman
This is the new Musicology Now.
Relaunched and reimagined, this Musicology Now is a product of teamwork over the course of the past two years. It emerges from a reflection upon the various roles this online publication has served for its parent organization, the American Musicological Society, including its early days as a graduate-student-run blog. The new Musicology Now, the curatorial team hopes, responds not only to the publication’s history, but to the unsettled present moment in which we all live.
Since March 2020, musicians and music scholars, like so many, have had lives reconfigured by online work. Conversation, collegiality, and collective music making have become dependent on access to technology and fluency navigating digital space along with the information that flows through it. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and accentuated hegemonies and structural inequalities, paradoxically effecting unimaginably divergent experiences of a “global moment.”
Into this present, Musicology Now. The curatorial team hopes that, along with a revitalized web design, this fresh beginning will animate a renewed and capacious spirit of conversation about music. We invite readers and audiences alike to revel in the joy of sharing ideas, research, and sound, just as we ask them to turn to this online platform as a place to reflect upon music’s (and music scholars’) roles in engendering precarity, racism and racial inequality, ableism, and exclusion—in the past as in the present.
The curatorial team is excited to introduce the new Musicology Now with the 2021 AMS-NYU Lecture, which has been reconceived in virtual chorus. With this roundtable, we reopen our call for submissions: 1,000-word articles, or alternative essay formats (including audio and video contributions). As you muse how you might distill your ideas into the brief pieces that populate Musicology Now, we invite you to explore the series around which the new site is designed. Please feel free to contact the editorial team with questions.
As Executive Editor, I am thankful to many who put in work toward the reimagination of Musicology Now for 2021: past Executive Editor Susan Thomas, AMS Past President Suzanne Cusick, the AMS Office, members of the AMS Musicology Now task force (Gurminder Bhogal, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Peng Liu, Douglas Shadle, and Siovahn Walker), and past curatorial team members (Brandi Neal and Marysol Quevedo). The current curatorial team deserves specific and continued gratitude: Sophia Enriquez, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Jasmine A. Henry, Siv. B. Lie, Ailsa Lipscombe, Felipe Ledesma Núñez, Chris Smith, and Joan Titus. Special thanks to Kevin Romoser, the consultant responsible for the new WordPress site.
Now, we listen to you.
