Editor's Message

  1. New Musicology Papers

  2. Essay and Commentary Submissions

  3. Advertisements

  4. mto-talk Hypermail

  5. Scholarly Electronic Publication


1. New Musicology Papers

This issue of MTO includes the last of the New Musicology papers read at the 1995 SMT meeting in New York City, Kofi Agawu's essay "Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime." The perspectives it offers should stimulate further responses in the lively dialog that began on mto-talk soon after the first five essays appeared in MTO 2.3 (January 1996). The various, contrasting views expressed, on Derrida, Quine, Norris, deconstruction, post-modernism, structuralism, foundationalism, and other writers and epistemological premises have been enlightening, and have no doubt caused many of us to reflect on what we do as music theorists, and why and how we do it. Surely presicely that--reflection on our activities as theorists--was one of the purposes of the Special Session at the 1995 SMT meeting. The dialog continues in the present issue of MTO, with Professor Agawu's essay and two commentaries, by Josh Mailman and Jonathan Walker. Watch your emailbox for responses posted to mto-talk!

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2. Essay and Commentary Submissions

As I have said in previous issues of MTO, essays and commentaries are accepted for consideration at all times. As any of our authors can verify, MTO offers relatively quick turn-around times, from submission to publication. Email communication among conscientious consulting editors, General Editor, and author make for rapid review and editorial procedures. Needless to say, that is a boon for younger scholars seeking to get their work published. An electronic, multimedia journal like MTO also allows for modes of presenting ideas not possible in print journals. We hope that younger--but not only younger!-- scholars will take advantage of the unique opportunities of electronic publication by submitting articles and commentaries for review. All texts should be emailed to the General Editor (address below). Those wishing to review a book should contact the the Reviews Editor, Brian Alegant (mto-reviews@societymusictheory.org).

Subscribers know that all essays, commentaries, and reviews now appear in both plain-text (ASCII) and HTML formats. The author guidelines describe the ASCII formatting. A template is now available for making up the HTML version of an essay. The template, named article.html (for articles and commentaries) can be found in the mto/docs directory on the SMT networking host, boethius.  [Please see the Contributor's Guidelines]

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3. Advertisements

The SMT Networking Committee's proposal to allow informative advertisements in the journal was approved by the Publications Committee and Executive Board at the 1995 meeting. I announced this fact in an earlier issue and invited ads at the same time. The present issue marks the second time we are including ads. The items being offered are listed in the table of contents (TOC, both ASCII and HTML versions). The ads themselves are in a separate file, named in the ASCII TOC, distributed through email, and linked to the HTML TOC for Web readers. The ads will not be included in the MTO "package." Non-Web readers who are interested in the items should retrieve the ads file by one of the usual means (mto-serv, ftp, gopher), and Web readers may simply follow the links in the TOC.

MTO offers the ad service free of charge. SMT and MTO receive no money for publishing the ads, nor commissions on sales. The ads are included strictly as a service to the scholarly community, to inform subscribers about items that are useful in teaching and research (e.g. books, texts, software).

We hope that the inclusion of advertisements will be a beneficial addition to MTO, and invite your comments about the service.

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4. mto-talk Hypermail

Although I have no statistics on the use of the mto-talk Hypermail Web page, I have received many positive comments about it. Those who have not yet seen it should direct their Web browsers to http://societymusictheory.org/www-talk/mto/current/index.html and take a look. The page offers a subject index (default), as well as author, thread, and date indexes. Each posting to mto-talk is processed by the Hypermail software, cross-indexed, and added to the page. Every message allows a reader to move to the previous or next one in the thread.

In order to conserve disk space, Hypermail files will be archived on a three-month cycle. Files older than three months will be removed. Since all mto-talk files are available in ASCII format (in the directory mto/mto-talk), mto-talk subscribers wishing to read files older than three months can retrieve the desired monthly files from boethius at any time.

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5. Scholarly Electronic Publication

Just a short closing note: In three years' time MTO has gone from a subscribership of around 60 to nearly 1,250! Readership may be even higher since some read MTO on the Web only, without subscribing. As anyone who spends time online can confirm, electronic publication, with its lower production costs, rapid, inexpensive distribution, and fast-paced publication schedules, is gaining ground in the scholarly world. Major university presses are quickly moving to electronic delivery. Print publication will no doubt remain important for some time to come, but its share of the market will probably gradually decrease. MTO is proud to have gained such a large, world-wide subscribership in such a short time. We take this strong following to reflect more the quality of the journal's content than its technological means. Ultimately, scholarly electronic publication will rise or fall on substance, not style. Our main goal is to provide informative, thought-provoking material, while exploring the technological means for presenting that material effectively in the electronic medium. We invite your comments and suggestions.

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Lee A. Rothfarb, General Editor
Music Theory Online
University of California, Santa Barbara
mto-editor@societymusictheory.org