Editor’s Message

Dear MTO readers,

Winter is come. We hope the new issue of Music Theory Online, 22.4 (December 2016), featuring five articles and three book reviews, will be a welcome distraction from your discontents (if any).

Garreth Broesche invokes film-splicing techniques as a useful metaphor for analyzing Glenn Gould’s recordings, focusing on his 1981 recording of Brahms’s Ballade op. 10 no. 1. Andrew Goldman explores ways of comparing music perception and cognition among improvisers with different levels and kinds of musical experiences. The next two articles participate in the “New Organology” described by John Tresch and Emily Dolan. Mark Gotham and Iain Gunn investigate the available pitch collections on the pedal harp and transformations between them, with an interactive guide showing the possible pedal configurations and their resulting pitch-classes. Alexander Rehding offers a broader contemplation of instruments as music-theoretical tools, with Pythagoras’s monochord, Vicentino’s clavicembalo, and Cowell’s synopticon as case studies. Margaret Thomas examines irregular hypermeter and phrase length in three songs by Tom Waits, considering their relationships to each other and to form, lyrics, and narrative persona.

Thanks to the efforts of our excellent reviews editors Kyle Adams and Heather Platt, we also present three book reviews: Rowland Moseley appraises Roger Grant’s Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Boyd Pomeroy evaluates Formal Function in Perspective, a festschrift for William Caplin edited by Steven Vande Moortele, Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, and Nathan Martin, and Chris Stover delves into Judy Lochhead’s Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music. We offer heartfelt thanks to Kyle Adams and Heather Platt for their dedicated service, and a warm welcome to incoming reviews editors Michael Callahan and Joti Rockwell.

We offer sincere thanks as well to the outgoing board members Amy Bauer, Stacey Davis, Robert Hasegawa, Kevin Korsyn, Panayotis Mavromatis, and René Rusch, and we are pleased to welcome new members Matthew BaileyShea, Benjamin Givan, Gretchen Horlacher, Samuel Ng, Mitchell Ohriner, and Jason Yust. Thanks also to managing editor Brent Yorgason for his skillful work behind the scenes, to the continuing members of the editorial board, and the editorial assistants.

In addition, we are deeply indebted to the many referees who provide lengthy, detailed, and well thought-out reviews containing excellent advice for our authors. This reflects an impressive and commendable commitment to mentoring new scholarship in the discipline as well as helping to disseminate it. We have recently developed a set of reviewer guidelines that provide a basic template and issues to consider in refereeing an article, which will likely be helpful to authors as well reviewers. The guidelines are available here and are linked to our submission guidelines as well (at the bottom of the section “What to expect after you submit your materials”).

In other journal-related news, the MTO retrofitting project is now complete; the text and examples for all issues have been modernized. Thanks to Brent Yorgason and his team of assistants for accomplishing this significant update of our materials. A “classic” version of MTO will remain in place for historians of online scholarship.

We encourage new and creative submissions to MTO. Although we are especially well suited for the publication of articles that incorporate recordings, videos, and other media, we also welcome text submissions in a variety of formats, including full-length articles, shorter essays and commentaries, conference reports, and entire special volumes. Commentaries in response to this issue’s articles, as well as announcements for our job listings and dissertation index, may be submitted to the Editor for publication in the next issue. Please refer to our submission guidelines.

All MTO volumes dating back to our first issue in 1993 can be accessed from the contents page at http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/issues.html. Thank you, as always, for your support of MTO—a Journal of the Society for Music Theory.

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