JMM 3, Fall 2004/Winter 2005, section 1

EDITORIAL

Welcome to JMM3, the third issue of JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning.

JMM continues to develop in a manner which is very encouraging, indeed. Thanks to the opportunities for activity tracking made possible by our Internet-based format, we can present some interesting statistics. As of June 15, 2005

Another important statistic – and one which we are proud to report – is our rate of acceptance for peer-reviewed articles. Currently, it stands at 58%. After only one-and-a-half years of existence, JMM is already well on its way to becoming a truly selective journal.

One of the factors that enable us to maintain high standards is, of course, the diligent work of an excellent international board of peer reviewers. Attentive readers will notice that we have experienced a very significant increase in the number of members on our editorial board since JMM2 appeared. We take this also to be a sign of the recognition which JMM is finding within the community of researchers in music-and-meaning studies. We are very pleased to welcome the following 19 new members to our Editorial Board:

David Bainbridge, PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Professeur Jean-Marc Chouvel, University of Reims, Centre de Recherche Langages Musicaux, University of Paris IV Sorbonne, France

Research Fellow, Lutenist, Tim Crawford, Centre for Computation, Cognition and Culture, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Senior Lecturer, PhD, Sally Jo Cunningham, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Associate Research Professor of Computer Science and Art, PhD, Roger B. Dannenberg, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Assistant Professor, PhD, J. Stephen Downie, The Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Michael Fingerhut, Director, Multimedia Library and Engineering Bureau, Ircam - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Assistant Professor, PhD, Ichiro Fujinaga, Faculty of Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Professor, Dr. Art. Rolf Inge Godøy, Department of Music and Theatre University of Oslo, Norway

Lecturer in Music, PhD Nicholas McKay, Head of Music, Department of Music, School of Humanities, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Professeur Nicolas Mèeus, Music Faculty (Unité de Formation et de Recherche de Musique et Musicologie) University of Paris Sorbonne, France

Professeur Costin Miereanu,Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne, Director of the IDEAC (Institut d’Esthétique des Arts Contemporains, UMR 8592 du CNRS), Paris, France

Dr.phil., Dipl. Math. Thomas Noll, Technical University of Berlin, Institute for Telecommunication Systems, Germany/Escola Superior de Musica di Catalunya, Spain

Dr. François Pachet, Director of Research, Sony Computer Science Laboratories - Paris, France

Associate Professor Christopher Raphael, PhD, School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Professor Emeritus, PhD Lewis Rowell, PhD, School of Music, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana USA

Senior Lecturer, PhD Michael Spitzer, Music Department, Durham University, UK

Lecturer in Music, PhD, Edward Venn, Music Department, Lancaster University, UK

Lecturer in Music, Gender and Culture, PhD Edith Zack, Department of Music, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

It is of interest to mention that all of these 19 new peer-reviewers are colleagues whom yours truly had the pleasure of meeting at either ICMS8 (Eighth International Congress on Musical Signification) in Paris, October 2-8, 2004 or ISMIR2004 (2004 meeting of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval) in Barcelona, October 10-14, 2004). It is fair to say that ICMS and ISMIR represent two traditions within music-and-meaning studies which are of great importance to the sort of discussion that JMM wishes to promote: ICMS-meetings are anchored in the humanistic tradition of musical semiotics, while ISMIR-meetings have been primarily centered around the mind-boggling advances being made in IT-based methods for storing, identifying and retrieving all types of music information. One can see a tendency in the music information retrieval (MIR) community towards more interest in the cross-disciplinary study of music-and-meaning, since this has always concerned itself intensely with what MIR refers to as user-interfacing with music. I believe that it is only a – brief – matter of time until the more humanistically-based areas of music-and-meaning studies begin to take serious interest in what is going on on the technical side of the fence within, for example, MIR.

Mention of the humanistic approaches represented within ICMS and the IT/technical ones represented within ISMIR is directly relevant to this issue of JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning in yet another respect: Siglind Bruhn, author of “In the Arms of Lady Death: Musical Signification in Gottfried von Einem’s Opera Jesu Hochzeit (Jesus’ Wedding)” and Iegor Reznikoff, author of “On Primitive Elements of Musical Meaning,” the two invited papers in this issue, were both colleagues with whom I had the pleasure of spending time at ICMS8. The same holds for Uri Golomb, author of the peer-reviewed paper “Rhetoric and gesture in performances of the First Kyrie from Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232)”. The very interesting research report “Comparison of Rhythmic Processing in Language and Music: An Interdisciplinary Approach” by Cyrille Magne, Mitsuko Aramaki, Corine Astesano, Reyna Leigh Gordon, Sølvi Ystad, Snorre Farner, Richard Kronland-Martinet and Mireille Besson is a fine example of the kind of work from the IT/technical-research sector that provides exciting insights into questions of central interest to humanistic research. I had the pleasure of meeting Sølvi and Richard at yet another important international forum for interdisciplinary study of music-and-meaning, CMMR2004 (Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval 2004), May 26-29, 2004 in Esbjerg, Denmark.

We wish to thank NTSMB (Netværk for Tværvidenskabelige Studier af Musik og Betydning/Network for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning) board member Amalie Ørum Hansen for providing us with a commentary on Ansa Lønstrup’s recent book Stemmen og øret (The Voice and the Ear). We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome Ed Venn (Lecturer in Music, PhD, Music Department, Lancaster University, UK) not only to our Editorial Board, but to our Editorial Staff as well. Ed is now part of the team which is responsible for carrying out the myriad of practical editorial tasks involved in putting out an issue of JMM.

In closing, we wish to remark that we are aware that this issue is appearing a few months behind schedule and we plan to work very hard to get on track with the next issue of JMM, JMM4. We are in the process of learning and implementing new ways of coping with JMM’s ever growing success.

We hope that you enjoy JMM3 and that you will continue to send contributions to all of our departments.

Cynthia M. Grund


With best regards,

Cynthia M. Grund, Editor-in-Chief
Kasper Eskelund, Managing Editor
Jens Hjortkjær, Member of the Editorial Staff
Ed Venn, Member of the Editorial Staff
Mikael Aktor, Webmaster