JMM 7, Fall/Winter 2008, section 1

EDITORIAL

Welcome to JMM7!

As announced in our previous issue, JMM6, JMM7 features the winner of the Award for Best Paper dealing with the conference theme of CMMR / NTSMB 2008, Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music. Javier Alejandro Garavaglia, who was presented with the award by JMM at the conference, has kindly prepared a special version of his paper ”Music and Technology: What Impact Does Technology Have on the Dramaturgy of Music?” for inclusion in our Invited Papers section.

We are pleased to announce that JMM will also be giving the Best Paper Award at 2009 ICAD/CMMR conference to be held May 18-22 in Copenhagen. For further details, please see the website of the Re:New group who is organizing this conference and an associated digital art festival: www.re-new.dk

Our Peer-Reviewed Papers section is bulging with interesting articles:

In “Music and the Abstract Mind”, our Associate Editor Per Aage Brandt provides a skillfully crafted state-of-the-art discussion of how music perception and performance may be a core activity of human communication in general.

Where Brandt’s discussion of music and meaning centers on the concept on gesture, Runa Fanany argues, in her paper “The Musicality of Language: An Application of Musical Analysis to Speech and Writing” that rhythm is a central component in both verbal and written language. It is her opinion that one can better estimate the success of different lingual patterns by applying musical analysis to them.

With regard to the relation between music and other modes of communication, Sara Zamir and Juliette Hassine present a detailed analysis of the connections between Liszt’s Harmonies du Soir and the Soleil Couchant theme within French poetry in their article, “Reading Liszt’s Harmonies du Soir through the Soleil Couchant (Sunset) Theme in French Romantic Poetry”.

The last of our peer-reviewed papers is “Saving Society from Instrumental Rationality: A Study of Mahler and Homeless Research in the Spirit of Adorno’s Critical Musicology” by Kenneth L. Wilson, Jason Adam Wasserman and Florin Lowndes. This untraditional paper contrasts concepts of homelessness distilled from Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the conceptual constructs employed by the social sciences. As the title indicates, the authors adopt Adorno’s critical stance towards “instrumental rationality”. We welcome our readers’ opinions regarding these controversial matters. Our forum is designed to accommodate discussion of this paper as well as all other material which appears in JMM.

In our book review section, Emma Gallon reviews Berio’s Sequenzas: Essays on Performance, Composition and Analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) edited by Janet Halfyard.

This issue of JMM concludes, as usual, with a list of recent publications compiled by our book review editor Jens Hjortkjær.

It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Nigel Nettheim as an Associate Editor on our Editorial Board. Dr. Nettheim has written several important studies in musicology, including work on applications of statistical methods to musicological analysis. This issue also sees the addition of a Student Assistant to our Editorial Staff. Jens Eichler Lorenzen has a BA in Literature from the University of Southern Denmark where he is currently completing his Master’s degree, also in Literature. We are greatful for his excellent help in editing articles and handling correspondence with authors and peer-reviewers.

The readership of The Journal of Music and Meaning continues to expand. In July 2008, the month where JMM6 had just been released, we had an average of 452 visitors to the website per day and 2185 page views per day. (Remember that one article equals one page.) The readership is also as diverse as ever. The following list shows the top 20 countries with respect to the number of hits generated in November 2008:

We hope you will enjoy this new issue of JMM!

Best regards on behalf of the Editorial Staff,

Søren R. Frimodt-Møller, Managing Editor
Cynthia M. Grund, Editor-in-Chief