|
Even back in
the days when ECHO was little more than a group of graduate
students sitting around dreaming about what an online music journal
might look like, we knew we wanted to provide a forum for interdisciplinary
work that investigates music’s integral place in society. Indeed,
our very first issue welcomed readers to “a journal dedicated
to music and human experience.” The overwhelming experiences
humans have endured in the past months have prompted new levels
of self-reflexivity that have engulfed even those of us who hide
in Ivory Towers. Worrying about musical texts and what they might
mean can appear a little inconsequential when images of the rubble
that once stood as the World Trade Center assail us at every turn.
Even music itself starts to seem trivial when news reports are filled
with eerily dispassionate accounts of “collateral damage,”
“friendly fire,” and clinical diagrams detailing how America’s
largest conventional bomb has wrecked devastation once again in
Afghanistan. In a world where people can hijack planes and fly them
into buildings, what role can music, musicians, and music scholars
possibly play?
The
discussion in the September
11 Roundtable serves as a timely reminder that music can assume
great symbolic power. The task of interpreting musical symbols and
interrogating music’s place in culture—music and human
experience—is more urgent now than ever.
All three articles
we present in this issue deal at some level with the question of
music’s role in constructing and expressing cultural identity.
Anahid Kassabian engages with
the inescapable phenomenon of muzak and posits a new form of subjectivity—a
“ubiquitous subjectivity”—that is the inevitable
result of a world in which silence is increasingly difficult to
find. Grounding their discussion in meticulous readings of musical
details, Francesca
Draughon and Raymond Knapp explore the knotty topic of Mahler
and Jewish identity in fin de siècle Vienna. Tamara
Levitz provides a model for interdisciplinary scholarship in
her multifaceted examination of one historical event: Jaques-Dalcroze’s
1913 staging of Gluck’s Orpheus und Eurydice in the
planned, utopian community of Hellerau.
Our photo
essay explores another conception of utopia. For one week every
year, the Burning Man festival strives to enact an ideal community
in Black Rock Desert, northern Nevada. Sheila Masson’s pictures
vividly capture a place where egalitarian individualist ideals often
express themselves through music and dance.
We are grateful
to Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Ali Jihad Racy, Nazir Jairazbhoy, Timothy
Rice, and UCLA’s Department of Ethnomusicology for allowing
us to publish the roundtable they convened on music, politics, and
the events of September 11. We present the discussion in its entirety,
along with poignant responses from Anne
Elise Thomas in Amman, Jordan and Gage
Averill writing in New York City. Taking advantage of the capabilities
of the World Wide Web, we have set up a discussion
board and invite all our readers to participate in this important
debate.
As we enter
our third year of publication, we welcome Michael E. Cohen from
UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities as ECHO’s
new technical advisor. Michael has enthusiastically supported ECHO
from its inception, and we are delighted that he is now officially
one of us. We also welcome José David Saldívar, professor
of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, to our distinguished advisory
board. Prof. Saldívar's scholarship in works such as Border
Matters has provided rich historical and conceptual frameworks
for the study of cultural texts and their relationship to U.S. nationalism.
Musicologists are particularly indebted to his writing on musicians
including Tish Hinojosa, El Vez, Los Illegals, Los Tigres Del Norte,
and Kid Frost. This has laid an invaluable groundwork upon which
we can build future studies of Chicano/a music. We are honored that
Prof. Saldívar has agreed to support our project.
We
are, as always, grateful for the generous encouragement and hospitality
of the University of California Press and the Department of Musicology
at UCLA, and our publication would not be possible without the financial
support from UCLA's Graduate Students' Association Publications
Fund.
I cannot let
my first outing as ECHO’s editor go by without publicly
acknowledging the woman who is, for the first time, observing the
frenzy of late ECHO nights from the sideline: founding editor
Jacqueline Warwick. Without Jacqueline's drive, vision, and enthusiasm,
ECHO would have never advanced beyond the group of graduate
students sitting around wondering what it would be like to edit
a journal. Thank you.
Cecilia Sun
December 18, 2001
Los Angeles, CA
|
