Welcome to ECHO.
With our current issue, ECHO continues to explore ways in which
music scholarship can be enhanced by the multimedia capabilities of
the World Wide Web. We are proud to present two new articles—Richard
Leppert’s “Paradise,
Nature, and Reconciliation, or a Tentative Conversation with Wagner,
Puccini, Adorno, and the Ronettes,”
and Sara Nicholson’s “Keep
Going: The Use of Classical Music Samples in Mono’s ‘Hello
Cleveland!’”—both
of which make significant contributions to ECHO, musicology,
and the interdisciplinary study of music.
Richard Leppert, with such seminal works as The Sight of Sound: Music,
Representation and the History of the Body, has been one of the
most prominent music scholars to break down the walls that have long
separated musicology from the rest of the humanities. In his article,
Leppert not only manages to examine the works of Richard Wagner, Giacomo
Puccini, Theodor Adorno, and the Ronettes—surely an unprecedented
feat—but his article also pushes into an area of inquiry not often
addressed in musicology: musical representations of nature. We are also
delighted to offer our readers Sara Nicholson’s examination of
art music samples in electronic dance music. In detailing the array
of samples from such composers as Berio, Schoenberg, and Webern in Mono’s
“Hello Cleveland!” Nicholson postulates two distinct listening
subject positions: the connoisseur and the mainstream listener. This
article takes full advantage of our online format—readers will
be able to hear sound examples juxtaposing sampled and original musics
as they follow Nicholson’s argument. With help from our technical
advisor Michael Cohen, we have also provided a QuickTime movie that
will lead the readers through the maze of quotations.
One of our goals for ECHO has been to present
first-person views about music and culture through interviews. We stepped
away from this standard feature with the last issue in order to bring
our readers a roundtable discussion of musical responses to September
11th. Here, we return to the interview format, presenting
Gordon Haramaki’s conversation with
Yatrika Shah-Rais, a radio programmer for
Los Angeles’ KPFK. Our earlier forays into the interview genre
have focused upon musicians in relatively conventional roles: composer,
performer, scholar. As a radio personality and programmer for KPFK’s
Global Village, Shah-Rais has to make practical decisions regarding
musical representations of ethnicity, geography, and intercultural exchange.
Gordon Haramaki engages Shah-Rais in a conversation that ranges from
such practical matters as assembling a set to deeper questions of how
music can and should be used to build cultural bridges.
As is customary, this issue includes a number of reviews. In a thoughtful
review essay about Don’t
Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working
Class, Stephanie Vander Wel assesses Bill Malone’s latest
contribution to country music studies, paying particular attention to
how the author addresses issues of work and leisure, rurality and urbanity,
and white southern masculinity. We are also fortunate to publish a review
of Paul Robeson, Jr.’s new biography of his father,
The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898–1939.
The review author Paul Von Blum is a professor at UCLA’s African
American Studies program where he has regularly taught a course on Paul
Robeson over the last fifteen years. Von Blum’s review addresses
the strengths and contributions of this new biography, which considers
Robeson’s career as an athlete, his rise to fame as a stage and
screen actor and singer, the difficulties of racism, and provides a
look into Robeson’s private life and marriage to Eslanda Robeson.
In the early days of ECHO, when we sat around a table and dreamed
about what our ideal journal would publish, we had always hoped that,
in addition to reviewing books and recordings, we would also review
musical events, concerts, novels, and films. With this issue Caroline
Polk O’Meara reviews All Tomorrow’s
Parties. Curated by Sonic Youth at UCLA in March of 2002, this
first staging of what has been a British musical event lasted three
days and turned the campus where we usually study, teach, and eat, into
a musical museum. O’Meara considers the implications of creating
such a “museum” of musical events, and reviews particular
performances including Sleater-Kinney and Japanese electronic dance
musician Merzbow.
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.
 |
 |
|
Cecilia Sun
|
Maria Cizmic |
