The desire to understand how music works is not exclusive to musicologists; indeed, music is an integral part of cultural experience for all people. Music functions as a sonic text, bringing people together and defining them according to their traditions, classes, sexualities, genders, ages, and individual characters. It is a mode of communication for ideas and beliefs, and can mean different things to different people. With ECHO: a music-centered journal, we hope to create a forum for discourse about music in which many voices speak.

     We use the media technology of the World Wide Web to enable innovative perspectives on music and culture. By including sound and film clips in our articles, we can directly address the nuances of performance and interpretation and avoid relying solely on notation and technical language. Our presence on the Web makes us accessible to readers from many backgrounds, and the possibilities of electronic mail mean that letters to the editor can be published quickly, allowing discussion to continue between issues.

     In keeping with our aim of engaging a broad readership, we publish work on music from an array of historical moments and geographical contexts. The articles in this, our inaugural issue, range from a discussion of eighteenth-century Italian music, to an exegesis of race relations in early jazz, to an exploration of drug subcultures in rock music in recent decades. Likewise, reviews in this issue address scholarly books, novels, a popular film, and recordings of a variety of musics.

     On behalf of all of us at ECHO, I wish to thank our board of advisors and the Department of Musicology and the Center for Digital Arts at UCLA for the support they have shown us. The confluence of energies and talents that came together for this project could only have been possible in this stimulating intellectual climate. We feel privileged to give something back to this community of scholars.