Welcome to ECHO. In our current issue, we further our project of expanding discourse on music and culture to include readers from diverse backgrounds. We publish original work about music in various cultural moments, striving always to illuminate how music works as an integral part of human experience.

The articles and reviews presented in this issue tackle subjects that range widely, but are generally concerned with the role of music and technology in mediating social events and individual sensibilities. Susan McClary addresses the aesthetics of French music at the court of Louis XIV, demonstrating—through her own performance—how the keyboard music of D'Anglebert structures time in ways that accord with the strict regulations of the ancien régime. Joseph Auner considers the role of "old" recording technology in contemporary popular music, treating the work of Pink Floyd, Portishead, and LoFidelity AllStars in his investigation of meaning in analog and digital recording technologies. Through Leonard Stein's reminiscences, we are afforded a rare glimpse into the character of avant-garde German Expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg; we gain insight into his work as a dedicated teacher in California.

ECHO continues to explore the possibilities of online publication, and we offer for the first time an interactive forum for readers to participate in a debate with far-reaching consequences for scholars of music. We present a roundtable dialogue about the philosophical questions raised by the current Napster debates, presenting the correspondence of Reebee Garofalo, Bob Fink, Casper Partovi, and Becky Gebhardt, all of whom offer singular perspectives on the idea of music as a commodity. We encourage readers to extend the panel's discussion through posting to our bulletin board.

As always, we endeavor to take full advantage of our position as an online project, providing links to relevant sites on the World Wide Web and offering sound and film clips as integral components of our writers' arguments. We are pleased to note that our creative use of hypertext and multimedia has recently attracted the attention of established journals such as The Chronicle for Higher Education and The Lancet. We look forward to the ongoing process of finding new ways to share ideas.

We are grateful for the generous support and hospitality of UCLA's Center for Digital Arts, the University of California Press, and above all the Department of Musicology at UCLA. Our project is facilitated by a grant from UCLA's Graduate Students' Association Publications Fund.