Welcome to Fall issue of ECHO: a music-centered journal. In keeping with our aim of exploring an array of different musics, while engaging a broad readership, this issue features articles, reviews, and a roundtable exploring the ways in which music—and musicking—can mean different things to different people.
Grounding her scholarship in the immediacy of the classroom, Elizabeth Keathley addresses the complex ways in which misogynistic rhetoric weaves its way through music, images, and the popular press in “A Context for Eminem’s ‘Murder Ballads.’” Keathley presents and analyzes cultural materials that already exist in dialogic relationships: two Eminem songs “Kim” and “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” images of Eminem, popular music press reviews, interviews with Eminem, statistics regarding violence against women, and Tori Amos’ cover of “’97 Bonnie and Clyde.”
ECHO also takes up the challenge of presenting a nonlinear essay with Geraldine Finn’s and Marcel Cobussen’s “Creativity and Ethics—in Deconstruction—in Music: ‘Intermezzo.’” Taking Cobussen’s own music as a point of departure, Finn and Cobussen offer an adventurous dialogue of music and text that considers the ethical implications of jazz performance and instruction through the lense of deconstruction. Through the beautiful and thoughtful design created by Gordon Haramaki, readers will be able to experience Finn’s and Cobussen’s thoughts—and music—in a multiplicity of ways, stepping outside the inevitably linear bounds of print publication in order to allow text, music, ethics, and deconstruction to speak in terms of and up against each other in a variety of ways.
Over the last four years ECHO has published roundtables and forums on topics of current cultural relevance in our hope to create a environment for many different voices to engage with music. This issue includes our most recent forum: O Brother, Why Now?: A Folk Revival Symposium. Bringing together writers from a variety of backgrounds, our O Brother forum considers American roots music projects connected with the success of the Coen Brothers’ film and music phenomenon O Brother, Where art Thou? Conceived and edited by Olivia Carter Mather and J. Lester Feder, O Brother, Why Now? includes reflections from Walter Nelson on the film, DVD, and CD Songcatcher, William Hogeland on the American Roots Music series, Rachel Howard on a current folk-revivalist community, Jeff Todd Titon on Ralph Stanley, Anthony Seeger on The Alan Lomax Collection, and Alan Williams on performance and recording issues. We hope we have created a virtual conversation, one in which these various musical artefacts and the writers’ reflections speak to and enrich one another.
In each issue, ECHO aims to bring our readers reviews of books, recordings, and music events that broaden our scope as an interdisciplinary journal through considering an array of historical moments and contexts. Here, James Grier reviews Bruce Holsinger’s most recent book, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer; Kristen Schilt reviews Ladyfest LA a feminist conference that includes music performances, readings, and panel sessions. And with our last review this issue comes full circle with Loren Kajikawa’s review of the Eminem vehicle, 8 Mile.
As the editorial board changes with this issue, we would like to take the opportunity to thank one of our own: Glenn Pillsbury. One of our most vivid memories from working on ECHO’s first issue was Glenn peering with wonder and awe at the sight of someone actually editing HTML in the source code. How things have changed! Not only did Glenn quickly learn to do that himself, but he also made it his task to become an expert in digitizing and presenting media. Without Glenn’s patience and persistence in teaching himself (and us) how to make real (or virtual) our visions, ECHO would not exist. From the beginning, Glenn set an unfailingly high standard for us, and has inspired us to produce nothing but our very best—not just in content and design, but also in thoughtful web presentation and technological innovation. While Glenn will no longer be part of our everyday operations, we are grateful that he will continue to share his knowledge and kindness in an advisorly capacity as our Media and Design Consultant.
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.
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Cecilia Sun
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Maria Cizmic |
