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In 2018 Sage launched Music & Science, a peer-reviewed open access online journal dedicated to the idea that the sciences can help us to make sense of music and its significance in our lives.

The journal’s goal is to be truly interdisciplinary: to give researchers from the many different scientific traditions that have been applied to music the opportunity to communicate with—and to learn from—each other, while encouraging dialogue with music scholars whose work is situated in artistic, performative or humanistic domains. In short, it aims to publish research from any discipline or perspective that can illuminate—or that can be illuminated by—scientific approaches to understanding music.

Music & science is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Below, Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Petits préludes sur les 8 gammes du plain-chant pour orgue, the subject of an article in the inaugural issue.

In 2018 the Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega launched Cuadernos de análisis y debate sobre músicas latinoamericanas contemporáneas (ISSN 2618-4583), an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to contemporary Latin American classical music.

The Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega is part of the Argentine government’s Secretaría de la Cultura. The journal encourages the participation of music researchers as well as composers, performers, and conductors, fostering collaboration between public and private initiatives.

Above and below, Diario de un proceso by Juan Ortiz de Zárate, which is loosely based on Kafka’s Der Process (The trial); the work is discussed in the journal’s inaugural issue.

During the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Papua New Guinea gained political independence from a colonial hold that had lasted almost a century. It was an exciting time for a diverse group of pioneering musicians who formed a band they named Sanguma.

These Melanesian artists heard an imagined future and performed it during a socially and politically critical time for the region. They were united under one goal: to create a sound that represented the birth of a new, sovereign, and distinctly Melanesian nation; and to express their values, identities, and cosmology through their music and performance.

Sanguma’s experimental music sounded the complex expectations and pressures of their modern nation and helped to steer its postcolonial journey through music. Drawing from rock, jazz, and nascent world music influences, Sanguma reached audiences far from their home nation, introducing the world to modern music, Melanesia-style, with its fusion of old and new, local and global.

Their performances ranged from ensembles of Melanesian log drums (garamuts) to extended songs and improvisations involving electric guitars, synthesizers, saxophone, trumpet, bamboo percussion, panpipes, and kuakumba flutes. The band sang in a variety of local vernacular languages, as well as in Tok Pisin and English. To further emphasize their ancestral style, the musicians wore decorative headdresses and body decorations from all around the nation.

This according to Hearing the future: The music and magic of the Sanguma band by Denis Crowdy (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016).

Below, excerpts from live performances.

The Board of Directors of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) joins other music organizations and societies in their condemnation of the Trump administration’s Executive Order of 27 January 2017 suspending entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocking entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen).

For fifty years, RILM’s mission has been to facilitate and disseminate music research produced and published in any country of the world. This goal has been fulfilled through a close collaboration between RILM’s International Center in New York City, RILM’s national committees, and scholars doing musicological research anywhere in the world. RILM’s Board of Directors and the staff at the International Center greatly value such international collaboration and consider it essential for an accurate representation of global music scholarship.

RILM’s goal is to represent music scholarship in its bibliographic databases as inclusively as possible. We value diversity and support free inquiry in music of all cultures and religions. The ban directly jeopardizes our collaboration with scholars from Muslim countries and might impact RILM’s collaboration with scholars anywhere in the world. As free thinking cannot be suppressed by imposing arbitrary limitations on movement, we are inviting members of the scholarly community around the world to contribute to RILM’s bibliographic database with additional entries for articles concerning music and Islam. Although this effort cannot relieve the hardship experienced by the good people affected by the ban, it can demonstrate the achievements of their communities and represent their music culture through writings by scholars worldwide. The bibliographic records can be submitted at http://rilm.org/submissions/.

Тhe Board of Directors
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
February 8th, 2017

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 77,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.