The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

Historical and Personal Perspectives

Editor’s Preface

To celebrate the Journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I invited several individuals to join me in reflecting on its history and significance: JSCM’s founding editor, Kerala J. Snyder; three former presidents of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, also long-time members of JSCM’s editorial board, Tim Carter, Margaret Murata, and Alexander Silbiger; and Baroque cellist Brent Wissick, who, as an author, took particular advantage of the Journal’s multimedia opportunities. Silbiger presents a foundational historical document: a committee report commissioned in 1992 by Jeffrey Kurtzman (then chair of the American Heinrich Schütz Society) in preparation for the birth of the new SSCM. Snyder and Murata tell us what happened next, and Snyder also shares a curious document from the year 2000. Wissick provides a scholar-performer’s perspective, and Carter ruminates on the Journal’s potential (realized and unrealized) and its many accomplishments.

Lois Rosow

1. Alexander Silbiger: Report of the Journal Feasibility Committee (November 4, 1993)

2. Kerala J. Snyder: A Journal That Can Sing

3. Margaret Murata: Digital Developments

4. Kerala J. Snyder: Instructions for Marking a Review for JSCM (2000)

5. Brent Wissick: Presenting Ideas with Sound and Image

6. Tim Carter: Live Long and Prosper!

1. Report of the Journal Feasibility Committee (November 4, 1993)

Last year Jeffrey Kurtzman appointed a committee to look into the feasibility of starting a journal for seventeenth-century music. Members are Stewart Carter, John Howard, Darwin Scott, and Kerala Snyder, with Lex Silbiger serving as chair. We discussed various angles of this idea, communicating by e-mail, fax, and the old U.S. Postal Service, and we decided that our first project should be a survey of members and other potentially interested people. Our committee-designed survey was sent out last spring by the office of Chairman Kurtzman, and I shall report here the results.

I am not sure how many forms were sent out, but 51 were received. Of those 38 admitted to being members of our Society, and 10 disclaimed membership; the remaining 3 refusing to commit themselves on the matter. Of those respondents, 74% thought starting a journal was a good or even excellent idea, an additional 10% though it was good but with some qualifications, and 12% opposed the idea—some quite strongly so. (I shall not report further on that omnipresent group that holds no opinion.) The question immediately arises whether the decision to respond to the survey at all probably entails a built-in bias. This may be so, but the bias could be in either direction; that is, people may decide to respond either because the idea appeals strongly to them or because they think it is a terrible idea, while those with no strong feelings either way are most likely to delegate the form to their wastebaskets. 32% would prefer to see an annual issue, while 52% prefer two or three issues per year. Those favoring an annual issue cite first of all cost considerations, also the amount of editorial work, and the problem of acquiring enough quality material. Those preferring two or more issues feel on the contrary that there are many good articles waiting to be published, and that more issues will create a sense of momentum. Furthermore, for some reason annual issues are more likely to get buried in libraries; they often do not appear on new-periodical shelves.

We had included a question asking for ranking of interests in specific areas, to see whether there were any strong preferences or dislikes. The listed areas—performance practice, source studies, documentary/archival studies, music-theoretical studies, and interdisciplinary studies—on the average were all thought to be of interest, quality rather than area being regarded a more important consideration; only organology scored consistently low (perhaps respondents felt that subject to be adequately covered by AMIS and the Galpin Society Journal). Additional areas suggested by respondents included iconography, critical approaches, genre/style studies, and reviews of non-musical books/articles on 17th-century topics. We also asked people to rank various types of contributions. First preference went to long articles (over 5 pages), second choice went to shorter articles and communications. (Some felt that these belong in the newsletter; perhaps it was not clear that we had in mind communications on scholarly research, not on society business or upcoming meetings.) Third place went to review of books and music, and fourth place to letters to the editor. Consistently low ratings were received by record reviews. Evidently the scholarly community in this country still does not see a recording potentially at least as significant a product of historical and editorial scholarship as a book or score. Additional categories proposed were “works in progress” and “research data.”

Suggested titles for the journal exhibited few extravagant leaps of the imagination: 17th-Century Music (with a new title for the newsletter), 17th-Century Music Journal, Music in the 17th Century, Studies in 17th-Century Music, Il Seicento, Seicento musicale, and Seconda prattica.  Respondents urged for something clear and concise, no acronyms, and no national bias. 80% said they would subscribe to the proposed journal; 8% said they would not; a few cautious respondents with their hands on their purses said it would depend on the subscription price. 64% promised to recommend their libraries to subscribe, while 12% would not do so; quite a number felt that during periods of budget cutbacks like the present, libraries might not follow their recommendations. Only one person objected to the idea of including the subscription as part of the society’s membership fee.

A surprising 58%, nearly 30 people, said they had articles they would submit to the proposed journal, with a wide variety of topics on theoretical, biographical, source, and performance-practice issues; this I regard as one of the most promising statistics to come out of the survey. A dozen journals, half of them foreign, were named in response to a question on where the respondents had previously had 17th-century articles published, suggesting there is no lack of potential outlets for those working in this period. While 28% knew of journals that had rejected articles on 17th-century topics, several added that the rejection was not because of the topic. I should interject here that I have never seen a hypothetical difficulty in getting 17th-century articles accepted elsewhere as a good reason for starting a journal. Rather, I see starting a 17th-century journal as creating a medium of communication within a community of interests, which in turn will serve to foster that community of interests and enhance its identity. Additional ideas and comments included expressions both pro and con regarding an electronic journal; overview articles, one in each issue, in which several writers address the same question or topic, offering contrasting views; and coverage of 17th-century music not from Europe or the colonies (but I would be quite happy to see more about the Seicento in the colonies).

The Society must now decide whether it wants to take the next steps, which could include entering discussions on feasibility with publishers and/or appointing a preliminary editorial board, or whether it wants to abandon the project as a good idea for which, however, the time either is not yet ripe or is already past.

This report was prepared by Lex Silbiger, with the assistance of Camille Crittenden, doctoral student at Duke University, who collated the survey results.

* * * * *

From the files of
Alexander Silbiger
Duke University (emeritus)
lexsilb@duke.edu

2. A Journal That Can Sing

The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music had few members in 1993, but the results of a questionnaire, as reported by Lex Silbiger (see above), indicated that we wanted a journal, not only to publish our articles and reviews but also to help establish the identity of our new Society. The membership of the Journal Feasibility Committee, renamed the Publication Committee, changed slightly after Lex’s report, with Bob Judd replacing Lex as a member and John Howard taking over as chair. This committee explored various possibilities for a printed journal and concluded that it would be far too expensive for our small Society to undertake at that time.

Three members of the Committee then stepped forward with a proposal to produce a prototype of an electronic journal for our Society. John Howard was hosting the website for the American section of RISM at the Harvard Music Library, and he offered not only to host our issue on his server but also to act as Systems Administrator. Bob Judd had been doing HTML markup for the recently established Music Theory Online, and he offered to do it for us as well. At that time this involved manually inserting code for every aspect of formatting. I had editing experience and had been using various computer programs in my scholarly work, and I volunteered to serve as Editor. We all enjoyed working in the vanguard of a new medium.

We produced that prototype—consisting of articles by Jonathan Glixon and Sally Sanford and a review by Ellen Rosand (see JSCM, vol. 1, no. 1)—in time for the 1995 meeting of the American Musicological Society in New York City. John had loaded the entire issue onto a laptop computer—there was of course no Wi-Fi back then—and set it up on a card table in the exhibits room. I walked around the room inviting anyone who would listen to come and inspect a “journal that could sing”; Sally’s article comparing French and Italian singing contains fourteen audio examples. They came up instantly from the files on John’s laptop, but my editorial note warned that it could take up to fifteen minutes to download an example that takes only eighteen seconds to play.

Following the exhilaration of that meeting, and the Society’s eager acceptance of our prototype as volume 1 of its official journal, we experienced various challenges and growing pains during the following years. Although twenty-nine respondents to our questionnaire had said they had articles to submit to a hypothetical [printed!] journal, we had difficulty finding authors of high-quality articles for our actual electronic journal, despite the efforts of an energetic editorial board. This was to be expected for the first online journal in musicology. Our diligent Reviews Editor, Bruce Gustafson, successfully solicited and encouraged reviewers, however, and volume 3 (1997) consisted entirely of reviews. We also had to find new technical support as our early volunteers stepped back to fulfill other responsibilities, and Margaret Mikulska saved volume 5 when she took over both markup and web administration. It was becoming clear, however, that self-publication with entirely volunteer labor might be fine for a startup but not for an established journal, and with a sense of both accomplishment and relief we published volume 8 (2002) with the University of Illinois Press.

By the time we entered into discussions with UIP, we were firmly committed to keeping our Journal open access, and the Press agreed that we could do so. We had discussed this question when we first began the Journal, and at that time it was a no-brainer. We wanted as many readers as possible to see our new Journal and learn about our young Society, and with entirely volunteer labor it cost us nothing to produce. I still recall my joy at receiving a positive comment on our first issue from a reader in Tasmania. UIP, however, charged us for its services, as does our current professional technical manager. As the costs of publishing the Journal mounted in later years, the question came up again, but our membership consistently supported—and continues to support—open access to our Journal as our contribution to the larger scholarly community.

Kerala J. Snyder
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester (emerita)
kerala.snyder@rochester.edu

3. Digital Developments

As is the case with JAMS and the AMS Board of Directors, the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music has always operated independently of SSCM, deciding on content and format under its own editorial board. In the three years that I served as president of SSCM, issues relating to the Journal were mostly practical, that is, dealing with servers and publishers. When our first host server was retired—the RISM server at Harvard University, under management of John Howard—the JSCM board found an external publisher in the University of Illinois Press, which was seeking to expand its electronic offerings. Before signing with the Press, the Society first consulted an intellectual property rights lawyer—I believe the most expensive telephone call I have ever made. Before the move to UIP, in addition to providing our own technical management, we had to make our own decisions about, for example, paying a service to improve our search engine rankings. We also had discussions about paid advertising—which as you know, we did not pursue.

In the early years of this century, academia was still uncertain about the viability of electronic journals themselves as well as the standards by which their publications should be valued in considering faculty for promotion. Nevertheless, JSCM received a glowing review by Suzanne Eggleston (Notes 54, no. 3 [1998]: 749–50) and enjoyed a public moment of glory at “Musical Intersections,” the mega-meeting of sixteen scholarly societies of music that met in Toronto in 2000, on a joint session titled “Death or Transfiguration? What Future Readerships, Media, and Market Forces Hold for Scholarly Publication and Writings on Music” (session 2-69, on 2 Nov. 2000). JSCM’s founding editor, Kerry Snyder, participated, along with Victoria Cooper, then editor at Cambridge University Press; Kyle Gann, critic and author, The Village Voice; Peter Givler, then executive director of the Association of American University Presses; Michael Ochs, then editor at W.W. Norton, Inc.; Ruth M. Stone (Indiana University, now emerita); and Robert S. Winter (UCLA). The session made it clear how pioneering JSCM was and remains.

Margaret Murata
University of California, Irvine (emerita)
mkmurata@uci.edu

4. Instructions for Marking a Review for JSCM (2000)

Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the links that you click in a JSCM article? The document below explains it all in minute detail, with a vocabulary from programs that we no longer use. I wrote it in 2000 for Alexander Fisher, who had recently signed on as Editorial Assistant for JSCM. We needed extra help that year—the only one in our 25-year history in which we published two issues—and our brave colleague followed all those instructions to mark up 23 reviews for volume 6, number 2. The first page of this document came to light beneath a very old printer that I was replacing, and it so amused me that I scanned it and sent it to Lois. A subsequent archaeological dig revealed the original Word file buried deep within my backup drive. Enjoy!

Kerala J. Snyder

* * * * *

Instructions for Marking a Review for JSCM

Part I: Becoming familiar with HTML

Assuming that you have Netscape on your own computer, pull it up and go to Edit −> Preferences −> Composer, and under External Editors, HTML Source, choose WORDPAD if it is not there already. Then click the plus sign in front of Composer, click −> Publishing, and make sure that what they recommend for publishing (Maintain links and Keep images) is NOT checked.

Go to JSCM and open Vol. 5, No. 1, Kendrick review of Hill.

Make a folder for this work and save this review as an html file in that folder. Print it out. This will be your model.

(If you’re using a modem, disconnect at this point.)

While you’re still in Netscape Communicator (the browser), play with the links in this article so you see how they work.

In your Netscape menu, go to Communicator −> Composer; that’s the editor. Open the file you just saved. You’ll notice that the graphics don’t come up; that’s because they’re linked to *.gif files you don’t have. Don’t worry about that.

Put your cursor on the little icon to the left of “Volume 5.” Notice that a little hand appears, and the words “Beginning.” That’s a TARGET.

Put your cursor anywhere on “Volume 5, no. 1” and click. Notice that “Heading 3” comes up in the left-most window of the bottom bar of the Composer tools. Write that down with a red pencil on the copy you’ve printed.

Likewise, note that the Book title is “Normal,” 14-point bold italic, author same without the italic, publication information 12-point without the bold, and reviewer is “Heading 2.” Write these all down.

Move your cursor to the asterisk after Kendrick. Note that the link does not work in this mode, but you know that it is a link, because you tried it in the browser. If you rest your cursor on that asterisk, you’ll see your file name at the bottom of the screen, followed by “#Author.” If you then scroll down to the end of the article, under “References” you’ll find a target icon and it’s named “Author.” That’s how it all works: Links to Targets.

Now notice that the four items in the outline are all in Heading 4 and are links to the section headings in the article, which are also in Heading 4.

Within the article itself, notice that “nine chapters” is linked to the itemized list of chapters at the end.

In paragraph 3.4 the only footnote appears, marked as “(note 1).” This is the only respect in which this issue will not be your model; we have changed styles to superscripts. (This was not available in the version of html with which we began.) Try to edit the change without killing the link. (If you do kill it, just close the file and bring it up again.) Remove everything except the “1.” Highlight that. Then go to Format −> Character properties, check Superscript, and hit Apply.

That’s the end of lesson 1.

For lesson 2, you want to take a look at the code, because I think it’s important to understand what you’re doing. When we began, this was all entered manually in a DOS file. I learned how to do it overnight when I messed up a file for the first issue that Bob Judd had marked up, and I was too embarrassed to send it back to him to fix. Most of the time we don’t have to look at this code, but occasionally we do.

So in Composer go up to View −> Page Source. There it is. All pure ASCII, and perfectly legible. Compare it with what you’ve printed out. You can’t change anything in the code now, because you’re in “View.” If you want to change something at this level—and you’ll have to do that for em-dashes—you have to go to Edit −> HTML Source. If you have set your Preferences right at the beginning, it will come up then in WordPad.

Don’t agonize over this now. Just notice that for every command in <> there has to be a cancel </> when it ceases to be valid. Notice, for example, that the title is prefaced by <i>, meaning italics, and that they’re canceled at the end of the title with </i>.

Part II: Marking the file in HTML

When you receive the file as an attachment, use Windows Explorer to COPY the file, from whatever folder in which your E-mail program deposited it, into your JSCM working folder. That way you’ll always have the original in case you mess up the one with which you’re working.

If the file you receive is a Word.doc, then bring it up in Word and Save it as html. After that, or if you have received the file as an html document, go into Netscape Composer and open it from your JSCM working folder. Make a printed copy so that you can mark it up. I always circle the footnotes with red pencil, for example.

Formatting

Begin by doing the formatting, for which Netscape Composer works very much like any word processor. Don’t worry about the graphics at the top; just work with the text, and follow the model from volume 5 that you have marked up. When you finish, you want it to look like that.

Add volume and number, in this case Volume 6, no. 2, using heading 3.

Highlight the various portions of the prefatory and concluding matter and the section headings and change them to the type sizes and styles and heading numbers in your model. Change the paragraph numbers to 10-point bold.

Add horizontal bars, full or ¾, as you see them in your model.

Check that the line spacing looks right between sections, paragraphs, etc.

Now those blasted em-dashes, and en-dashes which Word does not mark up properly. For correct usage, see Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed., 5.105–117. I am a stickler for the correct use of em-dashes. I am not a stickler for en-dashes, particularly in page numbers in footnotes; it is too much trouble. Bruce is a stickler for en-dashes for inclusive numbers, so you will find them in these reviews. In the first one I’m sending you (Miller), you’ll see that they all came out backwards in the conversion (I can’t imagine he did them that way); the em dashes are en, and vice-versa, and if you go in and look at the code there are no escape sequences for them.

THE ESCAPE SEQUENCE FOR AN EM-DASH (THE BIG ONE) IS &#151;
THE ESCAPE SEQUENCE FOR AN EN-DASH (THE SMALL ONE) IS &#150;

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to search them automatically in WordPad.

So go through your printed text carefully, and circle them all with a red pencil, and then go into Edit HTML source, search for the word preceding them, remove the dash that is there, and replace it with the proper escape code, including the semicolon. I’ve done the first one for you, after “Einzeldruck” in the first paragraph, second sentence. Do them one by one at first, until you get the hang of it. Save the file in WordPad; exit WordPad; Composer will ask you whether you want to reload the file to see changes; say YES; then look to see if it looks right. I don’t understand myself why these look all right on the screen and page as files (when they’re not backwards!) and don’t work when they’re published, but John assures me this is the case.

Entering the Links

This is where the fun starts.

Each link must have a LINK and a TARGET, and you’ll see buttons for these on your Composer toolbar. And each pair must have a name. I’ve marked this first link in Miller for you, also the first footnote.

Do the TARGET first, i.e. the note itself of a footnote. The plus signs are there to make them searchable as footnotes and get removed as you work. Do them one at a time at first, and test each one to make sure it works before going on to the next. Start with the note itself of footnote 2. Remove the plus signs, add a period and a space after the number, position your cursor before the number, and punch the target button. Give it the name “note 2.”

Now do the LINK. Go back to the body, search for the plus signs, remove them from ++2++, highlight the numeral 2, Format −> style −> superscript, and while it is still highlighted push the link button. It will ask you to choose the name of the target, and you select note 2. Save this, then hit Preview on your toolbar, which will take you into the browser so you can test the link.

Exit Preview, and you should still be at note 2 in Composer. Add a target after it, and name it FN2 Ref (it’s better not to give it the same name as the target for the note itself). Go back down to Note 2, highlight “Return to text,” punch the link button, and choose “FN2 Ref.” This “Return to text” should be on the next line after the note; presently there’s a line spaced between, which you’ll need to remove.

That’s all there is to it.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s more efficient to target all the footnotes at once, then go back into the body and link to them.

Links to matter at the end other than footnotes are marked with @@. The only one in this first file is to a musical example that we don’t have yet, so just leave it alone. In some other files there are links to textual matter, and you do those in the same way, being sure to highlight the entire text between the @@’s which you then remove, of course.

Final Check

Go into Preview and test all the links.
Run Spellcheck and correct any misspellings that you find.
Proofread and make a separate list of comments for me about anything you think should be changed. (You won’t find much with Bruce’s editing.)
Print out your version and compare it with the printout of your model; fix any formatting that doesn’t look right.
Add “Prepared by” with your initials and date to the end.
Send it back to me.

THANK YOU!

* * * * *

From the files of
Kerala J. Snyder

5. Presenting Ideas with Sound and Image

I first became aware of JSCM in 1995, when my colleague Sally Sanford invited me to record some sound examples for her article about Italian and French singing. It was so exciting to imagine a resource like this, and I watched with pleasure as those early issues became available. At subsequent meetings of SSCM, Kerala Snyder encouraged performers to submit articles that used not only sound but video, and this became my goal as I developed a sabbatical project for fall 2001. That year I made the recordings for “The Cello Music of Antonio Bononcini: Violone, Violoncello da Spalla, and the Cello ‘Schools’ of Bologna and Rome”: twenty-three video and nine audio examples. After the article was submitted, Kerry was so efficient in providing me with the insightful comments of the peer reviewers that I was able to jump right into revisions and improvements. Eventually Bruce Gustafson took over as editor, and I heard from him in 2006 that the article was ready for publication. Bruce too was remarkable in his care for detail, technical skill, and efficiency.

Within days of the posting of the article, I started to hear from scholars, players, and instrument makers around the world (and I mean that) with comments and responses. This confirmed for me that the reach of the Journal was truly international, and that the format provided a unique forum for presenting ideas with sound and image. Thanks to Kerry, Bruce, John Howard, Lex Silbiger, and all those who envisioned this potential in the early years of the Web. Who says that people who love music of the seventeenth century aren’t on the cutting edge?

Brent Wissick
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
bswissic@email.unc.edu

6. Live Long and Prosper!

Any twenty-fifth anniversary is worthy of note, but our celebrations of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music are particularly well deserved given that it was so special and unique at its inception in 1995, and it remains so today. In a decade when many of us were still getting used to the idea of email, and when connecting to the Web was associated with those annoyingly not-quite-musical chirps from AOL—for a nostalgic moment, click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dudJjUU9Nhs—the SSCM Publication Committee’s pioneering idea of an online journal certainly seemed brave. But some may have wondered how long it would last. Suspicions were aroused not just by the newest of new technologies but also by issues of academic credibility: would anyone, including all-powerful tenure-and-promotion committees, trust something not in print?

In her initial Message from the Editor, Kerala J. Snyder was particularly concerned with how to access the sound files that accompanied one of the Journal’s first articles: “It can require more than fifteen minutes to download an audio example that takes only eighteen seconds to play; the time varies with the browser as well as modem speed or the nature of your network connection.” Her warning now seems delightfully quaint: those “fifteen minutes” have become milliseconds. But Kerry’s vision embraced making full use of the potential of moving beyond just text: sound in the very first issue (https://sscm-jscm.org/v1/no1/sanford.html); an unusually large number of complex music examples (https://sscm-jscm.org/v4/no1/schulenberg.html); an article with no fewer than fifty-eight illustrations, many in color (https://sscm-jscm.org/v8/no1/kurtzman.html); and then video, for the first time in 2004 (https://sscm-jscm.org/v10/no1/pierce.html).

It is not surprising that the Journal took a while to find its place: early volumes tended to rely on reports of books, editions, and recordings, thanks to the remarkable efforts of Bruce Gustafson as the first Reviews Editor (he then served as Editor-in-Chief from 2003 to 2010). But themed issues (for example, https://sscm-jscm.org/v6no1.html) and a conference proceedings (https://sscm-jscm.org/v9no1.html) set things on an even keel such that as the Journal entered its second decade, it started to look more traditional in design, content, and scope. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether authors (myself included) have not quite grasped the multimedia potentials as Kerry so presciently created them. But if the aim of JSCM is to publish the “best” scholarship on seventeenth-century music in all its various shapes and sizes, there may be no harm in that.

Another slight regret is that we (I…) have not always taken advantage of the initial plan to allow the “updating” of articles to add new information, modify interpretations, or even just correct errors; nor has Kerry’s initial desire for collective discussions of articles being appended to them come to much fruition. One can see why: we tend in our work to look forwards rather than backwards, and there is more credit to be gained from a new text than from revising an old one.

But perhaps the longevity of the Journal will now prompt pause for thought. It has crossed various platforms by way of different publishers, yet those early sound and video files still play, and the hyperlinks remain secure. This is quite astonishing given the tendency of web resources to disappear in a miasma of HTTP (the dreaded “404: Page not found”) and DNS errors. We have all seen our work get lost in obscure printed collections traceable, if at all, only by footnotes in no less obscure places. JSCM has an enviable presence and permanence that make it a leader in our field.

Best of all is the fact that it is free to the world. For all the current angst over “open access” publishing and its financial and other consequences, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music bravely and firmly grasped that nettle a quarter of a century ago. It supports the Journal and now its offshoots (the JSCM Instrumenta series and the Society’s parallel Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music) for the public good, and its members devote extraordinary amounts of time and energy to what are, in effect, labors of love. Like SSCM as a whole, JSCM is a wholly remarkable institution. Long may it continue.

Tim Carter
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
cartert@email.unc.edu