The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

An Anniversary Note from the Editor: Remembering the Beginning

It has been twenty-five years since the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music established JSCM. In that time the Journal has produced a rich array of articles, many of them by major scholars, numerous book and recording reviews, five guest-edited special issues, five volumes in the JSCM Instrumenta series, and a wealth of supporting material, from audio and video examples to full-color illustrations and large sets of documents. Along the way JSCM has gone from an entirely volunteer operation (1995–2001) to publication by the University of Illinois Press (2002–2011), and ultimately to our present model: self-publication but with professional technical management.

In the early 1990s the World Wide Web was a novelty, browsers were in their infancy, and the notion of an institutional website barely existed. Nor was it clear that universities would value work published in an intangible medium. It was in that atmosphere, with only Music Theory Online preceding us, that SSCM embarked on the grand experiment of publishing an online music journal.

Those of us old enough to remember the technology of 1995 might recall the challenges. The complex table found in Jonathan Glixon’s article (vol. 1, no. 1: table linked to par. 3.4–6) was presented in two ways: as a Microsoft Word table in a linked file, and also in a rudimentary form within the article itself for readers lacking the software to read the tabular version (specifically, a “WWW browser with html 3.0 tables support”). As for audio, many readers still accessed the internet on dial-up modems. The audio examples in Sally Sanford’s article (vol. 1, no. 1), which the author submitted on analog tape, had to be restricted to less than a half-minute each to avoid interminable download times. Yet the frontier can be an adventuresome place. There was palpable excitement over those brief audio clips. For Alexander Silbiger’s article (vol. 2, no. 1), a performer played the musical examples on a MIDI keyboard, an innovation that founding editor Kerala Snyder celebrated in an editorial note.

That rudimentary pseudo-table in Glixon’s article did not survive the recent technological overhaul of the Journal’s first sixteen volumes. Bits and pieces of it were scattered all over my screen, and there was nothing to do but delete—a decision made easier by the actual table in the linked file, which came through unscathed. Indeed, as historians we must accept the impermanence of the medium. It manifests itself mainly in involuntary incidents: hyperlinks break, file formats go obsolete, coding practices evolve. Most repairs are small and local; some, such as the recent overhaul, are large and global. Yet our overarching goal for past issues is the same as that of any print journal. We want our scholarly content to live on for generations to come, with whatever technological tinkering that afterlife necessitates. Long may JSCM thrive!

This issue begins with a series of brief “anniversary reflections,” including historical notes and personal observations by Kerala Snyder, Margaret Murata, Brent Wissick, and Tim Carter; historical documents supplied by Alexander Silbiger and Kerala Snyder; and a brief video featuring the past and present editors-in-chief of the Journal. The heart of the issue, nestled between the anniversary reflections and the book reviews, comprises four articles: Jeffrey Kurtzman considers Monteverdi’s likely concerns as he recomposed a vespers psalm, Nicholas Till examines the Toccata from Monteverdi’s Orfeo as a reflection of the era’s neo-chivalric revival, Naomi Barker focuses on the significance of the emblems in Frescobaldi’s first book of Arie, and Derek Stauff considers the political context for Lutheran contrafacta in mid-century Breslau. In view of the celebratory nature of this issue, the article by Kurtzman has pride of place: a piece by the founding president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, warmly dedicated to the founding editor of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music.

Given the many images and musical examples in these articles, I remind readers that they have various options for opening linked files. See “Reading JSCM” [now in a pop-up accompanying each article or review—Ed., December 2020].

Finally, we dedicate this special issue to the memory of Robert Judd, who died suddenly on August 24, 2019, at the age of sixty-three. Bob was known to most of us as the indefatigable, patient, and caring executive director of the American Musicological Society. Before turning his full attention to AMS, he was one of the founders of JSCM, its very first technical editor. We honor his memory and his special role in our Journal’s history.

Lois Rosow
Editor-in-Chief
rosow.1@osu.edu