From The Editor

By Michael Hicks

"Of making many books there is no end," Solomon said. Of the making of many journals he had no comment. So into the breach I go with a few comments of my own.

As many of you know, the Society for American Music has begun a new journal while the University of Illinois Press will continue to publish American Music, as it has for twenty-five years. SAM's new journalÑ published by Cambridge (irony alert)Ñpromises to promote the various scholarly agendae du jour. In doing so it will surely not be the last journal to aim its lenses on American music, whose boundaries both in geography and style remain as limitless as the enterprise of scholarship itself. And so we at American MusicÑthe premier journal in this fieldÑsay welcome to one and all. Of making many journals there is also no end.

But one particular thought about this journal (bias alert): American Music has been and will persist in being a foundational archive that grows year by year. Durability always trumps fashionability.

The archive, of course, is a controlling idea, not to mention metaphor, of human memory. I do not so much mean the digital archive of virtual spaceÑthough American Music also appears onlineÑbut rather that repository of all the books and journals one can hold and touchÑeven "heft" as they used to say. It is that archive that literally carries the weight of scholarship from one generation to the next. Nothing can replace the feel of spading one's hands into books, turning pages as if they were little doors back into other places and times, passages to other minds, other memories. So I confess that, though I myself am onlineÑand quite ably, thank you, sometimes prodigiously soÑI give pride of place to books and journals one can hold and appreciate for their physicality. My librarian friends have that same pride of place, knowing that online documents are useful shadows of those real objects that populate archives and with which many of us who read have had lifelong love affairs. So I see my task in making these objects collectively known as American Music, volume 25 and beyond, to bring together good, (literally) solid writings of deep thinkers. I hope these new writings' ancestors on library shelves will welcome their progeny. Because they know, as we all do, that beyond its shadows on the internet, so-called hard copy will never die.

Maybe that is why I also give pride of place to the literate tradition in American music. Another bias, I know, one to which I confess but try to overcome as an editor for the sake of readers hungry for scholarship on vernacular, that is, nonliterate, traditions. (As an author, be it known, I myself have written much on the unwrittenÑsee my book Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions, for example). Still, during my brief tenure as editor of this journal, one should expect to seeÑmore than one might under a different editorÑan abundance of writings by and about the kind of figures that dominated the founding board of American Music in 1983, among them Milton Babbitt, Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Virgil Thomson.

So in this twenty-fifth year of American Music's existence I am delighted to open the volume with a fresh, deeply felt but intellectually rigorous essay by the eminent American composer Roger Reynolds. In it he does what I have invited all our authors to do in one way or another: speak to the twofold subject of the journal as denoted by its title. Teach us as readers about "American," about "music," and about how the two phenomena interact. The subtext, of course, is that both "American" and "music" are constructs of the imagination as well as of mundane experience.

Other articles in this issue take us from the literate tradition to the vernacular and vice versa. Luke Howard shows how Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings mutated from a tender movement of a string quartet to a vast symbolic network of associations whose tendrils reach into all genres from the arcane to the kitschy. Americans' proclivity for pragmatism mingles with their love of sentimentality in Howard's well-told account. Then Felicia M. Miyakawa shows how hip-hop turntablists are gradually moving from aural tradition to written tradition. In her narrative one sees an unlikely scenario: the joining of an anti-establishment aesthetic to an establishment-born tradition of codification. Here she shows us how a nonliterate art pursues literacy in ingenious ways that echo the founding of other new notations throughout the history of Western music.

We are also pleased to offer in this issue the first full transcript of Lil Hardin Armstrong's recorded monologue known as Satchmo and Me, along with an explanation of its curious history.

If eclecticism is not a trait of the American character, what is? So, in this issue, as always, reviews will survey a breadth of American musical products with an equally wide breadth of viewpoints. In this issue we dwell particularly on two online resources, giving an admiring nod to both of them, particularly in what they offer in access to the frequently inaccessible. So if you are reading those reviewsÑand the rest of this issueÑonline, thanks for finding us in virtual space. Archive us in whatever way works best for you. Who knows? maybe we'll meet next time in the library.