From The Editor

By Michael Hicks

I shouldn't be surprised that so many manuscripts sent to American Music concern music and war. The United States, like most nations, measures its history with war's yardstick. And as history goes, so goes musical style. We have music of the revolutionary War era, music of the Civil War era, music of and between the world wars, and of course the so-called post– World War II catch-all of musical idioms. I fully expect to see discussions of "music of the Vietnam War era"—there certainly is something to talk about—though I am less certain about music of the "Korean War era," let alone of the "Iraq War era." meanwhile, the body of music (and poetry, painting, sculpture, cinema, and so on) inspired by the attacks on the World Trade Center has almost become a genre of its own.

These days war is on all our minds. How could it not tinge our scholarship? So the war-related submissions to conference programs and periodicals, including this one, continue to arrive. Two articles in this issue treat musical phenomena that arose from each of the world wars. The first, by Jill Sullivan and Danelle Keck, inspects the curious history of The Hormel Girls, a musical group of female World War II veterans organized to promote SPAM and other Hormel meat products. Then brian Holder's shorter piece shows how America's anti-German rhetoric of World War I mutated into anti-bolshevik rhetoric when the war ended—and how some anti-bolshevik popular songs in 1919 took shots at organized labor, the supposedly newest and most insidious threat to the country.

This issue of American Music opens, however, in the roaring Twenties, that giddy era spawned by postwar optimism and invention. marc rice's article carefully examines (at last) the 1920s recordings of the bennie moten orchestra, Kansas City's precursor to what became swing. As with so much scholarship, rice's is a recovery of genealogy: don't forget this branch of the family, it seems to say, not only the branch's existence but what fruit it added to the table.

In 2001 Marilyn Shrude began interviewing fellow American composers about how they teach. This issue includes her conversation with that still-controversial statesman and patriarch of "post–World War II" music, Milton Babbitt. As usual, Babbitt, a mere eighty-five years old at the time of the interview, ranges from sage contemplation to playful gossip. In the closing passages he speaks plaintively of both a life keenly observed and a culture mourned. beside the reviews in this issue—whose topics range from fake books to the met—we have added a new occasional section called "Historians' Corner." This section is designed for (1) short pieces that delve into very particular historical questions or (2) first publications of important documents in American musical history. The first installment of "Historians' Corner" is the most thoroughgoing attempt yet to identify the dedicatee of Gottschalk's Adieu funèbre. (Next issue: the first printing of John Cage's December 24, 1940, letter to Peter Yates on the history of American percussion music.)

In 1942 the composer roger Sessions published a trenchant essay entitled "Artists and This War." Artists, he says, do not merely reflect their time and place. rather, "they help very powerfully to create eras and localities by giving concrete form to their visions. Certainly this has always been true in the past. As for the present," he argues, "never have we artists had so clear a vocation. For if our successors are to find the world a tolerable world to live in, it is a new world which we have to create—there is unlimited space to be filled. It can be filled only by the most complete implementation of human constructive imagination." This task, Sessions insists, is "utterly necessary for human survival."

I agree. So are scholarly journals also that necessary? Probably not. Nevertheless, in this and every issue of American Music we celebrate artists of all kinds, believing that in the end the best response to war is creativity, whether new art or new scholarship, both of which begin as acts of the imagination.