Conference/Journal Convergence

The latest issue of Journal of Musicology just appeared (in virtual form) for me today, and I've been reading through the fascinating articles by Karol Berger and Michael Gallope this morning (I omit Peter Schmelz's contribution not because I don't think it's fascinating, but simply because I haven't gotten to it at the time of writing). On broad topics cutting across decades and centuries, these are the types of articles that I wish appeared more often in my field. The arrival of this issue has made me set aside (again in a metaphorical sense) the journal that I had been reading through with interest, Gamut, a recently reestablished and exciting music theory journals that publishes entirely online.

Unifying the issues of these two quite different journals, and many of the other publications I've read recently, is that the articles selected for publication came not through open calls for submissions but as proceedings of conferences or as designed Festschriften for a major figure (well, important man, to be technical) in the field.

Yard from Dguendel/WP (CC:BY) 
Sign from arkadin55(CC:BY-NC-SA)

The JM issue comprises papers from the 2012 conference in honor of Richard Taruskin, "After the End of Music History," which included talks by so many of the brightest stars in the musicological firmament and which was covered in the New York Times. James Steichen's introduction to this and the following issue, which will contain more papers from the same conference, helps those of us who were not there feel the energy of the weekend: the dual performances of a lost Eugene Onegin, the premiere of a new work, the evenings on at a club at Princeton.

Beyond placing these articles together within the cultural context that produced them, what musicologists usually aspire to do with their writings on musical works, there is much that is gained from publishing articles from a single conference together. Responses from the audience or the dedicatee can be transcribed, edited, and included (the old IMS reports are fascinating in this regard). Interconnections among papers can be made by the writers themselves. And there is the opportunity, which Karol Berger takes, to keep articles shorter, nearer the length of the original presentation. This facet alone makes publication of conference proceedings and Festschriften in journals worth advocating. Too many of our journals contain articles that are far too long for their topics or narrow audiences. Whether encouraging such length is the editors' intent, or indeed even if they continue to publicly solicit shorter articles, those students and scholars who want to be published look at the tomes that do get accepted and are smart enough to know what to do.

Conferences as journal issues mitigate against this trend. They also help scholars, especially the untenured or underemployed, stay active in the vital intellectual life of the field by attending meetings and not needing to decide whether they will contribute their work to a special conference proceeding book, which will likely count less for tenure no matter how selective the press or how strong the process of peer review, or go out on their own in search of a peer reviewed journal.

Yet I am uneasy about the implications as more and more space in journals, especially at the top journals, becomes devoted to conference papers, or to colloquies, symposia, and round tables (common now in the Journal of the American Musicological Society). Conferences turn into journal issues either by the editors of the journal seeking out conferences or selected papers from conferences to publish or by the organizers of the conference proposing their papers (or, again, a subset) as ripe fruit for an issue. In either case, the scholars who are or could be included come from the group of people invited to present at the conference. Many conferences begin with an open call for papers, but these are rarely the conferences that turn into journal issues. Journal paper selection moves from selecting articles from the broad scholarly public to the group of people who were invited to prestigious conferences. And these invitations rarely, if ever, go out on the basis of the work to be spoken of at the conference--which is almost never written at the time of the invitation--but on the basis of past work.

This development does not harm me personally. I am now at a stage of my career where I receive more invitations to speak at important meetings in traditional and computational musicology than I could attend, let alone write new contributions for. And my newly tenured state enables me to publish more in fora that seem appropriate (even blog posts) than worry about what a promotion committee will think of the surrounding context of my thoughts. The change to conferences as journals does, however, have the potential, especially if it becomes more common, to exclude from publishing those who are less well-connected, who are not invited to be in colloquies or symposia, but who have thought-provoking and well researched ideas. The organizers of "Taruskinfest" and the JM editors are to be commended (and nothing here is directly specifically against them) for including younger scholars in their celebration and publications, but not every conference journal issue, especially Festschrift contributions, are so thoughtful.

The change also has the effect of squeezing out space for ideas and areas of work that are at present too obscure or new to be the subject of a conference or for interpretations that go sharply against those of the senior scholars who are in the position to convene these events. Musicology, and I suspect many other humanistic disciplines, is not yet at a post-publication, post-peer-reviewed-journal state; any changes that may make it harder for the brightest and newest of ideas to be shared in our journals should proceed cautiously and under the scrutiny of the field.